RNZ reports KiwiSaver managers are fielding a surge in hardship applications (as reported by RNZ, February 2026). The usual narrative? Auckland and Wellington are unaffordable, so people flee to the provinces for cheaper living. But the food price data tells a harder story: there's nowhere left to run.

The Rest of North Island — everywhere from Gisborne to New Plymouth to Napier — saw average weekly food costs hit $299 in 2024, up from $245 in 2020 (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional). That's a 22% jump in nominal terms. Factor in inflation running at 20-25% over the same period, and households are roughly treading water in real terms — but only if their wages kept pace. For most, they didn't.

Here's what that means in practice: a family spending $245 a week on groceries in 2020 is now spending $299. That's an extra $54 weekly, or $2,800 annually. Not enormous on paper. But when you're also dealing with higher petrol, power, and rent — and you moved to Hawke's Bay or Taranaki specifically because it was meant to be affordable — that $2,800 is the difference between managing and drowning.

The trajectory is what matters. In 2021, costs were $250 weekly. By 2022: $271. Then 2023: $298. Last year barely moved — $299 — but that's not relief, it's a plateau at an unsustainable height. Provincial New Zealand absorbed a 22% cost spike in four years and wages in these regions notoriously lag behind the main centres.

This is why KiwiSaver hardship applications are climbing. It's not recklessness. It's arithmetic. When your grocery bill alone eats an extra $220 monthly compared to 2020, and your rent's up, and your power's up, and your car costs more to run — raiding retirement savings stops being a choice and becomes survival.

The promise of provincial life was always affordability. Lower housing costs, sure. But if food — the one expense you can't avoid — costs nearly as much in Gisborne as it does in Auckland, that promise breaks. You're paying city prices on regional wages, in towns with fewer job options and less wage competition to push incomes higher.

The government talks about cost-of-living relief. But the data shows the squeeze isn't easing — it's just stopped accelerating. For households in the Rest of North Island, 2024 wasn't the year things got better. It was the year they realised the new normal is $299 a week at the supermarket, every week, indefinitely.

That's the number driving those KiwiSaver hardship forms. Not poor planning. Just maths.