More Census information about households, education and employment in the Ashburton District has been added to Council’s website, as part of a helpful tool to view the data.

The Census Viewer uses information from the five-yearly Census and is curated by Council’s Geographic Information Systems team and presented in an easy-to-understand format.

Business Support Group Manager Leanne Macdonald said the Census Viewer on Council’s website now had information and showed demographic trends about the district’s population and its ethnicities, languages and religions, as well as information just added about households, education and employment.

“People can use this as a source of information if they are writing reports or applying for grants and need good data.

“The household data tells us that 45.8 per cent of our residents owned or part-owned the house they were living in, which is higher than the national percentage.”

The household data also showed that 54.7 per cent of the Ashburton District population was married, compared to 48.6 nationally.

The work and labour force data includes occupations, industries and income.

“This is just an example of some of the levels of data that can be found on the Census Viewer as a result of the 2018 Census and we invite people to take a look,” Mrs Macdonald said.

All the data can be broken down to suburbs and different rural areas, and can also be compared to data from 2006 and 2013.

Stats NZ is expected to start releasing information from the 2023 Census at the end of May next year.

The link for the Census Viewer on Council’s website is on our community profile page here.

The field collection phase of the 2023 Census closed on 30 June and analysis of the raw tallies of returned census forms is under way.