As anyone with a mortgage will realise, these borrowers are wasting thousands in interest costs, which New Zealand borrowers do not. Aligning it with the fulltime minimum wage would put cash in the hands of all borrowers earning more than $24,128 – and anyone earning $48,800 and above would get nearly $3000 a year. Well, there are 504,000 New Zealand-based borrowers with outstanding student loans. Even if all of them earned over $60,000 (which they don’t), it would result in about $2.1 billion a year less being paid off in student loan balances. *Disclosure: I paid off my student loan years ago.

Source: New Zealand Herald February 20, 2026 19:00 UTC