Simplicity KiwiSaver Review: Low-Fee Ethical Investing That Compounds in Your Favour

Most KiwiSaver providers charge you fees and pocket the profit. Simplicity takes your fees, runs the lowest-cost operation in the country, and gives 15% of what it collects to New Zealand charities — over NZ$14 million donated so far. That is not a marketing claim. It is a structural feature of how the organisation is set up.

Simplicity is a non-profit trust. There are no shareholders demanding dividends. There is no parent company extracting value from the fee pool. Any surplus the organisation generates goes into reducing member fees further. The organisation now manages over NZ$11 billion on behalf of more than 190,000 members.

That structure changes the entire conversation about whether to choose them. With most providers, the question is whether the performance justifies the fee. With Simplicity, the fee is so low that the question becomes: can anyone consistently beat this by enough to make their higher fee worthwhile.

The Fee: 0.24% Across Everything

Every Simplicity KiwiSaver fund — from Conservative to High Growth — charges the same annual management fee of 0.24%. There is no annual membership fee. No performance fee. No administration fee. Just 0.24% per year on your balance.

To put that in context: the average growth fund fee across the KiwiSaver industry is roughly 1.00%, based on current fund data. On a NZ$50,000 balance, Simplicity costs about NZ$120 a year. The average growth fund costs about NZ$500. The difference — roughly NZ$380 per year — stays in your account and compounds.

Over thirty years, that gap is worth over NZ$100,000 on a typical KiwiSaver balance. That is not a projection of returns. That is purely the compounding effect of not paying someone else one percent of your money every year.

The Investment Approach

Simplicity is a passive, index-based investor. They do not pick stocks. They do not time markets. They track broad global indices — with a New Zealand tilt — and let the market do what markets do over long periods.

The Growth Fund targets 80% growth assets — 59% international shares, roughly 12% New Zealand shares, and about 9% unlisted property — with the remaining 20% in bonds and cash. The High Growth Fund pushes that to 98% growth assets. The Balanced Fund sits at roughly 60% growth, 40% income.

Six fund types are available: High Growth, Growth, Balanced, Conservative, Defensive, and Cash — covering every risk profile from aggressive accumulation to near-retirement preservation.

Passive investing rests on a simple argument backed by decades of data: most active managers do not beat their benchmark after fees over ten to twenty year periods. The S&P SPIVA report, which tracks this globally, shows the same pattern year after year. A small number of active managers do beat the market consistently. Identifying them in advance is the hard part. Simplicity's approach sidesteps that problem entirely — you get the market return minus 0.24%, and that minus is smaller than what almost everyone else charges.

The Ethical Screen

All Simplicity funds are ethically screened using a negative screening approach. The Responsible Investment Policy excludes companies involved in fossil fuels, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, adult entertainment, weapons, and nuclear power. It also excludes companies that violate UN Global Compact principles on human rights, labour, environment, and anti-corruption.

This is not unique — all default KiwiSaver providers have been required since December 2021 to exclude fossil fuel production and illegal weapons, and to publish a responsible investment policy — but Simplicity applies the screen across all funds at the lowest cost of any provider offering ethical exclusions. A dedicated ethical provider like Pathfinder charges around 1.35% for a certified ethical fund. Simplicity charges 0.24% and covers similar ground on the exclusion side.

For someone who wants an ethical screen without paying a large premium for it, Simplicity is the most cost-effective option in the market.

What You Give Up

Simplicity is not trying to beat the market. In a bull market, your balance will go up with the market. In a bear market, it will go down with the market. There is no fund manager making defensive moves, rotating out of overvalued sectors, or identifying underpriced opportunities. The entire value proposition is cost minimisation.

That suits some people and frustrates others. Milford's Active Growth Fund returned 7.6% per annum over five years to March 2026, compared to Simplicity Growth at 7.0%. The outperformance is real — 0.6% per year — but Milford charges 1.03% to Simplicity's 0.24%. The net gap after fees is narrower than the headline performance figures suggest, and the question of whether Milford's outperformance continues is unknowable in advance.

Simplicity also offers home loans and investment funds under the same non-profit model. The investment funds carry the same 0.24% fee and the same ethical screen, making them a natural extension for anyone who has maxed out KiwiSaver contributions and wants to invest additional money outside the scheme.