Media Releases
Finishing 2025 on a high note – RNZ National audience continues to grow
Released at 9:53 am on 2 December 2025
RNZ’s latest radio ratings show that RNZ National has continued to grow its audience in 2025, with growth across a number of key programmes, including Morning Report.
Results in live radio, measured through the GfK Commercial Radio Survey, show RNZ’s combined share (RNZ National and RNZ Concert) for Survey 3 2025 is 12.7% compared to 11.3% from the last survey.*
RNZ National’s audience 10+ is 500,300 in a typical week (475,800 in the last survey). RNZ Concert’s audience 10+ is 154,100 in a typical week (170,400, in the last survey). The combined RNZ Audience is 584,300, an increase of 8,800 from the last survey.
Morning Report helped contribute to a 5.1% increase in RNZ National’s listenership with over 13,000 or 4% more people listening to RNZ’s morning news programme in this survey period.
RNZ Chief Executive and Editor-in-Chief Paul Thompson said the results showed that changes made to programmes on RNZ National were beginning to have an impact and he expected to see further growth in 2026.
“We’ve only really begun the work in our audio plan with our Chief Audio Officer being in the role for a little over a month. One of our key focus areas was growing the Auckland audience and seeing a lift in that audience in this survey across all of our major shows is really gratifying.”
Thompson said RNZ’s audio plan set clear targets to first stabilise and then grow RNZ National’s audience, aiming for reaching an audience of 500,000 by November 2026 and 520,000 by November 2027.
“We’ve achieved our November 2026 goal a year early with these latest results, and we now want to build on that success in 2026. Further changes to programming and the introduction of new presenters and correspondents in 2026 will help confirm RNZ National as the home of trusted news and content for New Zealanders.”
The live radio survey results top off a year of record audiences for RNZ with the public media organisation now reaching 83% of New Zealanders 18+ a month.**
Contributing to that number is the growth of RNZ’s digital platforms, with1,698,000 New Zealanders aged 15+ visiting rnz.co.nz in October, the highest ever monthly audience for RNZ’s website. ***
“At the same time as reaching record audiences, we’ve managed to grow trust in RNZ, increasing this by nine points in a year. What we’ve seen over 2025 is that New Zealanders are really valuing our coverage of local news and turning to RNZ to help make sense of world events. We don’t take this trust for granted at RNZ and will continue our focus on standards and objective reporting to make sure we continue to earn the trust of audiences,” said Thompson.
Further Gfk radio survey results*
RNZ NATIONAL
| Audience | 2025 Survey 3 cumulative audience (000) | 2025 Survey 2 cumulative audience (000) | Change (000) |
| Total New Zealand | 500.3 | 475.8 | 24.5 |
| Auckland | 132.7 | 116 | 16.7 |
| Wellington | 87.7 | 87 | 0.7 |
| Christchurch | 63.9 | 61.3 | 2.6 |
| Audience/Programme | 2025 Survey 3 cumulative audience (000) | 2025 Survey 2 cumulative audience (000) | Change (000) |
| Morning Report | |||
| Total New Zealand | 352.2 | 338.6 | 13.6 |
| Auckland | 85.2 | 76.9 | 8.3 |
| Wellington | 69.8 | 67.2 | 2.6 |
| Christchurch | 47.7 | 47.2 | 0.5 |
| Nine to Noon | |||
| Total New Zealand | 258.3 | 238.1 | 20.2 |
| Auckland | 65.3 | 50.9 | 14.4 |
| Wellington | 40.7 | 37.1 | 3.6 |
| Christchurch | 34.7 | 33.7 | 1.0 |
| Checkpoint | |||
| Total New Zealand | 225.1 | 207 | 18.1 |
| Auckland | 61.5 | 49.6 | 11.9 |
| Wellington | 41.4 | 35.7 | 5.7 |
| Christchurch | 27.2 | 30.4 | -3.2 |
| Saturday Morning | |||
| Total New Zealand | 208.1 | 203.7 | 4.4 |
| Auckland | 45.7 | 43.4 | 2.3 |
| Wellington | 41.8 | 39.6 | 2.2 |
| Christchurch | 25.2 | 27.4 | -2.2 |
* Source: GfK Radio Audience Measurements, All Radio Stations, Total New Zealand - RNZ - Survey 2/2025, All 10+, Mon-Sun 12mn-12mn, Cume and Share %. Survey 3 2025 was conducted from August 10th to November 1st. For more information on the survey see: 2025 Radio Ratings Toolkit : GfK
** Source: Verian’s Value Indices survey. This is the main tool we use to assess public attitudes to RNZ and their sense of value and trust. We run the survey three times a year. These results are from the second survey. Survey size of 2000. Survey completed between 18-31 August 2025.
*** Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, All people 15+
Please note: RNZ endeavours to release GFK ratings information alongside its Value Indices Survey. However, the third survey for Value Indices will be released later in December due to additional data collection requirements to progress work on RNZ’s audio plan.
