Monthly Unique Regional Population Estimates
5 October 2023
MBIE
The Monthly Unique Regional Population Estimates finished after the release on 5 October 2023 for August 2023 data.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE) has replaced the MURPEs series with the Tourism Volumes and Flows data series. This new product provides a more granular and detailed of regional visitation, including unique counts and measures of visitation. The first release of Tourism Volumes and Flows was in November 2025.
Tourism Volumes and Flows (TV&F) updates are published here on the TEIC.
MBIE and Data Ventures have worked together to produce estimates for monthly unique local and visitor populations in each RTO in New Zealand. ‘Unique’ means each person will only be counted once in each area they appear, regardless of how many times they appear or how long they stay there.
The series begins in January 2019 and aims to fill a key gap that was identified by the tourism sector in understanding regional visitor volumes. The data was paused in August 2023. More information about pausing MURPEs can be found here. The gap has been filled by the Tourism Volumes and Flows data series.
The populations that are estimated include:
- International visitors – people from outside New Zealand who are staying in the country for less than one year.
- Short-term international visitors – a subset of international visitors who are staying in the country for less than 90 days. (These people are counted as both ‘international’ and ‘short-term international’).
- Local residents – New Zealanders in their primary or secondary home region.
- Domestic visitors – New Zealanders outside their home region(s).
More information can be found on MBIE's website.
Note: In January 2023, we identified unusual trends and inconsistencies in the MURPE data. The data provider investigated and identified two errors:
- Cell towers were not mapped to RTOs, resulting in some visitors not being included in RTO estimates.
- Non-mobile devices with cellular capability were counted as mobile devices.
The two problems have been resolved. Quality checks, outlier identification, comparator analyses, and sense checking were completed. The entire MURPE data series was fully quality-checked and updated through the end of May 2023. -06 July 2023
The full error report is available here.