Weekly employment indicators data collection

1. Data source All New Zealand employers are required to report PAYE (pay as you earn) data for their employees to Inland Revenue. Prior to April 2019, the PAYE data was reported on a monthly basis as the EMS. Since 1 April 2019, all New Zealand employers paying more than $50,000 PAYE and Employer Superannuation Contribution tax (ESCT) per year are required to electronically file payroll information, known as payday filing. Larger employers need to file within two working days of each payday, however, smaller employers can choose to file by paper and have slightly longer timeframes. This data is provided daily to Stats NZ by Inland Revenue. Payday filing is timelier and has more information about employees’ pay period, making it a more flexible and useful data source than the EMS, and enables indicators to be produced sooner than when using EMS data. 2. Defining paid jobs and median earnings Paid jobs are the number of unique employer-employee relationships with a pay period that occurs during the reference week. Median earnings are the middle point of the distribution of weekly earnings from the paid jobs during the reference week. 3. Interpreting the time-series data Industries Paid jobs are output at the total New Zealand level and using the following broad industry categories based on the industry code assigned at the enterprise level: Primary industries – ANZSIC06 divisions A (Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing) and B (Mining) Goods-producing industries – ANZSIC06 divisions C (Manufacturing) to E (Construction) Services industries – ANZSIC06 divisions F (Wholesale Trade) to S (Other Services) Industry not classified Total includes all industries, as well as enterprises that could not be classified into a category. Non-response imputation This indicator series does not use imputation to account for missing values. Back-casting Due to the EMS being filed for monthly periods, back-casting the weekly employment indicators to before April 2019 with only one year of reference data would not produce useful data. Seasonal adjustment No seasonal adjustment is performed on the weekly employment indicators at the time of release, since only one year of data is available. Provisional data status The employment indicators are provisional while we are still analysing the payday filing data, and making improvements to the items produced. 4. Paid job series compared with Monthly Employment Indicators' filled jobs Comparing monthly averages of the weekly paid jobs series to the monthly employment indicators shows that the two series produce similar measures, however the monthly employment indicators use imputation to account for data quality issues. en-NZ