As KiwiSaver managers report a surge in hardship applications (as reported by RNZ, February 2026), there's a quieter economic story unfolding in the tax data — one that shows just how dramatically New Zealand's income landscape has shifted since COVID.

In 2019, 160,000 Kiwis earned taxable income from sources classified as 'not elsewhere included' — a catch-all category for income that doesn't fit neatly into wages, self-employment, or investment returns. By 2024, that number had dropped to just 62,751 (Source: Stats NZ (LEED), taxable-income-sources).

That's a 61% collapse in five years.

Here's how we got here. In 2020, as the first COVID lockdowns hit, the number fell sharply to 137,394 — a 14% drop in twelve months. The next year brought another fall: 120,333. Then 91,350 in 2022. Then 69,597 in 2023. Each year, another chunk of this income category simply disappeared from New Zealand's tax system.

What does 'not elsewhere included' actually mean? It's the miscellaneous drawer of income sources: things like ACC payments, certain government transfers, income from trusts that aren't captured elsewhere, or unusual one-off payments that don't slot into standard categories. It's the economic equivalent of 'other' on a form.

But when 'other' shrinks by 61%, that tells you something fundamental shifted.

The trend accelerated after COVID. Between 2019 and 2021, the drop was relatively gradual. Between 2021 and 2024, it steepened. By last year, fewer than 63,000 Kiwis were earning income in this category — less than 40% of the pre-COVID figure.

And here's the catch: these numbers aren't adjusted for inflation. With prices up roughly 20-25% since 2019, even if the dollar amounts had stayed flat, the real value of this income would have eroded significantly. But they didn't stay flat — they collapsed.

This matters because it suggests entire income streams that existed before COVID have been restructured, reclassified, or disappeared altogether. Maybe people who once received miscellaneous payments now earn standard wages. Maybe certain government transfers were consolidated. Maybe some of these income sources — like certain trust structures or ACC supplementary payments — simply dried up.

Or maybe the people who relied on them found other ways to get by. Or couldn't.

Either way, while headlines focus on hardship withdrawals and retail crime, the tax data is quietly documenting something bigger: the economic arrangements that worked for tens of thousands of Kiwis in 2019 no longer exist. The system resorted itself. And 97,000 people fell out of this particular income category in the process.

Nobody planned for that. Nobody announced it. It just happened, one tax year at a time.