The number behind the frustration
New Zealand has 267 separate regulators. Ninety-five sit in central government, 79 in local government, and 57 are statutory bodies, committees or tribunals. Until this week, nobody had bothered to count them.
The Ministry for Regulation’s first-ever map of the regulatory landscape gives business owners a concrete figure to attach to something they have known intuitively for years. The system is not just complex. It is structurally incapable of efficiency.
Regulation Minister David Seymour put it bluntly: “This analysis shows hundreds of regulatory organisations operating under hundreds of Acts, with multiple agencies often responsible for the same issue. This drives high costs, long delays and confusion, while weakening accountability.”
Five billion dollars a year and climbing
The Ministry’s own 2024-2025 Annual Report puts the administration cost of regulatory compliance at over $5 billion per annum and growing. New Zealand has more than 1,200 primary Acts with cascading secondary legislation beneath them. The Red Tape Tipline, launched in 2024, has received more than 7,000 submissions, and 70% of the issues raised had never been reported to any other agency. The visible burden is a fraction of the real one.
For infrastructure, the picture is worse. A Te Waihanga analysis of 186 projects found that developers collectively spend $1.29 billion annually on consenting alone. A typical project burns 5.5% of its total budget navigating the Resource Management Act consent process. For smaller projects under $200,000, that figure climbs to 9.9%. For projects between $200,000 and $1 million, it hits 13.9%. Direct consenting costs have risen 70% for consents lodged since 2015.
These are not fees for better outcomes. They are a structural tax on building anything.
How 267 happened without anyone noticing
Parliament has been enacting between 100 and 150 Acts annually since the mid-1990s, along with roughly 350 legislative instruments each year. A Regulatory Institutions and Practices report found that while checks exist to test whether proposed regulations serve the public interest, “few are binding, most are self-imposed by the Executive and depend on collective self-enforcement.” The system grew because no single body had both the visibility and the authority to stop it.
Seymour acknowledged as much: “For years, New Zealanders have known regulation makes getting things done too slow, too complex and too costly. Now they can see why.”
In August 2025, NBR analyst Christoph Schumacher argued that lifting New Zealand’s productivity requires tackling “the web of regulatory chokepoints and compliance costs that are quietly throttling business” and that the problem cannot be solved by R&D investment alone.
Mapping is not the same as fixing
The government’s primary reform tool is the Regulatory Standards Act 2025, which requires agencies to review their own regulations. The Ministry will maintain and progressively update the regulatory map.
But asking regulators to assess whether they should exist is a familiar play. The Regulatory Institutions and Practices report identified exactly this as a structural weakness: self-imposed constraints enforced by collective self-discipline. That is the mechanism that produced 267 regulators in the first place.
In November 2024, BusinessNZ Chief Executive Katherine Rich said her members had “consistently called for something to be done about poor regulations holding back many businesses from achieving profitability” and that “excessive regulation holds back productivity and wage growth.” The business community’s frustration is not new. What is new is that it now has a number attached.
MartinJenkins consultants have warned that the government’s approach risks what they called “Verschlimmbesserung,” making things worse through unintended consequences. Their point is sharp: the problem is not just the number of regulators but how they operate, their culture, processes, and capability. Counting them does not fix them.
What business owners should actually watch for
The diagnosis is welcome. For the first time, the scale of regulatory sprawl has an official number and a public map. Seymour says “every dollar not wasted on bureaucracy is a dollar that can stay with the people who earned it.” He is right.
But the $5 billion annual compliance bill will not fall because someone counted the regulators. It will fall when regulators are merged, functions are consolidated, and the 1,200-plus Acts are rationalised. That work has not yet begun. The map exists. Whether anyone uses it to redraw the boundaries is the question that matters now.
Sources
- Scoop: First Ever Picture Of New Zealand’s Regulatory Landscape Revealed (2026-05-20)
- RNZ: Ministry uncovers 267 different regulators, Seymour urges consolidation
- Ministry for Regulation: Annual Report 2024-2025 (2025-10-22)
- NBR: Regulatory chokepoints, compliance costs throttle business growth (2025-08-04)
- Ministry for Regulation: Regulatory Institutions and Practices report
- MartinJenkins: Cutting red tape requires a system-based approach