Why painting costs more than it used to — and it is not the paint

Because paint is a small part of a repaint. Over the ten years to Mar 2026 the producer price of paints and varnishes rose +24.5% while consumer prices rose +36.8% — so in real terms paint is −9.0%. Over the same window the price residential building firms charge for their output rose +21.3% in real terms, and average construction hourly earnings rose +9.6% in real terms. The increase is in the hours and what surrounds them, not in the tin.

It means consumer inflation has been removed, so the number tells you whether something got more expensive faster or slower than everything else. The deflator used is CPI, all groups (CPIQ.SE9A), and real change is computed against the cpi value at the same quarter as the series, so march-quarter series are never deflated by a june cpi. Real change is computed as the series change after removing consumer inflation, (1+nominal)/(1+cpi)-1.

It matters because a nominal increase of forty per cent over a decade sounds alarming and may simply be inflation. Real change is the part worth arguing about.

No, and this is the most common misuse of index data. An index measures movement, not level. It can tell you that the same job costs meaningfully more than it did in 2016. It cannot tell you what the job costs today, because there is no published starting level for a repaint to move from. If you have a real quote from a few years ago on the same house, applying the movement to it is a reasonable sanity check — nothing more.

Because Stats NZ rebases series at different times, and each file states its own base. The paints series is based at Dec 2009 = 1000; residential building construction at Dec. 2010 quarter = 1000; residential capital goods at September quarter 2022 = 1000. That is why a level of 1430 on one line and 1980 on another says nothing at all when compared directly. Only the changes are comparable, which is why every table on this page states the base beside the number.

The data supports part of an answer and not all of it. Construction ordinary-time hourly earnings reached $41.41 an hour by Mar 2026, up +9.6% in real terms over ten years, so labour is genuinely dearer. Whole-job output prices rose faster than that, which means something beyond wages is in there: working-at-height and access requirements, health-and-safety compliance, insurance, and the plain fact that scaffolding a house is now standard where a ladder once was. We cannot decompose it further, because no free New Zealand dataset separates compliance cost from the rest of a construction bill. We are not going to guess at the split.

Closest is the CPI class property maintenance services — what households actually pay tradespeople for maintaining a house — the retail price of the work, painting included. It is +5.5% in real terms over ten years and +45.9% in nominal terms. It is a useful cross-check on the story, with two limits: it covers property maintenance broadly rather than painting specifically, and it is a national index rather than an Auckland one.