KiwiSaver

National is proposing a range of changes to KiwiSaver if it returns to power, including making the scheme compulsory.

Leader Christopher Luxon said on Sunday that the party was proposing to enrol every child born in New Zealand into KiwiSaver from birth, as of July next year, with a $1,500 kickstart.

Everyone would be required to be contributing to KiwiSaver or an equivalent scheme from July 2028 and would only be able to suspend contributions if they met the criteria currently used for a hardship withdrawal.

It would also make an employer contribution for people on paid parental leave, whether they contribute or not. At the moment, people must contribute to qualify.

“For a stay-at-home mum or dad with two kids, their retirement savings could be around $15,000 larger by the time they reach 65, thanks to this change in policy,” Luxon said.

He said the party would also require employers to continue to make contributions for employees who are over 65.

“Right now, the day you turn 65, your employer can stop contributing to your KiwiSaver. That’s not right, and it’s out of step with how Kiwis actually live and work today. So, that’s why National will require employers to keep contributing to KiwiSaver for workers over 65. Just because you’re 65 doesn’t mean it’s time to stop saving for your future, and it doesn’t mean it’s time for your employer to stop supporting you in that mission either.”

The party would also lift contribution rates to 12% by 2032.

The Financial Services Council welcomed the announcement. It said it would strengthen New Zealanders’ long-term financial resilience and close gaps in the system.

"KiwiSaver is one of the most practical tools New Zealanders have to build long-term financial resilience," chief executive Kirk Hope said.

"These proposals recognise that saving needs to start earlier, reach more people and continue through the life stages where people can otherwise fall behind."

Simplicity chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub said it was a positive direction for the conversation about KiwiSaver to take. He said earlier research by Simplicity showed that people were supportive of these sorts of changes.

Eaqub said it was clear that KiwiSaver was shaping up to be a key issue in this year’s election. NZ First has already revealed it would make the scheme compulsory.  “It feels like it’s a KiwiSaver election in the sense that it’s not just National. Everybody’s got some ideas on KiwiSaver. In the past it was the left wanting to improve KiwiSaver and the right wanting to denude KiwiSaver. Now it’s kind of become a more universal thing that we want KiwiSaver to be stronger, so we have choices in the future.”

A new fund finder tool is designed to offer a more user-friendly way for people to compare their KiwiSaver options.

Hugo Kidd is developing Find My Fund to offer a comparison of fund performance after fees.

He said the idea came about when he was studying his Level 5 qualification investment strand.

“I kind of came to the realisation that a lot of people are worse off with their retirement at the moment… people in the wrong fund types or wrong actual fund itself.

“Searching online, I couldn’t really find a platform that can first of all be independent and also just user-friendly to track all the KiwiSaver funds.”

He said the tool would act as a sort of leaderboard to see how funds were performing over various time periods and against their category average.

“I've done a proven performer [measure], which is a time period, but then against their fund type, and then the average or the category average. And then has that fund hit the category average every year?… Then the category average over five years, and then the fund's performance over the five years, and it can show the difference. And it’s something quite staggering, really, because it could be, 30%, and then this one's 60%.

“So, it's really important for people to talk to an adviser or provider and make those changes, make sure they're in the right funds, because it does add up over the long term.”

He said people were often not getting enough financial advice around their decisions.

“People in New Zealand don’t really get financial advice and there isn’t really an advisory hub where people can go and search for advisers and filter it out… that’s another component to the platform. Then another main part of the business is just providing content through social media and marketing to make Kiwis take action, essentially, with KiwiSaver.”

He said advisers had a role to play in KiwiSaver providing consistent advice. “People get advisers so they can have that human touch… I’ve got an adviser and I like it because I can text or call them any time. It’s the same person instead of if you’re with a provider – unless you’re with an adviser from the provider – you’re just talking to someone new every time… it’s just having that personal touch and reassurance.”

He said he had been building the platform alongside his full-time job and hoped to have it ready to take to market in a month or so.

Kidd said he planned to expand it into managed funds beyond KiwiSaver in future.

New data from the Retirement Commission shows balances have increased year-on-year, but some people are still being left behind.

The data shows the average balance across KiwiSaver was $41,286 in 2025, up 11.3% on the year before.

Men’s average balance was $47,452 and women’s $38,212.

About a third of members had balances below $10,000 but the number of people with balances above $80,000 was growing, to about 15%.
People who were contributing had much higher average balances than non-contributing members.

Policy lead Michelle Reyers said the gender pay gap was a concern and something that the Retirement Commission wanted to see addressed, with more support for people who were on parental leave.

The largest gender pay gap was among people aged 51 to 65.

The research noted that 90% of those earning $50,000 a year or more were contributing, so low balances were most likely to be held by people who were low-income, working part-time or not in work at all.

Reyers said it would also be more effective to target government contribution, currently $260 a year, to low-income earners, for whom it would make the greatest difference.

Edward Glennie, of Genesis Advice, said making KiwiSaver compulsory or offering tax incentives would help to lift average balances.

“I see so many clients who don't contribute – possibly because they can't afford it or it’s too easy to opt out.

“It’s topical now with all the chat about NZ Super – but if that was pushed back to 67 or means tested I'm sure it would be a catalyst to get people to consider saving more. [A balance of] less than $10,000 is not going to last long.

“The other big thing is people are not taking enough risk – they are in a conservative or default fund and don't realise the opportunity cost of staying in it and missing out on compounding until they get to 65. It’s why there's value in having advice.”

New Zealanders may be underestimating how much they need to save for retirement – and calculators that tell different stories aren’t helping, one consultant says.

Peter Urbani, from KnowRisk Consulting, has been looking at the retirement projection calculators offered by KiwiSaver providers and other institutions, and said they differed significantly.

“If you put the same inputs into 13 different KiwiSaver calculators ranging from Sorted to the banks and asset managers you get 14 different results.”

Using the example of a 35-year-old earning $75,000 a year with a current balance of $15,000 and contributions of 3.5%, calculators said they were on track to receive anything from just under $250,000 via the Financial Markets Authority through to $276,651 by Sorted’s calculation.

“The tools I build for people to use, they don’t give advice but I do try and get them right,” Urbani said.

“I was just having a look and I did notice there was a big disparity… obviously there’s a critical need because New Zealand started so much later than Australia, there’s a funding gap that’s quite far behind so it really comes down to what contribution rate is necessary and what, if anything, the government does to make it more urgent.”

He said a few calculators had not updated their NZ Super tables from 2025 to 2026 values. Some were using different PIRs and a couple were using non-standard fund return expectations, he said.

But people needed a clear picture to be able to plan how much more they would have to contribute to get to their desired outcomes.

“With current balances at around $10,000 median …and current average age 40, contribution rates are going to have to rise to around 18% for everyone to be able to retire comfortably and not outlive their money.”

He said the “straight line” method used by the calculators to show an investor’s likely experience was inadequate.

“To keep it simple they show the one line where you have accumulation and decumulation.

“That’s fine from a simplicity point of view but the problem is that the input assumptions, which they don't even show on the calculators …they've got specific fund return expectations and also implicitly volatility and things like that, all of which change dynamically per fund and per year.

“So that straight line is going to be a wriggly line and because it wriggles, some people are going to get the top line and some people are going to get the bottom line, depending on when they enter.

“And the range between those two is what really matters, because if you want to be very sure you're not going to outlive your money, you want to look at one of those lower confidence bands … let's say it gets you to $500,000, which is probably a generous number for New Zealand, there's some people who are going to be getting less than half of that and some people are going to be getting not quite twice, but sort of $700,000-odd. So, if a lot of people are getting less than half of that, obviously, they're going to outlive their money.”

He said the Government should take some policy decisions to encourage more people to save, whether that was tax breaks or credits, or other measures.

“It's got to come from somewhere. Otherwise, people have to start cutting back on the retirement age, which I think is going to happen anyway… The real thing is to get total contribution rates up.

“If you start saving immediately in your first job and you put away 10 percent from age 20, 25, you really don't have to worry about it.

But the reality is nobody has that discipline and life gets in the way… everybody starts later than they should. And the effect of starting later is the slope of the line to where you want to get to gets steeper.

“So it's really about getting those balances right. The sad reality is 90 percent of people are not going to be able to retire comfortably because of the skewness of income distribution in the country. And that's a universal thing.

“So basically if you think about it, ‘I want X amount’ and you're probably going to miss it, but let's say that's your target. If you're at 80% of that target, you're generally in pretty good shape. But once you're unfunded, it becomes harder and harder to make up that gap.

“You either have to cut your cloth for your circumstances… or you increase your contributions while you still have time.”