The market
The New Zealand architecture market, measured
We keep a live map of every enterprise, solution, integration, data, cloud, security and network architect working in New Zealand. Here is what it currently says. Every figure carries its sample size and its limitations, because a number without those is just a claim.
IT architects working in New Zealand
Eleven disciplines, and the two biggest labels hide most of the specialisms.
Solution architecture is by far the biggest label, and a large share of those people are really doing something more specific. Integration architecture is 39 people by job title and 141 once you read the technology they actually work with, MuleSoft, Boomi, TIBCO, an ESB, an API gateway. That gap is why integration roles are hard to fill: the people who can do the work are not filed under the name of the work.
Two of these are not technology specialisms at all. Architecture leader is the 148 people whose job is running architecture rather than doing it, chief architects, heads of architecture, architecture managers, chapter and practice leads. Principal is the 113 senior generalists who genuinely span enterprise and solution rather than sitting in either, which is a growing shape in New Zealand and one worth counting separately. Twenty-eight of them carry the hybrid title outright, enterprise solution architect, which several New Zealand employers now use as a grade of its own.
n = 2,469. Discipline is scored from named platforms, certifications and role phrases across each profile’s title, headline, skills, summary and role description. Two corrections matter: “continuous integration” is excluded, because CI/CD is not integration architecture, and “SOA” is treated as weak evidence, because it sits dormant in 354 skills lists as a marker of a Java career in 2012 rather than a job today. Where two disciplines score close, the more specific one wins, and a generic title is only overridden by the technology someone actually works with. 230 people, 9%, have profiles too sparse to place, and we leave them unclassified rather than assign them to make the chart tidy.
of the country’s architects work in Auckland
Wellington is the enterprise architecture capital and Christchurch is where the network architects are.
Auckland holds 1,101 architects and Wellington 646, but the two cities do different work. Enterprise architecture is 8% of Wellington against 4% of Auckland, and business architecture runs three times heavier there too, which is what a public sector full of capability models and target operating models looks like. Auckland leans integration, cloud and data, the shape of a commercial market rebuilding its platforms.
Christchurch is small at 165 but distinctive: network architecture is 12% there against 4% nationally, a legacy of the telco and infrastructure engineering base. If you need a network architect, that is where to look first.
| Discipline | Auckland n=1101 | Wellington n=646 | Christchurch n=165 | Hamilton n=71 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solution | 29% | 29% | 26% | 30% |
| Data | 12% | 13% | 10% | 7% |
| Infrastructure | 8% | 10% | 12% | 11% |
| Cloud | 9% | 8% | 7% | 8% |
| Architecture leader | 7% | 6% | 3% | 6% |
| Integration | 7% | 4% | 2% | 4% |
| Enterprise | 4% | 8% | 4% | 7% |
| Principal | 6% | 4% | 4% | 0% |
| Network | 3% | 4% | 12% | 6% |
| Security | 3% | 4% | 2% | 4% |
| Business | 2% | 3% | 2% | 7% |
n = 2,469. City is taken from the location on each profile. 394 people, one in six, do not state a city precisely enough to place, and they are shown as not stated rather than distributed by guesswork. Percentages are the share of that city’s architects, so columns read down.
Median years in the current architecture role
Architects stay about three and a half years, and security architects move fastest.
Security architecture has the shortest median tenure at 2.9 years and network architecture the longest at 4.7. Data sits at 3.1 and enterprise at 3.3. If you are budgeting for a security architect, budget for replacing them sooner than the rest of your practice.
n = 2,103. Time between the recorded start of the current role and September 2026, as medians so a few twenty-year veterans do not distort it.
Median years of total professional experience
Half of New Zealand’s architects have been working more than twenty-one years.
Architecture here is not an early-career destination, it is where experienced technologists arrive. Two consequences worth planning around. The pipeline underneath is thin, because almost nobody enters the profession directly. And a meaningful share of this population is closer to the end of their career than the middle, which is a succession problem the market has not started talking about.
n = 2,526 with an experience figure recorded. Counted from the first professional role on record, so it includes pre-architecture careers in development, infrastructure and analysis, which is the honest way to read it.
Architects who changed roles in the past twelve months
About one architect in ten changed jobs in the last year.
April 2026 was the busiest month with 36 moves, and the run rate sits around 26 a month. The banks are the clearest net absorbers, with ASB and Westpac taking the most. Datacom lost the most.
n = 217 confirmed moves, Sep 2025 to Aug 2026, counted by the month the person started. A move counts only if an architecture title sits on one side of it or the other, and the true figure is higher, because a recent move hides the ones before it.
Organisations employing at least one architect
The market is broad but the depth sits in about a dozen places.
IT services and consulting accounts for 512 of the architects we map, then government administration at 199, software at 181, telecommunications at 177 and banking at 149. Sixteen organisations employ twenty or more architects each. The other eight hundred-odd have a handful, or one.
The largest concentrations are consultancies rather than end-user organisations, which matters when you are hiring: Datacom, AWS, Microsoft and DXC together hold more architects than the four major banks, but those people are billable delivery capacity, not an in-house practice you can poach a whole team from.
n = 857 organisations. Employer names are normalised to merge obvious variants. Industry is the employer’s own classification and is missing for about one in nine.
What this does not tell you
Salary and contract rates are not in here.
Public profiles do not carry pay, and we will not publish a rate card built on inference. Any number we put next to a discipline would be a guess wearing a decimal point. If you want a view on what a role should pay, ask us and we will tell you what we have actually seen agreed on recent engagements, with the caveat that it is our sample and not the market.
Employment type is too thinly reported to publish.
Only about one architect in five states whether they are permanent or contracting, and contractors are more likely to state it, so any split we calculated would read high. The direction we do see is that data and integration architecture carry more contractors than cloud or enterprise.
230 people we cannot classify from their profile.
Nine per cent of the map: a title of “Systems Architect”, no skills listed, no summary. We leave them unclassified rather than assign them somewhere to make a chart look tidy.
Information architecture is real but very small.
Nine people in the country carry the title, so we count it inside data architecture rather than giving it a column of its own. The same is true of “digital architect”, which turns out to be an adjective people attach to solution and enterprise work rather than a discipline in its own right.
Discipline counts are a floor, not a census.
We only count someone into a specialism when the evidence is unambiguous. A looser reading of the same profiles puts integration at 425 rather than 141 and cloud at 350 rather than 197. The conservative number is the one we publish and the one we will defend.
This is a snapshot that moves.
Around twenty-six architects change roles in any given month, so the employer counts above are already slightly out of date. We refresh the map continuously and republish these figures monthly.
Salary and rate figures are published separately, in the annual survey.
Collada · Market map of the New Zealand architecture community · Compiled 1 September 2026
Writing
Twenty-five pieces published since 2023, under Ben’s name. Four lines of argument, on repeat.
The market, counted
Architecture in 2025 Demand for enterprise solution architects The return of the generalist architect Data architecture: the poor younger brother, now the rising star Architecture market pulse update Data architecture and the rise of modelling State of the Union, part two Architecture State of the UnionWhat good looks like
Architects’ admissions: why owning up to mistakes is key Business engagement: an architect’s most important role in low maturity organisations The enterprise architecture gap Architecture is learnt through experience, not certifications What is the best approach when an architecture function doesn’t have executive backing? How recoverable is your EA practice? Building a solution architecture team when permanent architects aren’t an optionThe uncomfortable one
Why short-sighted C-suite remuneration can spell trouble for architecture practices Architects beware: reporting to the CFO could hinder your success The solution architecture conundrum The new CIO: boom or bust for architecture Thought time for an architect shouldn’t be undervalued Becoming TOGAF certified doesn’t make you an architect