It was not until the 1990s that highly populated regions such as Wellington and Auckland (especially the suburbs of Henderson and Mount Roskill) began to see exponential growth in their respective Filipino communities.
In April 2008, New Zealand's embassy indicated that they would like to increase the intake of nurses and engineers from the Philippines.
[3] In 2013 the Census recorded 40,350 people, or 1.0 percent of the population, Filipino New Zealanders.
Some of the increase between the 2013 and 2018 census was due to Statistics New Zealand adding ethnicity data from other sources (previous censuses, administrative data, and imputation) to the 2018 census data to reduce the number of non-responses.
The Kaipātiki local board area of Auckland had the highest concentration of Filipino people at 5.4%, followed by the Maungakiekie-Tāmaki local board area (3.9%) and the Ashburton District (3.8%).