Happy new financial year! That’s right folks, welcome to the 2026 financial year. And with it come a couple of changes.
Minimum wage
If you’re on the minimum wage, congratulations, you just got a pay rise. If you have staff on the minimum wage, then you need to adjust their pay. Fortunately, this has been pretty well telegraphed and (depending on where you are the payer or the recipient, fortunately or unfortunately) this is the smallest increase in the last decade; a 35c bump from $23.15 per hour to $23.50 per hour.
If you have minimum wage staff, time to bump up their pay.If you have staff that you pay ‘piece rate’, this is a good time to check that they are going to be at least at minimum wage levels.
Got staff on the starting-out or training minimum wage? These remain set at 80% of the minimum wage, so they are going up too. From $18.52 to $18.80.
You can read more about the minimum wage here.
ACC
Of course, this flows through to ACC. What’s more, the ACC Earners Levy is increasing at the same time. The flat rate is increasing from $1.60 per $100 to $1.67 per $100. Boo. ACC does have a page that explains how levies work, but seem to lack a nice easy way to see the base levy increase. For that, IRD have a useful web page that shows the exact increase amount.
Don’t get me wrong, we don’t like to see price increases.But before breaking out the pitchforks, it’s worth bearing in mind that we were paying higher rates back in 2024 – albeit only just. Irrespective, time to update payroll accordingly.
Other price increases…
As of April, power prices are set to go up by circa $10 +GST per month on average, according to Consumer NZ. The cause of much political hand-wringing.
Xero: they put their prices up back in September of last year. Because of the number of subscriptions that run through Aro Accounting,they gave us a 6-month reprieve, but that’s about up now so if you have a Xero subscription with us, if it’s one of the affected plans, you’ll get a small price increase in the next month or 2.
And of course, Rates. These line up with Council’s planning cycles (July to June) so they tend to kick in as of July. Different local authorities have different increases – Auckland can expect a 5.8% increase in council rates and a 7.2% increase in Water care charges. But not for a couple of months.
Economic recovery?
With all these price increases, will we see a resurgence of inflation, or worse still, stagflation?That’s a definite maybe, and something highlighted in the most recent ANZ Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Survey. On top of the above price increases there is the highly publicised pullback from global trade, increasing unemployment and increasing business insolvencies. All adding pressure to prices.
However, counter to this, it’s worth remembering that many of these price rises are ‘baked in’ – we’ve known about most of them foraaaaaaagggggggggeeeeeesssss. While we are very trade dependent nation, we are small and primarily export agricultural products; the world continues to need to be fed. And while the economists from ANZ have extrapolated the data from their survey to say that inflation expectations are increasing, there is a sample size of only 1000 AND it’s being run by bank economists whose primary skill is to make weather forecasters look accurate. Or put another way, possibly not worth the paper it’s written on.
Our take? Irrespective of what happens, keep a close eye on your costs and your pricing. If you have decent strategy or game plan, stick to your guns and focus on ruthlessly implementing your plan. And if you don’t have a strategy, get in touch!
Have a great April and new financial year.