The Northland Home & Lifestyle Show runs Friday 25 to Sunday 27 September 2026 at McKay Stadium, Whangārei, with 120-plus exhibiting companies confirmed by organiser NZME Events. It is the middle leg of a three-city circuit and one of the largest annual commercial occupancies of Sport Northland's 1,710sqm stadium floor.
The Northland Home & Lifestyle Show 2026 is a three-day consumer trade exhibition at McKay Stadium in Whangārei, running Friday 25 to Sunday 27 September 2026. The organiser's event page lists opening hours of 10am to 5pm on Friday and Saturday and 10am to 4pm on Sunday, and states the show is "returning for 2026 with 120+ companies" covering new builds, kitchens, bathrooms, heating and insulation, gardening and outdoors, furniture, homeware, and gourmet food and beverages. Official ticketing is handled by iTICKET, whose event page is badged "NZME Events presents" and confirms the same dates, hours and venue address at 97 Western Hills Drive.
The show is run by NZME Events, the events arm of NZME Publishing Ltd — the same company behind the NZ Herald and The Hits. The Home & Lifestyle Show website carries an NZME Publishing Ltd copyright line and links to NZME's privacy and terms pages.
Northland is one of three legs on the 2026 Home & Lifestyle Show circuit. The organiser's homepage lists Manawatū (held July, Fly Palmy Arena, next running July 2027), Northland (25-27 September, McKay Stadium) and Whanganui (17-18 October, Jubilee Stadium). The About page describes each event as featuring "between 100 and 250 companies". NZME Events also runs the Women's Lifestyle Expo, a separate two-day format staged across multiple regions. OneRoof and The Hits — both NZME properties — are listed as show partners.
The team has longer roots than the NZME branding suggests: the Northern Advocate has reported that the expo business was previously run as Peacock Promotions for around 20 years before NZME acquired it, and that it is operated out of Palmerston North.
This is a consumer-facing exhibition, not a delegate conference. The organiser pitches it at people "about to tackle a renovation, DIY project, new build or looking for some home décor inspiration", with the transaction framed around booking quotes, viewing house designs, comparing products and taking home samples.
The commercial audience is the exhibitor base: building companies, kitchen and bathroom suppliers, heating, insulation, solar, spas and pools, landscaping, furniture and homeware retailers, and food and beverage producers. The show office operates on site, a café and food stalls trade through the weekend, and children 12 and under enter free. The organiser advises allowing about two hours to browse the stands and says the exhibitor list will be published on the Northland page in early September.
McKay Stadium sits on Kensington Park at 97 Western Hills Drive, Kensington, Whangārei, and is operated by Sport Northland. Per Sport Northland's facility page, the stadium reopened in May 2002 and offers a floor area of 57m x 30m — 1,710 square metres — laid in European beech over a Junckers sub-floor, dividable by drop-down curtains so up to four user groups can work simultaneously.
Sport Northland publishes whole-stadium capacities of 800-1,000 banquet, 2,000 cocktail (fire-regulation maximum) and 1,500-1,700 theatre, with fixed seating for 600 to 1,700 people. The facility includes a courtside canteen, four changing rooms, a first aid room, indoor and outdoor public toilets, disabled access, and free sealed parking for 350 cars. Two adjoining lounges (182 square metres and 72 square metres) can be opened into one space seating 180 banquet, 250 cocktail or 200 theatre, with a 19 square metre meeting room for 10-12, a commercial kitchen, natural light, air conditioning and lift access.
On parking, the organiser advises that the venue car park is free, that street parking is within a few minutes' walk, and that alternative parking may be available around Trigg Arena and Park Avenue with a short walk through Kensington Park. Sport Northland explicitly markets the stadium for trade shows, concerts and exhibitions as well as sport, and lists the Northland Home Show among its past high-profile events alongside the Northland Forestry Awards, Te Tai Tokerau Māori Business Awards and the Northland Wedding and Event Expo.
Northland has no purpose-built convention or exhibition centre, so its exhibition economy runs on multi-use community sports infrastructure. McKay Stadium's 1,710 square metres is modest against Auckland or Christchurch exhibition halls, but it is a rare piece of contiguous, column-free, hard-standing floor in the region — and a three-day, 120-exhibitor occupancy is one of the larger commercial bookings a facility of this type will take in a year.
That matters in two directions. For the venue operator, an annual anchor event of this scale underwrites a facility whose core business is community sport, and the adjoining lounges give it a genuine, if small-scale, conference and seminar offer that the stadium's public profile helps sell. For the sector, the Home & Lifestyle Show is a working example of the regional circuit model: a single organiser amortising build, marketing and staffing across three provincial cities rather than chasing one metropolitan venue, which is how much of New Zealand's provincial exhibition activity is actually delivered.
The honest caveat is that this is a consumer expo with a trade exhibitor base, not a business-events programme. Its value to the sector is measured in venue utilisation, regional supplier exposure and weekend visitor spend rather than in delegate days.
Cited links supporting this report.
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A directory of event equipment and marquee hire companies in Whangārei and Northland — marquees, furniture, styling and party hire for events.
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