We trawl through preliminary results data to bring you fascinating insights and a whole lot of maps.

Which places kept Māori wards?

Forty-two elections included a binding referendum on whether councils should retain specific Māori wards or constituencies, required as part of a government mandate. Most Māori wards are in the North Island; 24 councils voted to remove them, and 18 voted to retain them.

(Progress results gave a 25:17 split, which changed once Saturday votes were taken into account – Horizons Regional Council flipped from “remove” to “keep”, and could plausibly flip back once special votes are counted, as the “keeps” are just 123 votes ahead. In Ruapehu, the “keep” votes are currently 90 ahead, so there’s a chance the result could change there too.*)

October 17 update: special votes have now been counted, and the “keeps” prevailed in both the Horizons Māori ward poll (35,547 to 35,424) and the Ruapehu one (2,098-1,982). 

The bigger population centres – Hamilton, Wellington, Porirua, Hutt City, Palmerston North and Nelson – were largely in favour of Māori wards, though Whangārei and New Plymouth bucked that trend, voting to remove theirs.

While the distribution of population in the smaller councils meant more councils as a whole removed their Māori wards, nationally, a majority of voters were in favour of retaining them: there were 520,113 votes to keep Māori wards and 458,332 votes to remove them. (Some people voted in two referendums, for their regional council and city or district council, so the votes don’t represent the number of people exactly.)

Does being affiliated with a central government party help you get elected?

Across the country, the Greens, Labour and Act had candidates standings in local elections (National has long had a policy of not endorsing candidates in local elections; NZ First didn’t run any either).

Te Pāti Māori also had a handful of candidates running across Māori wards and constituencies on Northland Regional Council, Horizons Regional Council, Kāpiti Coast District Council and Rotorua Lakes Council. All four were elected, a 100% success rate.

Most of Labour’s candidates were in Auckland, particularly across the local boards, and Christchurch,  through The People’s Choice ticket. Most of the Green Party’s candidates were in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin, but there were a few on the East Coast too. Act’s candidates were scattered throughout the country, including many of the more rural councils. Labour candidates stood for nine different councils, Green candidates for 12 and Act candidates for 25.

(We haven’t included City Vision, which runs candidates in central Auckland areas, because it’s aligned with Labour and the Greens, but have counted all the candidates who were individually listed on the Green Party website, and The People’s Choice candidates who added a Labour affiliation.)

Labour and the Green Party have had local election candidates for years, and the majority of their candidates were elected. Almost all of the left-wing-party-affiliated incumbents were elected. One of the Green Party’s candidates, Mike Davidson, was elected on the Papanui community board in Christchurch; he has just been sworn in as the party’s newest list MP following the resignation of Benjamin Doyle and has said he will balance his community board and central government duties. 

Act, which was running candidates in local elections for the first time, had less success, with nine of the 46 Act Local candidates receiving enough votes for a place on council. Act leader David Seymour has said the campaign was nonetheless a success at pushing Act’s messaging and identifying talented people who could be part of future national or local election campaigns. 

There is clear gender inequality among mayors

New Zealand’s parliament is currently 44% women and 56% men – a fairly even split between genders, and a statistic that has climbed steeply since 2016, when only 30% of elected representatives were women.

Local government lags behind in gender equality, particularly when it comes to who wears the chains. In 2025, 49 men won mayoral elections compared to 17 women – about 24% of the total. That’s down from 2022, when 35% of mayors were women, and slightly down from 2019, when 27% of mayors were women.

(Of course, these statistics don’t include nonbinary people – Benjamin Doyle was the first nonbinary MP until they left earlier this month, and EJ Barrett, another nonbinary person, has been elected to New Plymouth’s council.)

Who voted? And when? 

In general, smaller councils with smaller populations had higher voter turnout. This could be because the decisions of these councils have a more direct, immediate impact on voters – or just because there’s a higher chance you’ve actually met someone who’s on the ballot.

On the Chatham Islands, 300 of the 439 eligible voters cast a vote. On the main islands, South Wairarapa, Kaikōura and the Mackenzie District were all in the high 50s, and 15 other councils managed a turnout of more than 50% – the biggest council that managed this was Taupō.

On pure numbers, though, the metropolitan areas have them beat: the 343,000 Aucklanders who cast a vote still add up to more democratic engagement than the 85,000 people who voted in the councils that had more than 50% turnout.

October 20: The below map has been updated to reflect final voter turnout numbers, where available.

Although there were 32 days to vote, many of the votes were cast in the final hours, before 12pm on Saturday, October 11. In Wellington and Dunedin, nearly 12% of the votes were cast on the final day. (In Christchurch and Lower Hutt, by contrast, final-day votes made up less than 5% of the overall turnout.)

The number of new mayors shows that incumbency doesn’t always help you get elected

Incumbent elected members have the advantage of name recognition and experience – they know how council works, and voters have hopefully seen them around at events or read their comments in the community newspaper (if it still exists).

Winning an election once makes it easier to win again, and that’s clear for all the councils with no new mayor (even if, in the case of Hurunui and Manawatū, it was because no one else put their names forward). 

Many councils in New Zealand now have new mayors; in 16 of those places, there was no incumbent (although existing councillors tended to go for the top job over completely new candidates).

In 16 other councils, incumbents were beaten by new candidates – from eight-term mayor Wayne Guppy losing to Peri Zee in Upper Hutt, to unpopular incumbent Glyn Lewers losing to John Glover in Queenstown, and Jules Radich coming a distant fourth to existing councillor Sophie Barker in Dunedin. Some of these results are quite marginal though, like Jacquie Grant’s four-vote lead ahead of incumbent Helen Lash in Westland, and may change when the special votes are counted. 

Bonus: can you guess the most common first name(s) of mayors in New Zealand? Click here to see if you were right.  

This post was updated on October 17 at 2.30pm to add Te Pāti Māori’s candidates to the affiliation section and to take into account the completion of special vote counting. Once final turnout numbers (including specials) are released for all councils, we’ll update those too.