Issues have been identified in the Household Travel Survey (HTS) datasets for the 2023/24 and 2024/25 survey years. Based on information available at this time, approximately 740 household survey records, primarily in the Waikato region, are affected and cannot be validated. These records account for around 60% of the Waikato sample and 5.7% of the national sample.
Further work is being undertaken to confirm the extent of any impacts and determine the appropriate treatment of the affected data. While this work is undertaken, access to the affected datasets is being temporarily suspended, as their validity cannot be assured and may change following completion of the review process.
At this stage, the Ministry is unable to determine the full implications of the issue but will ensure that further information is provided to data users following its review. The HTS remains an important source of information about how New Zealanders travel. However, as a survey-based dataset, it is inherently subject to uncertainty. The Ministry is working to understand the effects of the identified issues and any necessary remediation, particularly for Waikato and any other affected regions, to ensure users are provided with reliable and accurate information going forward.
General and background information on the HTS, including definitions can be found in the tab ‘General information’, above
An overview of the of the survey’s results can be found in the tab ‘Overview’, above.
Survey sampling
The HTS relies on a sample of the population and scales the results to national/regional level using weightings. The scaling and weighting is not perfect and, as such, there is some uncertainty in the results. Standard deviations have been included for the main trips, distance and duration columns to show the magnitude of this uncertainty.
In general, the lower the number of sampled people/trips, the greater the uncertainty in the results. Summaries with fewer than 20-30 sample trips/persons should be considered unreliable and ideally not used.
Three-year summaries have been included to reduce the uncertainty - at the cost of granularity of the time series. Results for groups with fewer than 5 respondents have been removed for privacy reasons. Shares are calculated without any of these low-response results.
All shares and per-capita summaries are calculated using only the mean values - these will also have uncertainty values associated with them but the uncertainty values have been omitted for space reasons.
Data tables
All values presented here are on an annual basis and all values are rounded to 3 significant figures except sample totals which are unrounded.
This report was generated on 2026-09-16
Disclaimer
All reasonable endeavours are made to ensure the accuracy of the information in this report. However, the information is provided without warranties of any kind including accuracy, completeness, timeliness or fitness for any particular purpose.
The Ministry of Transport excludes liability for any loss, damage or expense, direct or indirect, and however caused, whether through negligence or otherwise, resulting from any person or organisation’s use of, or reliance on, the information provided in this report.
The terms of the Ministry’s . copyright and disclaimer apply.