The average Google star rating for a ranked NZ service business is 4.86. That number is so consistent across industries, and so close to five, that it has stopped meaning much. The more revealing number is the 1-star rate: the proportion of reviews that are outright complaints, measured here across 3,269 businesses and more than 376,000 reviews.
Some industries absorb far more complaints than others
Family lawyers attract 1-star reviews at an average rate of 6.24%, nineteen times the rate of mortgage brokers (0.33%) and twelve times the rate of graphic designers (0.50%). Legal services as a whole now top the sector table at 3.84%, ahead of automotive at 3.21%. When we first ran this analysis in April, automotive led and the widest gap was sevenfold; two months of accumulated data and 16 additional categories have stretched it to nineteen.
Family lawyers attract 1-star reviews at 19x the rate of mortgage brokers, yet both display ratings above 4.6 stars.
The spread by individual category:
| Category | Avg 1-star rate | Avg rating | Avg reviews | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Family lawyers | 6.24% | 4.65 | 76 | |
| Employment lawyers | 5.76% | 4.68 | 67 | |
| Appliance repair | 4.79% | 4.70 | 112 | |
| Auto electricians | 4.39% | 4.71 | 112 | |
| Property managers | 4.35% | 4.77 | 294 | |
| Mechanics | 3.09% | 4.80 | 249 | |
| Electricians | 1.10% | 4.92 | 151 | |
| Insurance brokers | 0.77% | 4.95 | 133 | |
| Graphic designers | 0.50% | 4.97 | 33 | |
| Mortgage brokers | 0.33% | 4.98 | 316 | |
For legal services the likeliest explanation is adversarial outcomes: a client who lost a custody case or an employment dispute has both motive and time to leave a review, and family and employment lawyers now hold the top two complaint rates in the country. For automotive trades, the pattern probably reflects the nature of the work: complex diagnosis, disputed liability, customers who feel charged for a problem that wasn't resolved. Property management is a different case: managers are reviewed by landlords and tenants simultaneously, and that relationship is likely more contentious than the ones most service categories deal with.
The star rating hides all of this
The headline star rating barely moves across these categories.
Family lawyers, the most complained-about category in the country, still average 4.65 stars. Mortgage brokers average 4.98. The difference between the category with the highest complaint rate and the cleanest is a third of a star, a gap most people would not notice or act on.
A business with a 5 to 10% 1-star rate still averages 4.62 stars in the businesses analysed. Roughly one in six ranked NZ service businesses has a complaint rate above 5%, and seven in ten of those still display a rating of 4.5 or better.
A business with a 5 to 10% complaint rate still averages 4.62 stars. The star rating measures sentiment share, not complaint frequency.
The reason is volume. A business with 300 reviews absorbs 15 unhappy customers and still shows 4.7 stars. At that volume individual complaints disappear into the average.
For legal, automotive, and property management services, the star rating tells you almost nothing about how often things go wrong.
The city picture is more complicated than it looks
Dunedin businesses average a 2.58% 1-star rate across all categories, the highest of the seven markets analysed. Hamilton follows at 2.30%. Christchurch (2.01%) and Wellington (2.06%) run cleanest among the main centres.
| City | Avg 1-star rate | Avg reviews per business | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dunedin | 2.58% | 73 | |
| Hamilton | 2.30% | 109 | |
| Auckland | 2.16% | 213 | |
| Tauranga | 2.13% | 78 | |
| Wellington | 2.06% | 103 | |
| Christchurch | 2.01% | 135 | |
| Napier/Hastings | 1.91% | 78 | |
In April we attributed the small-city gap to review volume: fewer reviews per business means a single unhappy customer moves the rate further. That explanation now has a counterexample. Napier and Hastings, new to the analysis, has the second-fewest reviews per business, level with Tauranga and behind only Dunedin, yet the lowest complaint rate in the country. Volume still buffers the big-city numbers (Auckland's businesses carry nearly three times the reviews of Dunedin's), but it cannot be the whole story. Dunedin's higher complaint rate persists across most categories, including the well-reviewed ones.
What to look at instead
The rating distribution (the breakdown of 1-star through 5-star counts) carries more information than the average for high-stakes categories. A business with 400 reviews and 30 of them at 1-star is showing something a 4.7-star average does not.
For legal, automotive, and property management, the three sectors where complaint rates are structurally higher, the distribution is worth checking before committing.
Two things limit these figures. The rate is an average of per-business rates, so a business with three reviews and one complaint counts as 33% and weighs the same as one with 300 reviews. And only businesses rated 3.5 or above at the time of indexing are in the data, so the worst-reviewed operators in every category are not counted at all.
Methodology: Top5.nz analysed 3,269 ranked businesses and 376,534 reviews across Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton, Tauranga, Napier/Hastings, and Dunedin using Google review data as of July 2026. The analysis covers the consumer-visible tiers (the top 10 businesses per category and city). Businesses were included only if they had a minimum of three reviews and a rating of 3.5 stars or above at the time of indexing (the floor rose to 4.0 in May 2026, so snapshots crawled after that apply the higher bar). Sub-location contexts (North Shore, South Auckland, West Auckland) and national aggregates were excluded to avoid counting the same business more than once. 1-star rate is calculated as the proportion of 1-star reviews to total reviews using rating distribution data, averaged per business within each category. Analysis covers 51 service categories across 7 markets. This article updates an April 2026 analysis of 1,769 businesses across 35 categories using the same method. Full ranking methodology: top5.nz/how-we-rank.