New Zealand is seventh in the world on the Equaldex Equality Index, and the two halves of that score sit a long way apart: a Legal Index of 95 against a Public Opinion Index of 65. The legal side is close to finished. Same-sex marriage has been available since 2013, conversion practices were prohibited by statute in 2022, and since 2023 a person can change the sex recorded on their birth certificate by statutory declaration to the Registrar-General — no Family Court, no medical treatment, no doctor's sign-off.*

The opinion half is the more interesting number, because it is not low in the way it looks. On the specific question of whether trans people should be protected from discrimination in employment, housing and access to businesses, New Zealanders came first of the thirty countries Ipsos surveyed.* They came first again on whether same-sex couples raise children as successfully as anyone else.* A 65 built on answers like those describes a public that is warm on rights and cooler on some of the cultural questions bundled in alongside them — not a public that is unsure whether you belong.

New Zealand is the second-ranked democracy in the world in the EIU Democracy Index 2024, behind Norway, with perfect scores on electoral process, political participation and civil liberties. It has no written constitution and no specific statute guaranteeing press freedom; what it has instead is an unbroken practice of separating the government from the newsroom, which Reporters Without Borders describes as a recognised bulwark of the rule of law.*

Journalists here can say what they think, and that is the part that matters for this value. What has gone wrong is commercial. New Zealand fell to 22nd of 180 in the RSF 2026 index with a score of 77.38, down from 16th and 81.37 a year earlier, and almost all of the drop is in the economic indicator — 72.15 to 64.44.* Behind those numbers: Newshub closed its entire news division in 2024, leaving one major television news service, and NZME shut 14 newspapers that November, which RSF warns threatens to turn whole regions into media deserts.*

Fewer newsrooms is a different problem from a muzzled press, and our score reflects the second. Worth holding both: a country can keep every freedom on paper and still lose the reporters who use them.

Tenth of 181 countries on the Georgetown WPS Index, which measures lived conditions — education, work, financial access, safety — and 90 out of 100 on the World Bank's legal-frameworks score. Within that legal score, six of the ten topics are full marks; the four that are not are safety, parenthood, entrepreneurship and pension, each at 75. New Zealand was the first self-governing country in the world to give women the vote, in 1893, and the gap between that and a 75 on safety is the honest shape of the dimension here: the formal rights arrived early and the harder parts are still being worked on.

Reproductive rights, which we report separately rather than folding into the number: abortion was removed from the Crimes Act in March 2020 and is available on request up to 20 weeks with no clinical or statutory test at all — no referral needed, and nurses and midwives can provide it. After 20 weeks a practitioner must judge it clinically appropriate and consult one colleague.*

Fifth of 143 countries in the WJP Rule of Law Index 2025, and the only country outside northern Europe in the top five — Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden are the other four. The score is unchanged on 2024 in a year when most countries slipped. Courts are independent, corruption is rare, and a visitor who needs the legal system will find it works roughly the way it says it does.

The point in the note above belongs here too, though. The Waitangi Tribunal is part of this legal system — it is where the Treaty argument is being heard, and its reports are findings, not protest. A rule-of-law score counts whether institutions function; it does not count what happens when a government is advised by one of its own institutions to stop, and keeps going.

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and New Zealand is one of those cases.

The figure on our other country pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour, and that review covers the 131 countries which hold trade preferences with the United States. New Zealand is not one of them, so it is never assessed. Household surveys measure child labour in some countries outside that system, but on a different basis, so a number taken from one of them would not mean the same thing as the tiered assessment used elsewhere on this site.

Here the blank has something behind it, which is unusual. New Zealand has no single statutory minimum age for employment. It ratified the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention in 2001 but has never ratified the companion Minimum Age Convention, and the government's own position, recorded by the ILO, is that the school-leaving age of 16 and a patchwork of education and health-and-safety rules achieve the same thing without naming an age. The union federation disagrees and has pushed for ratification for years; the employers' federation holds that a fixed age would be too prescriptive.* We could not verify the live ratification status at the ILO's own database, which does not render for us; the position above is the one recorded in the ILO's country baseline.