Skai Solutions checked both numbers that matter: the New Zealand adult minimum wage is NZ$23.95 an hour from 1 April 2026, and the most recent industry average, measured across 2025, was NZ$27.84 an hour.
Three rates, all set by government and reviewed every year. These apply from 1 April 2026 and are before tax.
Where a rostered hour is the wrong tool for the phone, an AI receptionist for restaurants and cafes covers the calls that arrive mid service without adding a person to the floor.
| Type | Per hour | 8 hour day | 40 hour week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adult | NZ$23.95 | NZ$191.60 | NZ$958.00 |
| Starting-out | NZ$19.16 | NZ$153.28 | NZ$766.40 |
| Training | NZ$19.16 | NZ$153.28 | NZ$766.40 |
Source: Employment New Zealand, minimum wage rates and types.
The starting-out rate is narrower than most operators think. It covers 16 to 19 year olds who are entering the workforce or completing 40 credits of industry training a year, not simply anyone young. The training rate covers employees over 20 doing at least 60 credits a year of an industry training programme. Use either one loosely and you are underpaying, which is the most expensive filing error in hospitality because it is backdated.
There is no minimum wage at all for employees under 16. That is a legal fact, not a hiring strategy.
The Restaurant Association of New Zealand and Hospitality NZ run a remuneration survey each year. The 2025 results, published 22 July 2025, put the average hourly wage across the industry at NZ$27.84, up 2.54 percent on the NZ$27.15 recorded in 2024. The average salary was NZ$83,415.
By division, kitchen roles averaged NZ$29.77 an hour, front of house NZ$28.67 and accommodation NZ$30.82. Caterers paid the most at NZ$32.95, then bars at NZ$30.90 and coffee houses at NZ$30.30. Regionally, Queenstown and the Southern Lakes paid NZ$28.51, about 2.4 percent above the national average, which is what a tight labour market in a tourist town looks like in a spreadsheet.
Role by role, as reported by RNZ on 24 July 2025 from the same survey:
| Role | Average hourly |
|---|---|
| Kitchen hand | NZ$25.03 |
| Wait staff | NZ$25.52 |
| Barista | NZ$26.91 |
| Duty manager | NZ$29.16 |
| Breakfast chef | NZ$29.23 |
| Chef de partie | NZ$29.63 |
| Cafe manager | NZ$29.86 |
| Bar manager | NZ$32.20 |
| Head chef | NZ$36.81 |
| General manager | NZ$44.85 |
One honest caveat, because it changes how you read the table. That survey ran while the adult minimum wage was NZ$23.50. It is NZ$23.95 now. So the gap between the floor and the average is narrower today than the 2025 numbers suggest, and it will narrow again at the next review unless the industry average moves faster. Craig Renney, policy director at the Council of Trade Unions, told RNZ that the average increase was below inflation and that most workers were standing still. Both of those things are true at once: pay went up, and it bought less.
The practical reading for an operator is that entry level roles now sit within about NZ$1.50 to NZ$2.50 an hour of the legal floor. There is very little room left to compete for a kitchen hand on money alone. What is left is roster certainty, hours that do not get cut at 4pm, and a venue that is not chaotic on a Friday. Those cost management attention rather than payroll.
The surveyed average is NZ$26.91 an hour, which is NZ$2.96 above the NZ$23.95 adult minimum wage that applies from 1 April 2026. Read that gap carefully, because it is the number that decides whether you can hire.
When the survey was taken the floor was NZ$23.50, so the barista average sat NZ$3.41 above it. One minimum wage step later the same average sits NZ$2.96 above it. The premium a trained barista commands over the legal floor has compressed by about 13 percent, and nobody had their wage cut to make that happen. That is Skai Solutions' arithmetic on the Restaurant Association figures and the current minimum wage, and it is the mechanism behind the complaint operators actually make, which is that skilled people are getting harder to hold rather than more expensive.
Two comparisons make the point sharper. A barista averages NZ$1.39 an hour more than wait staff on NZ$25.52, which is about NZ$2,891 a year on a 40 hour week, so the entire market premium for the skill is worth less than three thousand dollars annually. And the coffee houses division averages NZ$30.30 an hour, well above the NZ$26.91 barista figure, which means the division average is being carried by managers and owners on the payroll rather than by the people on the machine.
If you are benchmarking a wage for a job ad, the honest range is the floor to about NZ$28, with the top of that reserved for someone who can open, dial in a grinder, train a junior and run the bar unsupervised. Anything below the floor is illegal, and the starting-out and training wage exceptions below are narrower than most employers assume.
Two things, and both of them land hardest on hospitality because hospitality employs more 16 and 17 year olds than any other industry in the country.
KiwiSaver went from 3 per cent to 3.5 per cent. Inland Revenue confirms that the default rate of employee and matching employer contributions rose from 3 per cent to 3.5 per cent on 1 April 2026, and will rise again to 4 per cent on 1 April 2028. The new rate applies to all pay days from 1 April, so a pay period straddling the date is deducted entirely at the new rate.
You now have to contribute for 16 and 17 year olds. This is the one most operators have not costed. From 1 April 2026, employees aged 16 or 17 who are KiwiSaver members qualify for employer contributions of 3.5 per cent of their pay, and if they are already members the employer starts contributing automatically. Before that date they did not qualify at all. Source: Inland Revenue, KiwiSaver changes, dated 19 March 2026.
| What it costs you | Per week | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| The 0.5 point step, one full timer on the adult minimum (40 hours, NZ$958.00) | NZ$4.79 | NZ$249.08 |
| A 17 year old on 20 hours at NZ$23.95, employer contribution that did not exist before April | NZ$16.77 | NZ$871.78 |
| Four such part timers | NZ$67.06 | NZ$3,487.12 |
That table is our arithmetic on the published rates, and you can check every line: 3.5 per cent of the weekly gross, multiplied by 52. It is not a large number on its own. It is a number that arrived without an invoice, which is a different problem, because it does not show up anywhere until you reconcile the year.
One more thing worth knowing, because it removes a common piece of wishful thinking. Employment New Zealand states that an employer superannuation contribution must be paid on top of at least the minimum wage, and cannot be counted as part of the minimum wage rate. So a total package of NZ$23.95 an hour inclusive of KiwiSaver does not meet the minimum wage. It is short.
There is a release valve, and it is worth knowing it exists so you are not surprised by the paperwork. An employee can apply to Inland Revenue for a temporary rate reduction back to 3 per cent for between 3 and 12 months, and can reapply as often as they like. Your obligation as the employer is to process the letter when it arrives. You may match the reduced rate. You are not obliged to.
The rate table further up this page is the easy part. The rule underneath it is where the money leaks, and it is stated plainly by Employment New Zealand and almost never repeated in hospitality content.
If the employee supervises or trains other workers, the starting-out and training wages do not apply, and they must be paid at least the adult minimum wage. It has to be part of the job rather than a one-off, and it usually means overseeing or instructing someone doing their job. The employee does not have to be anybody's manager.
Read that against how a cafe actually runs. The 17 year old who has been there eight months is the one who shows the new starter how to run the till, calls the order through to the kitchen for them, and tells them where the milk is. That is instructing someone doing their job. It is also completely normal, completely reasonable, and it moves that person from NZ$19.16 to NZ$23.95 an hour.
The gap is NZ$4.79 an hour. On 25 hours a week that is NZ$119.75 a week and NZ$6,227.00 a year, per person, and wage arrears in New Zealand can go back six years. Source: Employment New Zealand, minimum wage rates and types, last modified 1 April 2026.
Three more conditions on the same page are worth checking against your own roster, because each of them ends starting-out eligibility on a date rather than gradually. A 16 or 17 year old moves to the adult minimum wage after six continuous calendar months with you, counted from their first day, regardless of how many hours a week they work, and including any time they were on leave or employed by you before they turned 16. If they leave and join another employer, they become a starting-out worker again there for six months. And the 40-credits-a-year training route only applies where the employment agreement actually says so.
This is the single biggest difference between the two markets and almost nobody writing about hospitality pay says it plainly. Australia has the Restaurant Industry Award MA000119, which sets classification levels, casual loading, evening loadings, Saturday and Sunday penalty rates and public holiday rates, all as law. We have written that whole table up separately in our guide to hospitality award rates in Australia.
New Zealand has none of it. There is no industry award, no statutory weekend penalty, no casual loading. Pay is whatever the employment agreement says, provided it clears the minimum wage. The one statutory exception is public holidays: an employee who works one is entitled to at least time and a half, and to an alternative holiday if that day was an otherwise working day for them.
What that means in practice is that a New Zealand roster is cheaper to flex than an Australian one, and a New Zealand operator has to set their own weekend premium rather than read it off a table. Plenty of venues pay one. Nothing forces them to.
Total wage cost divided by total revenue for the same period, both excluding GST. Include everything that behaves like wages: gross pay, holiday pay accrual, KiwiSaver employer contributions, ACC levies. Owner drawings only count if the owner is doing a rostered job that would otherwise be paid.
The Restaurant Association of New Zealand puts wage costs at around 40 percent of hospitality revenue across the sector. That is an average across cafes, restaurants, bars and accommodation, so it is a reference point, not a target. Read it against your own gross margin. The same discipline applies as with food cost percentage, and the two move against each other: a venue that cooks everything from scratch will run food cost down and wage cost up.
A worked example, using the figures above. A cafe with four front of house staff averaging NZ$26 an hour, open 60 hours a week, carrying an average of 2.5 people on the floor at any time, spends roughly 60 x 2.5 x NZ$26, or about NZ$3,900 a week on floor labour alone before kitchen, before holiday pay and before KiwiSaver. At a 40 percent wage ratio that floor bill alone implies weekly revenue near NZ$9,750 just to stay at the sector average, and that ignores the kitchen entirely. Substitute your own hours and rates. The point of the exercise is that the number is large and fixed, which is what makes everything else on the roster a rounding error by comparison.
Our longer method piece on restaurant labour cost percentage covers the calculation in more detail, including what to do when the number comes back high.
Wages are the largest fixed cost but they are not the only one that is set for you. Registration under the Food Act, the annual food business levy and verification add roughly NZ$1,300 in a first year for a single site, and the levy is legislated to keep climbing until 1 July 2027. We have priced the lot from published council fees on our page covering the cost of a food control plan in New Zealand.
Here is where the numbers meet the day. Labour is the largest controllable line in a New Zealand venue and the one operators cut first when trade softens. The cut almost never lands on the kitchen, because food has to go out. It lands on the floor. One less person on the floor between 11am and 4pm, or one less on a Tuesday night.
The phone is the first thing that person was doing. Not the only thing, but the first thing to be dropped, because a ringing phone can be ignored and a table waiting for a main course cannot. So the roster decision that saves you NZ$26 an hour also quietly stops anyone answering booking calls during exactly the hours you are trying to fill.
That is the trade Skai Solutions exists to remove. An AI phone agent answers every call at the same cost whether it rings twice a day or forty times, which is the opposite shape to a wage bill. Our New Zealand pricing page has the numbers, what an AI receptionist costs a month puts them beside the rest of the market, and the AI receptionist guide explains what it does and does not do before you book anything.
Wages are only half of a restricted day. The other half is whether the shop may open, which in New Zealand turns on what you sell rather than what you are: restricted trading days for restaurants and cafes covers the Easter and Anzac Day rules.
For everyone else, the wage bill is the fixed cost and the phone is the variable one. Our page on an AI phone answering service for restaurants covers what the category does in a New Zealand venue.
Wage pressure is not evenly spread across the country. For what the phone side of this looks like in one South Island market, see our page on AI phone answering for Christchurch venues.
If your wage percentage is above the sector average because you have deliberately built a venue around service, keep it there. High wage cost is a strategy in a fine dining room and a symptom in a takeaway. The ratio does not know which one you are.
And if your phone genuinely rings four times a day and someone is always near it, you do not need us. A venue that small should spend the money on a better coffee machine. We would rather say that than sell you something you will cancel in three months.
Skai Solutions answers every call your team cannot get to, at a flat monthly price that does not move when someone picks up an extra shift.
Book a Free DemoNew Zealand rest breaks are paid and statutory, which is the opposite of the Australian position. Paid breaks in Australia and New Zealand compared has the Employment Relations Act table by work period and what the same 9 hour shift costs on each side of the Tasman.
If wages are the constraint, the counter hour spent on the phone is the one to look at first. An AI receptionist for a coffee shop sets out what that hour costs and what covering it differently is worth.
NZ$23.95 an hour for adults from 1 April 2026, which is NZ$191.60 for an 8 hour day and NZ$958 for a 40 hour week before tax. The starting-out and training rates are both NZ$19.16 an hour. There is no minimum wage for employees under 16.
No. New Zealand has no industry award and no statutory weekend penalty rates. Pay is set by the employment agreement, as long as it is at or above the minimum wage. Public holidays are the one exception: an employee who works one gets at least time and a half, plus an alternative holiday if it was an otherwise working day.
NZ$27.84 an hour, from the Restaurant Association and Hospitality NZ remuneration survey published on 22 July 2025. Kitchen roles averaged NZ$29.77, front of house NZ$28.67 and accommodation NZ$30.82.
The surveyed average is NZ$26.91 an hour, from the Restaurant Association survey reported by RNZ in July 2025. That is NZ$2.96 above the NZ$23.95 adult minimum wage in force from 1 April 2026, where it was NZ$3.41 above the floor when the survey ran. A barista averages NZ$1.39 an hour more than wait staff, worth about NZ$2,891 a year on a 40 hour week.
The Restaurant Association of New Zealand puts wage costs at around 40 percent of hospitality revenue. Treat that as the sector average rather than a target. A wine bar with two staff and a 70 percent gross margin and a busy suburban takeaway will sit either side of it for good reasons.
Not by law. Many venues do it anyway to fill Saturday nights, and some employment agreements build it in, but there is no statutory loading the way there is under the Australian hospitality award.