Auckland · Original data
Auckland consents three quarters of a billion dollars of alterations a year. Here is where, and how big.
This page has not been written before in New Zealand, as far as we can find. It takes the Stats NZ dwelling alterations series, rolls it up to Auckland and down to all 21 local boards, and reads it honestly — including the part where the spread between the top board and the bottom is more than six-fold, and why that is a fact about project type rather than about value for money.
$712.3m
Declared value of dwelling alterations consented across Auckland, Jun 2025 – May 2026, across 4,350 consents — an average of $163,752 each, and +12.9% on the prior twelve months in nominal dollars.
Photography commissioned — plate reserved · July 2026
The market
Scale, volume and direction.
Four figures set the frame. All of them are nominal, all of them are self-declared, and all of them exclude land. Read them as a measure of activity and project scale.
Ten years
120 months of Auckland alterations, month by month.
Monthly declared value in millions of dollars, from Jun 2016 to May 2026. The series is seasonal and noisy at monthly resolution, so the twelve-month windows underneath it are the honest read.
See the numbers
| 12 months to | Value consented | Consents | Average per consent |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 2017 | $721.4m | 5,151 | $140,046 |
| May 2018 | $790.4m | 5,377 | $146,996 |
| May 2019 | $724.5m | 5,478 | $132,260 |
| May 2020 | $674.0m | 5,056 | $133,300 |
| May 2021 | $756.3m | 5,368 | $140,891 |
| May 2022 | $740.1m | 4,858 | $152,337 |
| May 2023 | $780.7m | 4,224 | $184,827 |
| May 2024 | $745.4m | 4,234 | $176,051 |
| May 2025 | $630.9m | 4,148 | $152,107 |
| May 2026 | $712.3m | 4,350 | $163,752 |
Nominal dollars. None of these figures is inflation-adjusted, so part of the rise is general inflation — see how much on the page about why renovating costs more than it used to.
Two cautions on this chart. It is nominal: none of it is inflation-adjusted, so a decade of general price rises is inside the trend. And it is consent data: it records when permission was granted and what the applicant estimated, not when work happened or what it finally cost.
If you want to know how much of the rise is real, that is a different dataset and a different page — construction cost is up 21% to 25% in real terms over a decade, and it is not the materials driving it.
All 21
Local boards, ranked by average consent value — a 6.5× spread.
Waitematā averages $358,178 per alteration consent. Papakura averages $55,067. That is 6.5 times, inside one city, on the same series in the same twelve months.
| Local board | Average per consent | Consents | Value consented | Value vs prior 12 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Waitematā | $358,178 | 353 | $126.4m | +62.0% |
| Albert-Eden | $324,294 | 346 | $112.2m | +14.4% |
| Ōrākei | $229,218 | 429 | $98.3m | +22.5% |
| Devonport-Takapuna | $205,475 | 273 | $56.1m | -3.2% |
| Waiheke | $191,567 | 105 | $20.1m | +18.2% |
| Māngere-Ōtāhuhu | $136,973 | 83 | $11.4m | +29.5% |
| Rodney | $133,742 | 391 | $52.3m | +4.4% |
| Kaipātiki | $129,752 | 287 | $37.2m | +39.6% |
| Ōtara-Papatoetoe | $124,184 | 72 | $8.9m | +71.8% |
| Hibiscus and Bays | $119,769 | 374 | $44.8m | -9.3% |
| Howick | $111,928 | 256 | $28.7m | +8.0% |
| Upper Harbour | $106,563 | 138 | $14.7m | -17.4% |
| Manurewa | $105,793 | 85 | $9.0m | +31.3% |
| Whau | $96,082 | 148 | $14.2m | +35.0% |
| Maungakiekie-Tāmaki | $86,514 | 135 | $11.7m | -10.5% |
| Franklin | $85,940 | 308 | $26.5m | -8.4% |
| Puketāpapa | $81,189 | 104 | $8.4m | -27.4% |
| Henderson-Massey | $71,811 | 179 | $12.9m | -23.9% |
| Waitākere Ranges | $68,570 | 210 | $14.4m | -14.9% |
| Aotea/Great Barrier | $56,250 | 4 | $0.2m | -3.9% |
| Papakura | $55,067 | 70 | $3.9m | -61.7% |
The 21 board figures sum exactly to the Auckland total. Boards with very few consents move violently — Aotea / Great Barrier recorded 4 consents in the period, so its average is arithmetic rather than a market signal. Values are nominal and self-declared.
Stats NZ — Building consents issued — May 2026 · May 2026
What the spread is actually telling you
It is not that renovation is dearer in one board than another. It is that the two boards consent different projects.
Waitematā and the boards immediately below it hold Auckland’s pre-1940 villa and bungalow stock on small central sites, much of it inside Special Character Area controls. The project that typically gets consented there is a whole-house reconfiguration: structure opened up, services renewed, a rear addition, detailing that has to satisfy an overlay. That is a large declared value per consent by construction.
Papakura and the southern and western boards hold newer, simpler, larger-sectioned houses where the typical consented alteration is a bedroom, a deck, a garage conversion or a bathroom — a smaller declared value, and often a better-value piece of work per dollar spent.
So the ranking is a map of project type, not of price. A useful way to read it: it tells you what your neighbours are consenting, and therefore what your local builders, designers and council planners are used to seeing. The suburb pages carry this down another level, and what your zone allows explains much of why the pattern falls where it does.
Concentration
Five boards, most of the money.
Ranked by average consent value, the top five boards account for the share below of all Auckland alterations value in the period. Central Auckland is where the large alteration projects are.
Photography commissioned — plate reserved · July 2026
Questions people actually ask
Does a 6.5× spread mean Waitematā renovations are worse value?
No. It means a different kind of work gets consented there. Waitematā’s stock is dominated by pre-1940 villas and terraces on small central sites, often inside character controls, where the typical consented project is a whole-house reconfiguration with structural work, new services and heritage-sensitive detailing. Papakura’s consented work skews to smaller additions and alterations on newer, simpler houses. The average consent value is measuring project scale, not price per unit of work.
Why use consent values at all if they are self-declared?
Because they are the only complete, dated, public record of renovation activity in Auckland — 4,350 consents in twelve months, every board, ten years of monthly history. Used as a measure of scale and direction they are genuinely informative. Used as a price they are wrong, because they are the applicant’s own pre-construction estimate, they exclude land, and they capture nothing that happens after the consent is issued. This page uses them for the first purpose only.
Is the market getting bigger or just more expensive?
Both, and the split matters. Value consented rose +12.9% against the prior twelve months while consent volume rose +4.9%. So most of the increase is in the size of the average project, not in the number of projects — and part of even that is general inflation, because these are nominal dollars. How much of it is inflation is a separate page.
Can I use my board’s average as a budget?
Not as a budget, but it is useful as a sanity check on scale. If your board’s average consented alteration is around $163,752 and you are planning something four times that, you are planning an unusual project for your area and should expect the consent process, the design input and the builder selection to reflect that. Use it to calibrate ambition, not to price work.
Where does this data come from?
Stats NZ — Building consents issued, May 2026 release, from the file "Building consents by Auckland local board (Monthly).csv", licensed CC BY 4.0. 54,684 rows were read to build the series on this page. The trailing twelve months are Jun 2025 – May 2026; the monthly series starts Jun 2016 and runs 120 months.
Consent and zoning information on this page describes the published rules and the Auckland Unitary Plan zoning map. It is not a determination about your property, and only Auckland Council can confirm what applies to your address. Much of the work described here is restricted building work under the Building Act 2004, which must be carried out or supervised by a Licensed Building Practitioner. This site does not yet name the trade partner who would do the work, and until it does it claims no licence, guarantee or membership.
One route from here
Where your project sits in that distribution.
Send your suburb and your scope. Part of an honest reply is telling you whether what you are planning is ordinary for your board or unusual for it, because that changes who should design it and who should build it.