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MBIE data via eolas

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) is the policy ministry for the productive economy — business, employment, science, immigration, tourism, energy, building. eolas serves 12 datasets from MBIE — focused on the operational data streams MBIE publishes most actively: fuel and gas market stats, government procurement (GETS) notices, residential rental bonds, and science funding.

If you're doing energy-market analysis, government-procurement research, or rental-market work — MBIE is the source.

What's in the catalogue

Energy markets

Dataset Description
fuel_prices_weekly Weekly retail petrol + diesel prices across all main centres + nationally. The series energy analysts and journalists track.
gas_monthly_stats Monthly natural gas production, consumption, and storage. Sourced from MBIE's gas statistics workbook.

Government procurement (GETS)

The Government Electronic Tenders Service publishes every public procurement notice. MBIE indexes these:

Dataset Description
gets_award_notices Procurement contracts awarded — successful tenders, vendor, value.
gets_product_categories Standard product/service classification system used in tender categorisation.
gets_region_by_tender Regional breakdown of tender activity.

Rental market

Dataset Description
rental_bonds_quarterly Quarterly bond-lodgement stats — proxy for residential rental-market activity, by region.
rental_bonds_by_tla Same data sliced by Territorial Authority — useful for council-level housing analysis.

Science funding

Dataset Description
science_funding Government research grants — recipients, amounts, fund stream.

Plus 4 additional MBIE datasets covering ancillary topics (browse the live catalogue for the current list).

Refresh schedule

Weekly, Wednesday morning NZ time. MBIE publishes most series on a monthly or quarterly cadence — the weekly refresh catches new releases promptly.

meta = client.info("fuel_prices_weekly")
meta["last_refreshed_at"]
meta["source_last_modified_at"]

License

All MBIE data is published under CC-BY 4.0. Commercial use is fine; attribution required.

Recommended attribution: "Source: MBIE, served via eolas (eolas.fyi). CC-BY 4.0."

Common patterns

NZ retail fuel prices over time

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fuel = client.mbie("fuel_prices_weekly", start="2020-01-01")
# fuel has columns: date, region, fuel_type, value (cpl)
nz_avg = fuel[(fuel["region"] == "National") & (fuel["fuel_type"] == "Petrol 91")]
nz_avg.plot(x="date", y="value", title="NZ Petrol 91 — National avg (cpl)")
plt.show()

library(ggplot2)

fuel <- eolas_get_mbie("fuel_prices_weekly", start = "2020-01-01")
nz_avg <- fuel[fuel$region == "National" & fuel$fuel_type == "Petrol 91", ]
ggplot(nz_avg, aes(date, value)) + geom_line() +
  labs(title = "NZ Petrol 91 — National avg (cpl)", y = "Cents per litre")

Government procurement by region

procurement = client.mbie("gets_region_by_tender", start="2022-01-01")
# Pivot to see top regions by tender count
pivot = procurement.groupby("region")["count"].sum().sort_values(ascending=False)
pivot.head(10).plot.barh(title="Top regions by tender activity (2022+)")

bonds = client.mbie("rental_bonds_by_tla", start="2018-01-01")
# Filter to one TA (Wellington City = tla_code TBD; verify from data)
auck = bonds[bonds["tla_name"] == "Auckland"]
auck.plot(x="date", y="median_rent", title="Auckland median rent (MBIE bonds proxy)")

Source-specific notes

  • GETS is operational + advisory: gets_award_notices includes both completed contracts (transparency) and forward-looking spending forecasts. Filter by notice_type to separate them.
  • Fuel prices are surveyed: MBIE doesn't publish actual point-of-sale data — fuel_prices_weekly is a national survey average. For station-level granularity you'd need a private aggregator.
  • Rental bonds proxy ≠ true rent: rental_bonds_by_tla shows median bond at lodgement, which approximates median rent but lags actual rent-roll movements. For more granular real-time rental data, MBIE collaborates with Tenancy Services — sometimes available via OIA.
  • Cross-source overlap: MBIE's rental data overlaps with Stats NZ housing stats and council planning data. MBIE's fuel/gas data is the canonical official source — no overlap concern.
  • Science funding lag: science_funding is published with a 6-12 month delay (after grant cycles close).

Where to find more