The headline number is the one employers wanted. Stats NZ figures show New Zealand recorded a net migration gain of 22,600 in the year to September 2026, up 12,700 on the year before. Look one layer down, though, and the country is still bleeding young people, and the bleeding has moved to an earlier age. The biggest net loss of any age group was among 15-24 year olds, and the increase came from 18- and 19-year-olds. Those are not backpackers on a gap year after a degree. They are the people who should be signing apprenticeship agreements.
The recovery is real
Credit where it is due. Arrivals rose 7 percent to 136,100 while departures fell 3 percent to 113,500. That is a clear turnaround from the September 2025 year, when net migration was just 9,889. Reserve Bank quarterly data shows the momentum building through the year, with net migration of 6,550 in the June 2026 quarter against 3,720 a year earlier.
For firms that have spent two years struggling to fill skilled roles, more arrivals means vacancies get filled faster. That matters. But context matters too. This is a series that peaked at 130,934 in the September 2023 year. Today’s gain is modest by recent standards and leans heavily on foreign arrivals.
Kiwis are still going, and younger
The same release shows a net loss of 37,800 New Zealand citizens. Citizen departures aged 15-24 rose 6 percent to 15,800, producing a net loss of 11,500 in that bracket alone.
The youth outflow itself is not new. In calendar 2024, 18-30 year olds made up 38 percent of citizen departures. By the March 2026 year that cohort still accounted for 40 percent of departures. In 2025, the median departing citizen was 29 years old, someone with a qualification and a few years of experience.
What has changed is where the growth sits. An 18-year-old leaving is a different economic event from a 29-year-old leaving. The older emigrant takes skills New Zealand has already paid for. The younger one takes skills New Zealand never gets the chance to build.
The calm view has a point
The reassurance case deserves a fair hearing. Koi Tū’s May 2026 brain drain paper found the 20-34 share of emigrants rose from 41 to 43 percent between 2021 and 2025, still below the pre-Covid average of 46 percent. Its authors argue that “high mobility amongst young adults is not, on its own, a cause for concern.”
In 2025, University of Auckland economist Asha Sundaram described the flows as a “brain exchange”, pointing to strong inflows from China, India and the Philippines. A year earlier she had argued that the policy fix lay in quality education and productive job creation, not in treating departures as the problem.
Fair enough at the aggregate level. But aggregate comfort does not help a builder or an electrical contractor in Hamilton trying to staff next year’s intake.
The pipeline breaks before it starts
Business has been warning about this for two years. In 2024, Alan McDonald, then head of advocacy at the Employers and Manufacturers Association, said firms were losing people who had “done all their training” and were “really starting to hit their peak”. He flagged construction and infrastructure as most exposed and warned that if several big projects ran at once, the country “may have to import a workforce.”
That warning concerned the mid-career cohort. The September data suggests the problem now starts at the school gate. If 18- and 19-year-olds leave before entering trade training, there is no cohort to develop into the 24-35 year old workers McDonald was worried about losing. Construction, manufacturing and engineering firms cannot recover an investment they never got to make.
Koi Tū identifies the critical blind spot. Current reporting offers limited insight into emigrants’ skills, motivations or intention to return. Nobody knows whether these teenagers are on a two-year adventure or a permanent move to Australian wages. Businesses are being asked to plan a training pipeline around a cohort whose return rate is unmeasured.
Imported labour is a bridge, not a plan
The migration rebound buys time. Employers should use it, but not mistake it for a fix. Relying on arrivals to fill trade roles works until another country offers those workers a better deal, and the infrastructure pipeline every party is promising for the election will need domestic tradespeople for decades, not just visa holders for a project cycle.
The practical question for the next government is not how to stop young people travelling. It is why the first rung of a New Zealand trade career looks less attractive to an 18-year-old than a flight out. Until someone measures who is leaving, with what skills, and whether they plan to return, the headline gain will keep masking a slow erosion at the bottom of the workforce.
Sources
- RNZ: Net migration up, but so is number of young Kiwis leaving (2026-11-12)
- Stats NZ: Migration (topic page) (2026-11-12)
- NZ Herald: Migration data, new stats reveal age of Kiwis leaving the country (2025-02-16)
- NZ Herald: Net migration small rise as Kiwi departures drop in March, arrivals steady (2026-05-14)
- RNZ: The record number of Kiwis leaving New Zealand (2025-11-22)
- Koi Tū: Brain drain or business as usual (2026-05)
- University of Auckland: Taking Issue, should we be worried about a brain drain? (2024-11-07)
- The Post: NZ business faces losing young dreamers and skilled up-and-comers (2024-10-25)
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