Labour market statistics for disabled people - June 2025 quarter

Stats NZ’s Labour market statistics: June 2025 quarter provides a picture of the New Zealand labour market, including official employment and unemployment rates. It includes data from the Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS), which has included the Washington Group Short Set (WGSS) of questions on functioning in June quarters since 2017. We have summarised some of the key findings for disabled people from the latest data.

For more information, you can:

• read Stats NZ’s Labour market statistics: June 2025 quarter external URL
• read about the Washington Group Short Set questions
• download further data on labour market outcomes for disabled people: Labour market statistics (disability): June 2025 quarter (XLSX 591KB)

Labour market summary

For disabled people aged 15 to 64 years, in the June 2025 quarter:

• the labour force participation rate was 44.4%, compared with 82.8% for non-disabled people – a labour force participation gap of 38.4 percentage points
• the employment rate was at 38.2%, compared with 78.5% for non-disabled people – an employment gap of 40.3 percentage points
• the unemployment rate was 14.1%, compared with 5.2% for non-disabled people – an unemployment gap of 8.9 percentage points
• the underutilisation rate was 24.4%, compared with 12.6% for non-disabled people – an underutilisation gap of 11.8 percentage points.

None of these gaps, or the rates for disabled people, have changed significantly since the June 2024 quarter, or since the series began in 2017.

One third of tāngata whaikaha Māori in employment

For tāngata whaikaha Māori aged 15 to 64 years:

• the labour force participation rate was 40.4%, compared with 75.1% for non-disabled Māori
• the employment rate was 33.3%, compared with 67.8% for non-disabled Māori. The disability employment gap for tāngata whaikaha Māori was 34.5 percentage points. In the June 2024 quarter this gap was 43.5 percentage points.

Larger employment gap for disabled men

Employment rates for disabled men and women were 35.4% and 40.8%, respectively, with no statistically significant difference between them.

However, the disability employment gap (the difference in employment rates between disabled and non-disabled people) was smaller for women (34.1 percentage points) than men (46.6 percentage points).

There has been no significant change in the employment gap for either gender since the June 2024 quarter, or since the series began in 2017.

Nearly a quarter of disabled people underutilised in the labour market

Underutilisation gives a broader measure of unused capacity in the labour market.

It includes people who are:

• unemployed – do not have a job, but are available and actively looking for work
• underemployed – employed part time (fewer than 30 hours a week) and who want and are available to work more hours
• available potential jobseekers – available and want to work, but not currently looking for a job
• unavailable jobseekers – unavailable to start work now but looking for work and will be available in the next month.

Available potential jobseekers and unavailable jobseekers make up the potential labour force, which can be combined with the labour force (employed and unemployed people) to create the extended labour force.

The underutilisation rate is the proportion of people who are underutilised out of the total extended labour force.

In the June 2025 quarter, disabled people aged 15 to 64 years were almost twice as likely as non-disabled people to be underutilised (underutilisation rates of 24.4% and 12.6%, respectively)

Additionally, 54.4% of underutilised disabled people were unemployed, compared with 39.8% of underutilised non-disabled people.

There was no significant difference in the underemployment rate between disabled and non-disabled people (6.8% compared with 4.4%), despite 66.9% of disabled people working full time, compared with 81.8% of non-disabled people.

Fewer disabled people working in labouring and trades

The proportion of employed disabled people working as technicians and trade workers or as labourers has decreased since 2017. In the June quarter 2017, for employed people aged 15 to 64 years:

• the proportions of disabled and non-disabled people working as technicians and trades workers were similar (12.9% and 12.0%, respectively)
• disabled people were more likely than non-disabled people to be labourers (16.2% and 10.2%, respectively).

Since then, the proportion of employed disabled people working in these occupations has significantly decreased. In the June 2025 quarter:

• disabled people were less likely than non-disabled people to be technicians and trades workers (5.5% and 11.1%, respectively)
• there was no significant difference in the proportion of disabled people and non-disabled people who were labourers (9.9% and 8.4%, respectively).

Many young disabled people not in employment or education

Disabled young people aged 15 to 24 years were much less likely than non-disabled people to be working or in education. The NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) rate for disabled young people was 45.9%, more than four times the NEET rate for non-disabled young people (11.3%).

Nearly a third of disabled people have no qualification

In the June 2025 quarter:

• 31.5% of disabled people aged 15 to 64 years had no qualification, compared with 13.3% of non-disabled people in the same age group.
• Disabled people aged 15 to 64 years were also much less likely to hold a bachelor’s degree or higher than non-disabled people in that age group (16.3% and 34.4%, respectively).

Main activity for non-working disabled people is self-care

• The most common main activity for disabled people (aged 15 to 64 years) not in the labour force was own care due to sickness/injury/disability (39.4%) followed by free-time activities (20.6%). This compares with 7.5% and 14.9%, respectively, for non-disabled people.
• Disabled people were much less likely than non-disabled people to identify their main activity as study or training (7.1%, compared with 38.0%), or looking after a child (9.6%, compared with 19.3%).

Sickness, illness or injury most common reason for disabled people to have left employment

Some 55.5% of disabled people aged 15-64 years who were unemployed or not in the labour force, but had had a job within the last 5 years, said their main reason for leaving was their own sickness, illness or injury. For non-disabled people in the same age group this was 14.5%.

About the data

Disability was identified using the WGSS questions. The WGSS identifies disabled people as those who have a lot of difficulty, or cannot do at all, at least one of the following six activities: seeing (even with their glasses), hearing (even with their hearing aid), walking or climbing stairs, remembering or concentrating, self-care, and communicating.

The WGSS questions are not designed to produce comprehensive counts or rates of disabled people. Instead, disability status derived from the WGSS questions is used to compare a broad range of labour market outcomes for disabled and non-disabled people and to estimate differences in the characteristics of disabled and non-disabled populations.

Disability status is strongly correlated with age, which means older people are disproportionately represented in disability data. People aged 65 years and over are also less likely to participate in the labour market, and often have different outcomes to younger people. To reduce the impact of this age bias, the data reported here is restricted to the population aged 15 to 64 years of age. Additional data for people aged 15 to 64 years and for all people aged 15 and over can be found in the downloadable spreadsheet at the top of this page.