Where does the government's money go?
Budget 2026 plans $172.9b of operating spending in 2026/27.
Over time, in today's dollars
Operating spending per person, in 2024/25 dollars
Total operating spending ($ billion)
Years after 2024/25 are the latest estimate and the Budget plan, not actuals. Today's dollars and per-person figures stop where a full year of prices isn't yet published.
The Budget's plans: 2026/27 against 2024/25 actuals ($ million)
Biggest capital items ($ million)
Capital spending includes one-off transfers of assets between government entities, which can be very large in a single year.
About these numbers
Appropriations are Parliament's authority to spend, set out in each Budget's Estimates. Each Budget workbook has four years of actuals, an estimate for the current year and the plan for the next. This page uses the most final figure for each year: actuals where they exist, then estimates, then the Budget.
Operating spending excludes capital expenditure (assets, loans, equity). It isn't the same as Treasury's "core Crown expenses", an accounting measure that treats some items differently.
Functions are Treasury's functional classification. Interest on government debt has no function, so it's shown on its own. Departments are restructured from time to time and appropriations renamed, which can make a vote's change look larger than it is. The year-by-year charts leave a gap where spending more than doubled, which is nearly always a restructure.
Today's dollars adjust by the consumers price index for each June year; per person uses the estimated population at 30 June.
Source: Treasury, Estimates of Appropriations data, Budgets 2012 to 2026 (fetching and parsing adapted from the nz-industrial-policy project).