Three-quarters of New Zealanders share Māui’s fish island
New Zealand’s North Island covers 113,729 square kilometres—43 percent of the country—yet held about 4,067,400 people in June 2025, some 76 percent of all residents. Cook Strait parts it from the larger, emptier South Island. Māori tradition knows the landmass as Māui’s great fish.
At 113,729 square kilometres it is the fourteenth-largest island on Earth and the most populous in Polynesia. Twelve main urban areas string down it from Whangārei and Auckland through Hamilton, Tauranga, Rotorua and Napier to Wellington, the capital, perched on the southwestern tip. The Golden Triangle bounded by Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga alone holds nearly half the national population and a similar share of economic output, and in 2021 the island generated about NZ$282 billion, 78 percent of the country's GDP. Auckland Airport, the busiest in New Zealand, handled 18.9 million passengers in 2025.
Te Ika-a-Māui means 'the fish of Māui'. In the legend the demigod hauled a giant fish from the sea while fishing from his canoe, the South Island, and his quarrelling brothers hacked at it, carving the mountains and valleys. Cook recorded another name, Te Ahi no Māui, meaning Māui's fire, in 1770; nineteenth-century maps called it New Ulster, and Aotearoa once meant this island before it came to stand for the whole country. Only in 2009 did the Geographic Board notice it had no official name at all, and in October 2013 it made North Island and Te Ika-a-Māui co-official.
In the last ice age, with seas more than 100 metres lower, a broad plain at the South Taranaki Bight joined the two main islands, and Northland was subtropical rainforest; rising water began splitting them about 7,000 years ago.
The 2023 census counted 3,808,005 people, up 17.6 percent in a decade, of whom 19.8 percent identified as Māori and 19.3 percent as Asian. Māori are the majority in Kawerau, Ōpōtiki and Wairoa. Since the Otago gold rush ended in the 1860s population has drifted north, though since the late 1980s more New Zealanders have moved south than north.
Source: North Island
