By Blair, Client Solutions Manager - Infrastructure & Trades

Building consents jumped 19% in the year to May 2026. Nearly 40,000 homes consented nationwide, the strongest run since 2023. Auckland's up 22%, Canterbury's up 30%. After two years of watching businesses go under, it's tempting to read that number and think: right, the recovery's here, time to start hiring again.

I'd be careful with that.

It's a two-speed recovery, not a broad one

Here's the bit that gets lost when a headline number like 19% does the rounds: non-residential consents are down 4% over the same period. So while housing's taking off, commercial clients are still sitting on their hands. Two different markets, moving in opposite directions, both hiding inside the same "construction is back" headline. If you're planning your hiring off the 19% figure without asking which side of that split you actually sit on, you're planning against a market that doesn't exist for you.

The longer view backs up the shift, but with the same caveat

MBIE's National Construction Pipeline Report backs up the broader trend. Activity bottomed out in 2025 and is forecast to climb to $65.4bn by 2030. Fine, that's genuinely good news. But it's the same story again underneath: growth by sector, not growth across the board. Some parts of the pipeline are already busy. Others haven't turned yet.

What this means in practice

I'm hearing this play out in real conversations right now: contractors who spent two years in survival mode are cautious about over-committing to permanent headcount again, and rightly so, but the risk on the other side is just as real. Under-resourcing now, while residential demand is genuinely accelerating, means losing ground to competitors who read the numbers correctly and moved early. The businesses getting this right aren't asking "should we rehire" as a single yes or no question. They're asking it sector by sector, region by region, and matching the answer to what the data is actually showing in their specific patch of the market, not the national headline.

Working with Enterprise

This is exactly the kind of judgment call we help clients work through: not just filling roles, but reading where the demand is real, where it's still soft, and building a workforce plan around the difference. If you're weighing up whether now's the time to scale back up, we'd be glad to talk it through against what we're seeing on the ground.