2025 Restaurant Association Hospitality Report

2025 Hospitality Report: Key Statistics & Highlights

The 2025 Hospitality Report delivers a current snapshot of the hospitality sector — its scale, performance, and pressures. Drawing on data from Statistics New Zealand, the Restaurant Association, the report reflects an industry at a crossroads. Hospitality has reached new revenue highs even as margins tighten.

Selected Highlights

• For the year ended June 2025, total hospitality sales reached $15.99 billion, an increase of 1.4 %.

• Despite the growth in top-line revenue, profitability is under intense pressure, with rising costs in food, wages, insurance, rent, and other fixed expenses eroding margins.

• In the restaurant & café segment, which continues to hold a dominant share of the market, sales growth was more muted: up  0.3 % year-on-year.

• Three regions stood out as exceptional performers: Nelson, with 15.1 per cent sales growth, followed closely by Queenstown-Lakes at 14.2 per cent, and Kaikōura at 10.2 per cent.

• Wage pressures are a factor in margin compression. According to the 2025 remuneration survey, wage costs now represent approximately 40 % of revenue.

What’s Changed — & What’s New

Compared with 2024, several key themes emerge more strongly in 2025:

• Moderated growth, intensifying cost pressure: The jump from a 5.8 % year-on-year growth in 2024 to just 1.4 % in 2025 signals that topline expansion is returning to more modest trends — but input inflation and fixed cost escalation are making it harder to convert revenue into profit.

• Regional disparities remain pronounced: Some regions (especially tourist-heavy ones) still manage healthy growth, underscoring the uneven nature of recovery and resilience.

• Less certainty around trajectory: With marginal growth and rising volatility, the industry narrative shifts from expansion to adaptation — evolving business models, smarter cost management, and innovation are no longer optional.

What the 2025 Report Contains

• Executive overview

• Industry sales data by sector (restaurants & cafés; pubs, bars; catering; food to go; clubs), with multi-year trends

• Annual sales analysis for year ended June 2025

• Quarterly sales breakdown, capturing 2024–2025 performance

• Outlet & business counts, by sector, showing changes over time

• Employment data by sector, across multiple years

• Regional outlooks (for sales, outlets, employment) across all standard regions

• Insights from 2025 Remuneration Survey

Restaurant Association members can access the full digital version of the report; non-members may purchase it.

Restaurant Association members can download the full free electronic copy of the 2025 Hospitality Report by clicking here. 

If you are not a member of the Restaurant Association, the 2025 Hospitality Report is available for purchase to the wider industry for $300.00 +gst. Let us know if you’d like to talk to one of our team about becoming a member, or click here for more information.