National Pulls in $6.27 Million in 2025 Donations as ACT Overtakes Labour for Second Place
The Electoral Commission has released its 2025 party donations and loans report, showing the National Party pulled in $6,275,234 in declared donations across the calendar year, comfortably more than every other registered party combined and a clear sign of the financial firepower the governing party has built heading into the 2026 general election.
The release, published on 7 May, also confirmed that ACT has overtaken Labour to become the second-best-funded party in the country. ACT reported $2,445,225 in donations across the year, narrowly ahead of Labour’s $2,403,241. The Green Party landed in fourth place with $1,848,678, NZ First fifth on $1,360,272, the Opportunity Party sixth on $179,401 and Te Pāti Māori seventh on $141,986. Three minor parties, the Animal Justice Party, the Women’s Rights Party and the Conservative Party of New Zealand, each declared less than $13,000 for the year.
The numbers point to a substantial fundraising lead for the centre-right block over the parliamentary opposition. Combined declared donations to the three coalition partners total just over $10 million, against roughly $4.4 million for Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori combined. With less than five months until polls open, that gap is likely to translate into real differences in advertising spend, billboard saturation, social-media reach and on-the-ground campaigning.
National’s haul also represents a sharp rise on the previous year. In 2024 the party reported just under $5 million in declared donations, meaning 2025 added another $1.3 million on top of an already chart-topping figure. Labour, by contrast, has been broadly flat across the same period, while ACT has continued the steady upward trajectory that has tracked alongside its rise in the polls since the 2023 election.
The reporting threshold itself was lowered from $15,000 to $5,000 in 2023, meaning a much larger slice of the donor base now appears by name in the public returns. From 1 January 2026 the threshold ticked up slightly to $6,000, although that change will only show up in next year’s report. Even at the lower threshold, the bulk of small-dollar donations remain anonymous in aggregate, and parties continue to receive untold sums in payments below the threshold that do not have to be itemised by donor.
The single-donor story this cycle belongs to Brian Cartmell, a Queenstown-based technology entrepreneur, who appears in four separate party returns. According to RNZ’s analysis of the filings, Cartmell gave $204,999 to NZ First, $201,993 to National, $200,000 to ACT and a further $100,000 to the Opportunity Party. Together that is more than $700,000 spread across the three governing parties plus one centrist outsider, an unusually wide pattern of giving for a single individual under New Zealand’s disclosure regime. Cartmell did not donate to Labour, the Greens or Te Pāti Māori.
Other large declared cheques included $210,000 from Nelson philanthropist Robert Wares to National, which made him the single largest contributor to the governing party for the year. Labour’s biggest backer was the Mills Family Trust at $125,000, while the Greens’ top donor was entrepreneur Robert Morgan at $132,000. Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere personally donated $60,000 to his own party, an internal pattern of giving that has become more common across smaller parties since the threshold was lowered.
The big-dollar names obscure a wider trend, which is that the lower threshold has pushed disclosed totals across every party upwards. Some of that growth is genuine new money being raised, but a meaningful slice is simply donations that would previously have stayed below the old $15,000 line and were therefore never published. That makes year-on-year comparisons tricky, although the relative gap between parties is real enough.
Outside the donations report, the Electoral Commission has also confirmed broadcasting allocations for the 2026 campaign. National received the largest slice of the public advertising pot at roughly $1.08 million, with Labour on $913,435. The allocations are calculated using previous election results, current MP numbers, polling and a fairness test, and they sit on top of whatever the parties spend from their privately raised funds. Once the regulated period begins, every party also has to operate within a strict total spending cap, so the gulf in fundraising will not translate one-to-one into a gulf in advertising volume during the closing weeks of the campaign.
The figures give voters their clearest picture yet of who is bankrolling each side of the 2026 contest. Two patterns stand out from this year’s release. Concentration of giving at the top of the disclosure range has continued, with a small handful of donors contributing six-figure sums to several parties at once rather than picking a single horse. And the gap between National and the rest of the field has widened, even as ACT consolidates its place as the country’s second-best-funded political party. Whether that financial advantage shows up in vote share is, of course, another question entirely. Money buys reach, not necessarily conviction.
Voters who want to cut through the advertising spend and work out which party most closely matches their own positions can take Newswire’s voting tool, which compares your views to current party policy across more than 30 issues, from tax and healthcare to immigration and the environment.
Were you surprised by any of the donation figures, or by the spread of giving from individual donors across multiple parties? Tell us what you make of the 2026 funding picture in the comments below.