The number of people changing address within New Zealand at least once during an intercensal period has been increasing steadily over the last two decades. Overall, from the 1991–1996 to the 2001–2006 period, the number of movers increased by 22 percent; by contrast there was a small decrease in the number of non-movers. Similarly, census recorded that the number of movers from overseas had increased, reaching a high of 343,100 during 2001–2006.
Table 2
Movers and Non-movers by Usual Residence Five Years Ago Indicator
Urban/rural areas
1996 and 2006 Censuses |
| Urban/rural area |
1996 |
2006 |
| Non-movers(1) |
Internal movers(2) |
Non-movers(1) |
Internal movers(2) |
| Main urban |
1,017,705 |
917,709 |
1,041,489 |
1,110,786 |
| Satellite urban |
48,600 |
39,162 |
45,078 |
53,622 |
| Independent urban |
193,836 |
152,814 |
167,853 |
180,312 |
| Rural with high urban influence |
42,171 |
33,354 |
52,134 |
45,174 |
| Rural with moderate urban influence |
62,862 |
42,465 |
65,688 |
55,110 |
| Rural with low urban influence |
102,189 |
60,435 |
93,384 |
76,065 |
| Highly rural/remote |
31,752 |
19,482 |
27,153 |
20,580 |
| New Zealand(3) |
1,499,289 |
1,265,856 |
1,493,010 |
1,541,979 |
(1) Residents who lived at the same usual residence five years ago.
(2) Residents who lived elsewhere in New Zealand five years ago.
(3) Includes area outside urban/rural profile.
Increased internal mobility was in particular a feature of people resident in main urban and independent urban areas, though other areas also were more mobile. Compared with ten years earlier, the number of internal movers had increased by more than one-third in the 2001–2006 period, for both satellite urban areas and for rural areas with high urban influence.
People were less likely to move among the urban area types than among the rural area types. By contrast, a characteristic of the rural area types was a large proportion of their populations moving from other area types, mainly from main urban areas. At the 2006 Census, satellite and independent urban areas had the highest proportions of people who had moved within the area type or had moved from other area types (42 and 41 percent, respectively).
Figure 2
Typically, main urban areas had a high number of movers (977,600), and a high proportion of their population (34 percent) that had moved also stayed living in main urban areas. Another characteristic is the tendency for people who moved from overseas to settle in main urban areas (289,400 or 10 percent of main urban areas' resident population at the 2006 Census).