Following a successful run in 2014, it has been updated with the latest data from the Ministy of Social Development's Household Incomes Report. This report is New Zealand's most important source of data on inequality, hardship and poverty. Crucially, it produces data for after-tax incomes and then adjusts them for household size to provide a true picture of people's disposable income, and therefore their standard of living.

The visualisation uses data from the report to estimate how much better or worse off people in different deciles (tenths of the population) would be if income growth had been evenly distributed between 1982 and 2016, the period covered by the report.

The re-launch of the Calculator is a collaboration between data journalist Keith Ng and academics Emily Beausoleil and Max Rashbrooke, and is designed to situate people in the income spectrum and examine their responses to learning their position. The New Zealand Herald is not collecting any data that readers enter as part of the interactive visualisation. The only people privy to the raw data from the calculator and survey will be Emily Beausoleil of Massey University and Max Rashbrooke of Victoria University. The Herald will have no access to this data.