Effectiveness of MSD employment assistance 2024/2025

The annual Employment Assistance Effectiveness report summarises the Ministry’s evidence on the effectiveness of its employment assistance (EA) expenditure up to the end of the 2024/2025 financial year.

EA evidence catalogue

The EA evidence catalogue has information on 313 EA interventions and case management services operating from 1990. For detailed information on specific EA interventions, please visit the catalogue.

Effectiveness ratings

Effectiveness is based on whether the intervention improves participants outcomes relative to a comparison group. Outcomes include employment, income, justice, qualifications, and welfare. For interventions that we can evaluate, they are classified into one of the following categories:

• Effective: the intervention has significant positive overall impact on one or more outcome domain and no negative impacts for any other domain.
• Promising: impacts across outcome domains indicates the intervention is expected to have a significant positive overall impact over the medium to long term.
• Mixed: the intervention has both positive and negative impacts on different outcome domains (e.g. positive impact on income support payments, but a negative impact on overall income).
• Makes no difference: the intervention makes no significant difference on any outcome domain.
• Likely negative: based on the trend in intervention impacts we expect the intervention to have a long-term negative overall impact on one or more outcome domains.
• Negative: the intervention has a significantly negative overall impact for one or more outcome domain and no positive impacts for any other.

Not rated interventions fall into either:

• Too soon to rate: there has been insufficient time to judge whether the intervention is effective;
• Not feasible: it is currently not technically possible to evaluate the effectiveness the intervention using non-experimental evaluative methods.
• Not rated: we have not yet assessed the effectiveness of the intervention, applies to new interventions or where required information on who participates is not yet available for analysis.

Changes to reporting in 2024/2025

We have made several minor improvements to the way we structure our reporting to provide clearer information to users in the 2024/25 report, including:

• updating EA programme categories to better align with international standards and improve comparability and usability of reporting
• reporting EA spend by category type, to provide a clearer view of expenditure across the EA portfolio
• reporting EA spend by participants’ benefit type, allowing analysis of spend by benefit group and average spend per participant
• producing a standalone A3 summary report alongside the fuller EA annual report.

The changes made this year complement our existing reporting rather than replace it. The changes will not impact on MSD’s ability to report on effectiveness through our Annual Report performance measures or affect the overall assessment of effectiveness proportions (i.e. how much of the spend is rated as effective).

Key Findings

MSD spent $839 million on EA programmes in 2024/25, a slight decrease compared to the previous year ($842 million). 52.1 percent of the EA spend was rated for effectiveness, and of that, 91.5 percent ($400 million) was found to be effective, an increase from the previous year (90 percent, or $387 million, rated effective or promising). The proportion of EA spend that was feasible to evaluate was at a 12-year high of 65.5 percent.

Labour Market Services, and Employment Incentives were the two EA categories with the highest expenditure in 2024/25.

Four programmes have been newly evaluated, with two found to be ‘effective’ and two ‘promising’, and two previously evaluated programmes have updated findings that change their rating to ‘effective’.

Jobseeker Support – Work Ready clients received the largest proportion of EA spend, which is consistent with the Employment Investment Strategy 2025-2028 focus on supporting work-ready clients into employment

Findings can be further explored in the main EA report and the EA A3 summary report.

Technical documentation

For more detailed information on the data and methodology used in estimating the impact of EA interventions and how we rated each intervention’s overall effectiveness, please see the accompanying technical report.