Income statistics
The Herald has a story headlined “Where to work if it’s money you’re after,” giving estimated median incomes across a range of job areas. Sadly, if you read to the end, two of the sources are summaries of advertised salaries for advertised jobs on Seek and TradeMe. That is, they are neither actual incomes, nor for the country as a whole.
Rather than just whinge about unrepresentative data, I looked at StatsNZ. They divide things up differently, so there was only one job group in the story that exactly matched one on NZ.Stat. People working in construction have a median weekly income of $840 and mean weekly income of $956 according to the NZ Income Survey. If most people in construction worked all year, without periods of unemployment, this would come to a median annual income of $43,680 or a mean of $49,712.
The Herald thinks the median annual income in construction is $60,000-$78,000.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
If you are after incomes for new graduates (both from polytechnics and from university) the best source is the work by the Ministry of Education. It gives actual (from IRD tax returns) incomes for different levels of qualification and different subjects. It also gives the upper and lower quartile range so you can tell how widespread the incomes are.
the source, including the data, is here:
http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/80898/what-young-graduates-do-when-they-leave-study
10 years ago