Statistics NZ Home > Browse for statistics > People and communities > Geographic areas > Download digital boundaries

Download digital boundaries

2012 digital boundaries covering New Zealand, including the Chatham Islands, are now available to download. Compressed in zip format, the files contain the following geographic layers: meshblock (MOP), area unit (AU), urban area (UA), territorial authorities (TA), regional council (RC), wards, and community boards (CB).

The General (GED07) and Māori (MED07) electoral districts (used for the 2011 election) are now available to download separately.

The annual pattern* starts from 2007 and covers only New Zealand. Also available are Census-based** digital boundaries for 2001 which cover only New Zealand. The 2006 Census boundaries cover New Zealand and are broken down into regions.

From 2010, digital boundaries will only be available in NZTM (NZGD2000), which is now the official national geodetic datum for New Zealand. Previous years are still available in NZMG. Go to the LINZ website for more information on the Transverse Mercator 2000 projection.

See conditions of supply for terms of use.

Instructions for download

download the files below
download the metadata file

*Annual pattern digital boundaries are the most accurate. They contain all of the points digitised along the boundaries and are available annually.

**Census Based digital boundaries are generalised to a 1.3 metre tunnel width using the douglas algorithm and are only available every five years.

To view digital boundaries, you need a geographic information system (GIS) installed. If you do not have a GIS, you can download software that can read these files.

Statistics New Zealand does not provide support for any of these free viewers:

MapInfo ProViewer available from MapInfo (.tab)
Supported platforms: Windows
http://gw.vtrenz.net/?S09SPVMG9I

ArcExplorer available from ESRI (.shp)
Supported platforms: Windows, Unix, Linux
http://www.esri.com/software/arcexplorer/download.html

Metadata

ANZLIC 2011 Digital Boundaries Metadata (PDF, 1.2MB)
ANZLIC 2012 Digital Boundaries Metadata (PDF, 701KB)

These downloadable zip files are in Adobe Acrobat format. If you do not have the Adobe Acrobat Reader, you may download the reader to view or print the contents of this file.

Download annual pattern

Attention: The Area Unit with a code of ‘523818’ and a descriptor ‘Reboubt East’ was found to be incorrect and should have had the descriptor ‘Redoubt East’. This has been corrected for the ESRI digital boundaries but has not been corrected in the Map Info formats provided on the Stats NZ website. The Map Info files will need to be corrected by the user of the downloaded files. Stats NZ apologises for this inconvenience.