The economy is gathering pace and the jobs market is looking good but debate remains on whether the unemployment rate will rise or fall.
Statistics New Zealand's Household Labour Force Survey for the December quarter is published on Wednesday.
The data will paint a picture of how unemployment, wage growth and jobs were shaping up in the final three months of 2013.
Despite signs that the overall economy is picking up, Westpac Bank is predicting only a modest 0.1 percent fall in the unemployment rate from 6.2 percent to 6.1 percent.
And while the bank believes the labour market will continue to improve, senior economist Michael Gordon says employees may have to put their pay rise hopes on hold.
He's picking wage growth in the December quarter to have actually slowed, but says that's not unusual during that stage of the cycle.
Mr Gordon says when employees start to see higher wages will depend on when they have more bargaining power to negotiate that.
He says it tends to be a drawn out process and there is still reasonably high unemployment at the moment with spare capacity in the labour market.
"It takes a good few years of the economy growing strongly to really soak up the excess labour and actually get to the point where employees have a bit more bargaining power and we really start to see some more substantial wage growth."
Mr Gordon says the fact that the labour market is still fairly loose will work against employees at the moment.
Wage growth and unemployment rate will rise - Tuffley
ASB chief economist Nick Tuffley has a different view. He thinks both wage growth and the unemployment rate will rise.
He says there are some strong net migration inflows with a lot of people returning from Australia and fewer people leaving which will lead to a growth in the number of people making themselves available for work.
Mr Tuffley says ASB's forecast has the unemployment rate rising slightly to 6.3 percent.
He says the migration figures of about 30,000 people each year is a strong inflow.
"When we're looking at the labour force, which would be the number of people who signal they're either in work or they're seeking work, we're expecting growth in that of about 16,000 people over the quarter."
Mr Tuffley says that's compared to about 13,000 who are expected to be in new jobs.
