OBJECTIVES: To provide a sociodemographic profile of students enrolled in their first year of a health professional pre-registration programme offered within New Zealand (NZ) tertiary institutions. DESIGN: Observational, cross-sectional study. Data were sought from NZ tertiary education institutions for all eligible students accepted into the first 'professional' year of a health professional programme for the 5-year period 2016-2020 inclusive. VARIABLES OF INTEREST: gender, citizenship, ethnicity, rural classification, socioeconomic deprivation, school type and school socioeconomic scores. Analyses were carried out using the R statistics software. SETTING: Aotearoa NZ. PARTICIPANTS: All students (domestic and international) accepted into the first 'professional' year of a health professional programme leading to registration under the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003. RESULTS: NZ's health workforce pre-registration students do not reflect the diverse communities they will serve in several important dimensions. There is a systematic under-representation of students who identify as Maori and Pacific, and students who come from low socioeconomic and rural backgrounds. The enrolment rate for Maori students is about 99 per 100 000 eligible population and for some Pacific ethnic groups is lower still, compared with 152 per 100 000 for NZ European students. The unadjusted rate ratio for enrolment for both Maori students and Pacific students versus 'NZ European and Other' students is approximately 0.7. CONCLUSIONS: We recommend that: (1) there should be a nationally coordinated system for collecting and reporting on the sociodemographic characteristics of the health workforce pre-registration; (2) mechanisms be developed to allow the agencies that fund tertiary education to base their funding decisions directly on the projected health workforce needs of the health system and (3) tertiary education funding decisions be based on Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the foundational constitutional agreement between the Indigenous people, Maori and the British Crown signed in 1840) and have a strong pro-equity focus.