Close to one in 10 New Zealand employees changed roles inside their own company in the past three months, but pay across the market barely moved, new data shows.
The figures come from LiveRem, the New Zealand pay intelligence platform that connects directly to company payroll and HR systems to track what employers are paying in real time.
Its latest quarterly data covers April to June, the period when most New Zealand companies run their annual pay reviews.
Hiring held up. Internal movement surged. Pay went almost nowhere…
The company says the result is a job market moving in two directions at once. “Hiring held up. Internal movement surged. Pay went almost nowhere.”
Kathleen Webber, Co-founder and CEO of LiveRem, says in a statement that everyone assumes review season is about pay rises. “This year it was really about musical chairs. More people changed seats than changed pay grades.”
Kathleen Webber.
The company says far more people ended the quarter with a new job title than with a meaningfully bigger pay packet. Around nine percent of employees moved roles internally, a notably high number for a single quarter.
“Where pay did move, it moved unevenly. Engineers saw the strongest gains of any profession tracked, up 2.4 percent. Salespeople saw the sharpest falls, down 4.1 percent, with human resources, administration and product design and development roles also going backwards.
For employers, that spread cuts against the most common review-season habit: the across-the-board increase.
“The market didn’t hand out one number this quarter, but plenty of companies did,” Webber says. “Some jobs are getting increases right now, others are going backwards.”
The gender pay gap in the private sector, the average difference in pay between men and women, held at around 18 percent.
“New Zealand hasn’t legislated that organisations report their gender pay gap the way Australia and countries across the EU have,” Webber says. “This is what that looks like in practice. Nobody’s watching, so nothing moves.”
Hiring grew by just under three percent over the quarter…
The data found that hiring grew by just under three percent over the quarter, in line with the same quarter last year. Average pay, though, told a different story – it fell by close to two percent, more than three times the drop seen over the same quarter last year.
“That doesn’t mean people took pay cuts,” Webber says. “What we’re likely seeing is companies replacing leavers at lower rates or hiring more junior people as they grow. Total salary spend actually rose over the quarter. Companies hired more people, they just paid less per person.”
The company notes that growth wasn’t spread evenly across the country. Hamilton recorded the strongest employment growth over the first half of the year at 4.0 percent, ahead of Canterbury at 3.8 percent, while Auckland remained the country’s largest employment market.
It says there was one bright spot in the data – once people are hired, they’re staying. Early turnover, employees leaving within their first 90 days, fell to 3.6 percent over the first half of 2026, down from around 5.5 percent a year earlier.
“People aren’t jumping ship the way they were. When someone takes a job now, they stay,” Webber says. “The whole market has changed shape. What was true at the last pay review isn’t true now.”
Data Source: LiveRem private sector remuneration dataset, incorporating weekly analytics from participating employers between late March and early July 2026, covering the first quarter of New Zealand’s financial year. Results are based on aggregated and anonymised payroll and HR data from organisations across New Zealand.
Illustration by VectorElements on Unsplash
