If you want to make the case for volunteering – to a funder, a council, a minister – you need numbers. New Zealand has some good ones. It also has gaps large enough that the sector is, in places, arguing its worth from data that predates COVID. Here's what actually exists.
What we know
The best current source is Stats NZ's General Social Survey, published as Wellbeing statistics: 2023. It found that 53.0% of New Zealanders had volunteered in the previous four weeks, up from 50.7% in 2021 – and that volunteers gave an average of 18.1 hours over those four weeks, up from 15.9.
The same survey shows the shape of volunteering changing: 27.6% volunteered through an organisation (down from 30.2% in 2021), while 40.8% volunteered directly for someone outside their own household (up from 36%). More helping, less joining.
On the economic side, Stats NZ's Non-profit institutions satellite account: 2018 valued voluntary labour in the non-profit sector at $4.0 billion, up from $3.5 billion in 2013, from around 159 million volunteer hours a year. It also counted about 115,000 non-profit institutions contributing $8.1 billion to GDP – 2.8% of the economy.
Tūao Aotearoa Volunteering New Zealand's statistics page adds two details that explain why volunteers matter so much to the sector's structure: community organisations are 89% fully volunteer-run, and only 3.5% have more than five employees. VNZ's own estimate puts formal volunteering at 231 million hours a year, worth $6.4 billion valued at the living wage.
Now look closer
Notice that the two hour-counts don't agree. The satellite account says roughly 159 million hours; the sector's estimate says 231 million. Neither is wrong – they measure different things, with different methods, in different years. But if the official range for the sector's core input spans nearly half again from bottom to top, that tells you something about the state of measurement.
The bigger problem is freshness. The satellite account – the only source that turns volunteering into national-accounts economic value – was last published for 2018. Every dollar figure derived from it is now being extrapolated across eight years that included a pandemic, a cost-of-living squeeze, and a documented shift from formal to informal volunteering. And informal volunteering – the 40.8%, the larger share – barely registers in economic terms at all, because the satellite account only counts labour inside non-profit institutions.
Why the gaps matter
Funders fund what they can measure. When a food rescue charity or a visiting service applies for a grant, the value of its volunteer workforce is part of its case – and right now that case rests on stale or contested numbers. Under-measured volunteering becomes under-valued volunteering, which becomes under-funded infrastructure. It's the reason the UN made measurement the theme of its 2026 State of the World's Volunteerism Report.
What we're doing about it
We can't rebuild the satellite account, but we can add fresh signal. Our State of Volunteering in Aotearoa 2026 survey asks the questions the official data doesn't: what stops people volunteering more, how they find opportunities, and what they get back. It takes two minutes, it's anonymous, and the national results will be published in November. If you've read this far, you clearly care about the numbers – add yours.