A map of New Zealand showing just how much land is uninhabited per square kilometre, making up 78.21% of our total land area.
Following the posting of several similar maps of other countries, I thought it would be interesting to see how sparse New Zealand was using population data. With 4.6 million people spread out over 268,021 km², New Zealand is not a crowded place when compared to more densely populated countries such as Japan and the UK.
There are many reasons that people don’t live in these areas, including important ecological habitats in our national parks, mountainous terrain that is difficult to build upon and extensive farmland areas, which are used for food production. This map visualises and compares these different factors.
Map by Andrew Douglas-Clifford, 2025.
Second edition created for 30 Day Map Challenge 2025.
Data: Statistics NZ, Manaaki Whenua, LINZ (CC-BY-4.0)
The original map received plenty of attention on Reddit’s r/newzealand and r/mapporn, and featured in articles in The New Zealand Herald and Newshub.
Data: 1km Population grid data by Blair Rogers/Stats NZ/LINZ under a CC BY licence / Modified from original.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aotearoa
