Budget 2024 Major Spending Decisions

FamilyBoost: a major spending decision in Budget 2024

FamilyBoost is a cross-vote initiative with the Ministries of Education and Social Development. It is a payment to help eligible households pay for the cost of early childhood education (ECE). $50.5 million was paid to 60,300 households this year.

More than 100 of our people contributed to the rapid introduction of the scheme. We built relationships with the ECE sector, worked out what was feasible for the system design, developed policy and legislation and recruited new people to support customers.

From March to December 2024, we ran online advertising and proactive media, radio, outdoor posters, and sent emails to ECE providers. Community teams worked closely with government and support organisations and industry bodies. As a result, there were 480,000 visits to our website by December 2024.

The scheme met its 3 delivery milestones: legislation enabling it was passed in May 2024, it opened for registrations as planned in September, and families and whānau were able to claim from October for invoices covering the previous 3 months.

IR forecast the number of families who were expected to receive FamilyBoost, based on the limited information we were able to obtain at the time. While we expected some uncertainty around take-up, the numbers of families registering was lower than projected as was the overall amount claimed (people have up to 4 years to claim credits). Our ongoing outreach efforts aim to alert households still missing out.

After its introduction, we provided advice to the Government on adjustments to FamilyBoost policy settings. In early July 2025, the Minister of Finance announced adjustments to provide larger rebates to families and increase the number of families eligible to claim it.

We’ve also continued to work on ways to make our processes easier for customers to use. Initial surveying of customers noted some complaints were received as customers navigated the new eligibility rules and claims process. We also found customers were satisfied when they called us about the scheme. 

IR received operating funding to administer FamilyBoost. We self-funded the capital build costs of $1.2 million to launch it.

You can read more reporting on the scheme including take-up, claims received, amounts paid and other key indicators on our website:

Major spending decisions

Key indicators

• Registrations received - 78,300
• Registered accepted - 77,500
• Claims received - 174,900
• Households claiming - 70,900
• Claims paid - 138,500
• Households paid - 60,300
• Claims declined - 29,200

^[1]In March 2025, Ministers agreed to reduce the FamilyBoost budget for 2024–25 from $170.4 million to $131 million. This was a timing difference due to a change in accounting treatment.

Investment in compliance: a major spending decision in Budget 2024

Through its Budget 2024 investment, Government targeted an increase in tax revenue and debt collected from our undertaking more compliance activities. The investment enabled a substantial increase in activities such as audits, targeted engagement and enhancements to our intelligence tools and use of data.

We focused on achieving revenue, debt collection and loan repayment targets in four areas:

• revenue assessed through compliance interventions, where we exceeded our target by 40%
• revenue assessed from unfiled returns, where we missed the target by 20%
• cash collected from overdue debt activities, where we exceeded the target by 5%
• an uplift in the value of repayments collected from overseas-based student loan borrowers, where we exceeded the target by 28%.

As you can read in the next section’s assessment of our operations for 2024–25, a 42% increase in audits contributed to us exceeding the first target.

Increased activity led to greater numbers of customer complaints on interactions, mainly on debt, repayment plans, penalty and interest remissions, unfiled returns, late-filing penalties and audits. We paid close attention to this in our customer surveys, which highlighted the need to ensure our people continue to be understanding of customers’ situations and clear about why and how a debt has occurred.

IR spent all of the $29 million administration cost allocated to this initiative in Budget 2024. Read about the results from our compliance spending our page on ensuring fairness for all taxpayers.

Ensuring fairness for all taxpayers

Our website has additional reporting:

Major spending decisions

^[2]Excludes child support, student loans and Small Business Cashflow loans.