The 2018 New Zealand Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD18) is a set of tools for identifying concentrations of deprivation in New Zealand. The IMD18 comprises 29 indicators grouped into seven domains of deprivation: Employment, Income, Crime, Housing, Health, Education and Access to services.

IMD18 measures deprivation at the neighbourhood level in custom-designed 2018 data zones that have an average population of 761. Data zones are designed to produce better small area information without losing their contents to suppression or confidentiality. The New Zealand land mass was divided into 6,181 data zones (DZ) in 2018, which mostly nest within 2013 data zone boundaries. Some of the 2013 data zones had low populations in 2018, so were merged with adjacent areas, while those areas that experienced a population increase between 2013 and 2018 were split to maintain relatively consistent populations. No 2018 meshblocks were split. On average, there are 8.55 mesh blocks per data zone.

Source: The University of Auckland. Index of Multiple Deprivation developed by Exeter et al 2017 and licensed by The University of Auckland for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand licence.