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Capitals of the world

Wellington, capital of New Zealand: facts and figures

Updated 28 August 2026 · 3 min read · DailyGeo team

Key figures

Climate through the year

Wellington averages 11.0 °C in winter and 17.1 °C in summer. July is the coldest month of the year and January the warmest, and the city receives 1,029 mm of precipitation in an average year.

What makes it stand out

• Size: 2nd most populous capital in Oceania (420,000 residents).
• Elevation: lowest-lying capital in Oceania (3 m).
• Winter: 2nd coldest capital in Oceania (11.0 °C).
• Rainfall: 2nd driest capital in Oceania (1,029 mm).
• Latitude: southernmost capital in the world (41.29°).
• Wealth: 2nd capital of the richest country per head in Oceania ($49,591).
• Isolation: 3rd most isolated capital in the world (2,327 km).

Nearest capitals

Distances are great-circle distances between city centres, which is what the Capitals game measures when it tells you how far a guess was from the answer. Canberra is the closest capital to Wellington.

How to remember it

Reading a figure once rarely fixes it in memory. Attach Wellington to a place and a number you already know: it is 2,327 km from Canberra, and it is the 144th largest capital in the atlas. Then practise retrieving it. DailyGeo Capitals gives you one mystery capital a day with distance, direction, language and population clues, the memorising method explains the review schedule, and the capitals index lists all 172.

To see how New Zealand compares with every other country on figures like these, the most expensive Big Mac index ranks them on geopolitix, a country-ranking game by the same maker as DailyGeo.

Sources

• City population and coordinates: DailyGeo's own game data, the same figures the Capitals game plays with. Population follows the urban area rather than the commune, which is why no density is quoted.
• Temperature and rainfall: ten-year means (2015 to 2024) computed from ERA5 reanalysis, retrieved through Open-Meteo. Hersbach, H., et al. (2020). The ERA5 global reanalysis. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.
• Elevation: terrain height at the city's coordinates in the Copernicus DEM, read through Open-Meteo rather than taken from a curated claim.
• Time zone: resolved from the same coordinates.
• Country figures: the World Bank, latest reported year for each series: Country GDP, GDP per capita, Country population, Life expectancy, Internet users.
• Big Mac price: The Economist's Big Mac index, from its published dataset. The index covers about 55 economies, so most capitals here have no figure.
• Founding date: Wikidata, earliest recorded founding claim.
• This capital elsewhere: Wikipedia, UNdata, Wikidata.
• Method and limits: How this data was collected explains how each figure was collected and what it does not cover.

The short answer

Keep learning

• Canberra, capital of Australia: facts and figures

  Canberra is the capital of Australia: 460,000 residents, 574 m above sea level, 6.0 °C in winter and 19.8 °C in summer. Key figures and sources.

• Suva, capital of Fiji: facts and figures

  Suva is the capital of Fiji: 180,000 residents, 44 m above sea level, 23.1 °C from June to August and 25.9 °C from December to February. Key figures and sources.

• Port Vila, capital of Vanuatu: facts and figures

  Port Vila is the capital of Vanuatu: 50,000 residents, 42 m above sea level, 23.3 °C from June to August and 26.2 °C from December to February. Key figures and sources.

• Capitals of the world: the full list by continent

  Every capital in DailyGeo's atlas, grouped by continent, with population, elevation and winter and summer temperatures, each linking to its own data page.