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For the past 2 years, I’ve been tracking New Zealand’s unemployment rate using 3-quarter and 8-quarter moving averages. Nothing sophisticated, just adding the last few quarters together to smooth out the noise and watch the direction of travel over time.
I started doing this because headlines tend to swing emotionally from quarter to quarter, optimism one month, panic the next, while labour markets usually move much slower than people realise.
The March 2026 unemployment rate came in at 5.3%.
From my observation, the situation hasn’t changed very much. The curve has flattened slightly, but the broader trend still looks like a slow unwind rather than a recovery.
And I think many people can already feel this without looking at the charts.
You see it in the number of applicants chasing a single role. You hear it in conversations around restructures, delayed hiring, shrinking budgets, and experienced people applying for jobs well below where they were 2 years ago. Even recruiters, who were once overwhelmed by shortages, now sound more cautious.
This cycle feels different because it never arrived like a crisis.
No dramatic collapse.
No single shock event.
Just a long gradual tightening.
Source: Stats NZ
Those are often the harder cycles to navigate because people keep waiting for things to "go back to normal", while the system underneath has already changed.
New Zealand is also tied closely to what happens elsewhere. We are a small open economy, whether we like it or not, and the broader Western economies have all been wrestling with similar pressures: weaker growth, high living costs, cautious investment, geopolitical tension, and businesses delaying decisions longer than usual.
The patterns rhyme.
One thing I’ve noticed is that activity can return before confidence does. Job ads might increase, projects restart, conversations pick up again, but employers still hesitate at the final step. Hiring becomes selective. Expansion gets delayed. Permanent roles quietly become contracts. Everyone waits for someone else to move first.
That creates a strange disconnect where the data says conditions are "improving", while lived experience still feels tight.
Both are true.
I also think remote work changed the labour market more than many expected. A role that once attracted applicants from one city now attracts applicants from everywhere. Geography matters differently now. Competition widened quietly while most people were still arguing about working from home policies.
And underneath all this sits a bigger structural question.
What does stable employment even look like going forward?
I’m not sure the old assumptions fully hold anymore, especially for younger workers entering the market now. Career ladders look less linear, tenure matters less than adaptability, and many people are stitching together portfolio careers, contract work, side income, and remote opportunities across borders.
The system is changing while people are still using the old mental models to interpret it.
So personally, I’ve spent less time trying to predict the exact turning point and more time thinking about resilience, cashflow, adaptability, health, keeping skills current, maintaining relationships, and staying mentally steady while the cycle runs its course.
Economic cycles come and go. They always have.
But slow cycles test people differently. They wear people down gradually because the signals stay mixed for a long time.
I guess that’s what I’ve been observing these past 2 years.
Not collapse.
Not recovery either.
Just a long adjustment phase that still hasn’t fully played out.
It’s worked for me.
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