Working holiday visa New Zealand. Every rule in one place

Last updated 1 August 2026. This is general information, not immigration or tax advice. Visa rules were checked against Immigration New Zealand’s scheme pages on that date. Always confirm on immigration.govt.nz before applying.

How the scheme works

A working holiday visa lets you live in New Zealand, work for any employer, and travel, with the holiday officially the main purpose and the work funding it. New Zealand runs the scheme with 45 countries, from the giant uncapped arrangements with the UK, Germany, France, Japan and the USA down to 50-place quotas for Malta and Luxembourg. The system is genuinely accessible. Immigration New Zealand decided nearly 50,000 working holiday applications in 2024 and approved 97 per cent of them, per its own published statistics, and most applications are processed within two weeks.

The rules are scattered across 45 separate pages on immigration.govt.nz, one per country, plus separate pages for medical rules, fees and extensions. This guide pulls all of it into one place, along with the practical layer the official pages skip: tax, banking, healthcare and cars. It reflects the scheme pages as at 1 August 2026, and the caps and dates below are for the 2026 scheme year. One rule frames everything else: you get one New Zealand working holiday visa per lifetime, even if you never travel on it, so the decisions about timing and length are worth making carefully.

Every country’s deal in two tables

The default deal, unless the tables say otherwise, is age 18 to 30 at application, a 12-month visa, NZ$4,200 in available funds plus an onward ticket or the money for one, full medical insurance for the stay, and a fee of NZ$770. Everything unusual is in the differences column, and an empty cell means the default applies.

Uncapped schemes, open year round. Checked against Immigration New Zealand 1 August 2026

Country	Differences from the default
Belgium
Canada	Age to 35. Choice of 12 or 23 months
Denmark
Finland	Age to 35
France
Germany
Ireland	No insurance requirement on the scheme page
Italy
Japan
Netherlands
Norway
Sweden
USA

Capped schemes with 2026 places and scheduled openings. Checked 1 August 2026. Capped schemes close when full, so check the scheme page for live status

Country	2026 places	Differences from the default
United Kingdom	15,000, rarely fills	Age to 35. Choice of 12, 23 or 36 months. Funds $350 per month of stay. No insurance requirement on the scheme page
South Korea	3,000
Spain	2,000
Czech Republic	1,200	Age to 35
Malaysia	1,150	6 months. Funds $2,250. Insurance recommended, not required
Argentina	1,000, opens 24 Sep	Age to 35
China	1,000	Must be living in China when applying, with senior high school qualification and English
Chile	940, opens 15 Oct	Age to 35
Taiwan	600
Hong Kong	400
Brazil	300, opens 8 Oct
Singapore	300	Work Exchange Programme, 6 months, funds $2,250
Israel	200
Mexico	200
Uruguay	200, opens 17 Nov	Age to 35
Vietnam	200, opens 3 Nov
Austria	100	6 months. Funds $2,250
Croatia	100, opens 10 Sep
Estonia	100
Hungary	100	Age to 35
Latvia	100
Lithuania	100, opens 19 Aug
Peru	100, opens 1 Oct
Philippines	100
Poland	100
Slovakia	100	Age to 35
Slovenia	100
Thailand	100, opens 5 Aug	Funds $7,000
Turkey	100, opens 27 Aug	Funds $7,000
Luxembourg	50
Malta	50, opens 12 Aug
Portugal	50

Australians are the visible absence from both tables: they do not need any visa to live and work in New Zealand, under the trans-Tasman arrangements. And a note on age: the limit applies when you apply, and your visa is then valid to activate for 12 months, so applying just inside the age limit works.

How capped schemes open and fill

Each capped scheme opens once a year on a date Immigration New Zealand publishes each January, at 10am New Zealand time, and runs first come first served until the places are gone. There is no ballot and no waiting list. When a scheme fills, it closes until the next year’s opening. The 2026 dates still ahead as this guide is published: Thailand on 5 August, Malta on 12 August, Lithuania on 19 August, Turkey on 27 August, Croatia on 10 September, Argentina on 24 September, Peru on 1 October, Brazil on 8 October, Chile on 15 October, Vietnam on 3 November and Uruguay on 17 November.

Practical mechanics for opening day: have a RealMe login and your immigration account created in advance, documents scanned, and be on the site at 10am New Zealand time, which is a different hour in your country than you think it is, so convert it carefully. The 100-place quotas are the ones that go fastest. And do not apply before the opening moment, because Immigration New Zealand states plainly that applications lodged before the scheme opens are deleted. The UK’s 15,000-place cap is the exception to the scramble, in practice it has not been filling, and the scheme has behaved like an uncapped one.

Costs and requirements

Every scheme page now quotes its cost as from NZ$770, which is the $670 application fee plus the $100 International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy, the pricing that took effect in October 2024. If you see references to a $420 fee, you are reading an old article. The fee is paid on application and the levy portion is not refunded if you are declined.

Beyond age and the fee, the standard requirements are consistent across schemes. You need NZ$4,200 available, shown by bank statements, with the Thailand and Turkey schemes requiring $7,000, the six-month schemes $2,250, and the UK working on $350 per month of intended stay. You need a return or onward ticket, or enough money on top of your living funds to buy one. Most schemes require full medical insurance for the whole stay. You need a passport valid three months past your planned departure, and no accompanying children. A partner can come, but on their own visa.

Health screening depends on your history and length of stay. A chest X-ray is required if you have spent more than three months in the past five years in a country outside Immigration New Zealand’s low-TB-incidence list, and a full medical joins it if your total intended stay exceeds 12 months, which catches the UK 23 and 36-month options and Canada’s 23 months. Police certificates become mandatory at 24 months and can be requested at any length. The evidence has to reach Immigration New Zealand within 15 days of applying, so have the X-ray arranged before opening day, not after.

What the visa lets you do

The visa is multiple entry and lets you work for any employer, in any legal job, anywhere in the country, with no job offer needed. The old restriction limiting how long you could stay with one employer has disappeared from the current scheme pages, and several capped schemes now state outright that you can work for one employer the full 12 months. You can also study or train for up to six months in total. What has never been allowed is taking a permanent job, and the visa’s purpose clause expects the holiday to come first.

The big recent change is about working for yourself. From 20 April 2026, Immigration New Zealand attached explicit employment conditions to all open work visas, and working holiday visas fall in the category that must work for an employer, under an employment agreement or a contract for services, which Immigration New Zealand counts as employment. What that ends is genuine self-employment: sole trading, freelancing for your own clients, and owning or operating a business are no longer permitted on a working holiday visa, and on any open work visa you cannot employ other people. Anyone who was already doing now-barred work when the change landed can continue until their current visa expires. The details are in Immigration New Zealand’s announcement. Older blog guides still telling backpackers they can freelance on the visa are describing the pre-April rules.

One border trap deserves bold text. When you fill in the New Zealand Traveller Declaration on the way in, declare that you hold a temporary entry class visa. Ticking the visa-waiver visitor option instead risks being processed at the border as a visitor rather than activating your working holiday visa, and since you only ever get one, that is not a checkbox to get wrong.

Extensions and what comes next

There is exactly one extension available to everyone: the Working Holidaymaker Extension Work Visa, which adds three months on the same conditions and costs from $800. To qualify you must have done at least three months of seasonal work in horticulture or viticulture, planting, maintaining, harvesting or packing crops. The work does not need to be continuous or for one employer, and you prove it with employer letters, payslips and tax records, but nursery work and food processing do not count, and you can only get the extension once.

UK and Canadian visa holders have a second door. If you took a 12-month visa and want the rest of your entitlement, up to 36 months total for the UK and 23 for Canada, you apply for the balance with a paper form, INZ 1223, posted rather than lodged online, with the same funds evidence and any medical certificates not previously supplied. Beyond that, staying in New Zealand means a real work visa, most commonly the Accredited Employer Work Visa with a job offer from an accredited employer, or a partnership visa if life has taken that turn. Lodging a new application before the working holiday visa expires puts you on an interim visa while it is decided.

Your first week. IRD numbers, banks and addresses

You cannot be paid properly without an IRD number, the New Zealand tax number, and you cannot easily get one without a New Zealand address, and you cannot always get a bank account without an address either. This circular problem structures your first week, and the order that works is: get a local SIM, settle somewhere with an address that will vouch for you, then IRD, then bank.

• SIM or eSIM at the airport or any mall. Around $30 buys a starter plan from Spark, One NZ or 2degrees, and every later step wants a New Zealand mobile number.
• An address. A hostel where you are staying a week or two will usually provide a letter confirming you are resident there, and that letter is the key that opens the next two doors.
• IRD number online. Use Inland Revenue’s new-arrival route, which verifies your identity against your visa, needs your passport details and Immigration New Zealand application number, and typically returns your number by text or email within two working days. Do it soon after arriving, since the streamlined route is for new arrivals.
• Bank account. Requirements differ by bank and change often, but all want your passport, visa and a New Zealand address document, and some let you open from overseas and verify identity at a branch after you land. Ask your hostel which local branch handles backpackers, because they always know.
• Jobs. Seek and TradeMe Jobs for city work, PickNZ for the harvest trail, hostel noticeboards for everything else.

One thing not to do in week one: do not join KiwiSaver, the retirement savings scheme, because temporary visa holders are not eligible. Tell your employer you are on a temporary visa when you fill in the forms. If a payroll system auto-enrols you anyway, contact Inland Revenue and have the enrolment reversed and the money returned, which is a correction, not the standard opt-out process.

The tax you will actually pay

New Zealand taxes wages through PAYE, deducted by the employer each payday, and there is no special backpacker rate, so you pay what residents pay. The brackets, unchanged for the 2026 to 2027 year: 10.5 per cent up to $15,600, then 17.5 per cent to $53,500, then 30 per cent to $78,100, with higher rates beyond that territory than most working holidaymakers will visit. Your main job uses tax code M. A second concurrent job uses a secondary code, which takes more tax during the year but washes out at the automatic year-end assessment.

Spend more than 183 days in New Zealand in any 12 months and you become a tax resident, backdated to your first day. For a working holidaymaker with no other income that mostly changes nothing day to day. Inland Revenue runs an automatic assessment after the tax year ends on 31 March and refunds over-deducted PAYE, and if you leave permanently before then you can file an early return instead of waiting. To see what any wage actually pays after tax, our PAYE calculator does the arithmetic with current rates.

Work rights and the jobs themselves

Employment law protects you exactly as it protects a New Zealander. The adult minimum wage has been $23.95 an hour since 1 April 2026, per Employment New Zealand, and piece rates in picking work must still average at least minimum wage for the hours worked. You must get a written employment agreement before you start. Casual and short fixed-term workers are commonly paid holiday pay as an extra 8 per cent of gross earnings, which is lawful only when it is itemised on your payslip, so check that line exists. New Zealand replaced its leave law in July 2026, but the new Employment Leave Act does not take effect for roughly two years, so the current rules are the ones your payslip should follow; our coverage of the change has the detail.

Two local realities to know. Employers can lawfully include a 90-day trial period in your agreement, during which dismissal is hard to challenge, and it must be agreed in writing before you start work. And if a job feels unsafe or wages arrive short, the protections and complaint routes in our guides to unsafe work and unfair dismissal apply to you regardless of visa.

Where the jobs are follows the seasons. Bay of Plenty kiwifruit picking and packing runs roughly April to August with thinning work in spring. Central Otago cherries peak November to January. Hawke’s Bay and Nelson apples run February to May, and the wine vintage sweeps the country February to April. Queenstown hospitality hires year-round with a winter surge for the June to September ski season. The official seasonal jobs board is PickNZ, and three months in the orchards or vineyards is also the ticket to the visa extension described above.

Healthcare, ACC and insurance

Here is the part almost every backpacker learns the hard way, so learn it here instead. A standard 12-month working holiday visa does not qualify you for New Zealand’s public health system. Eligibility requires a visa allowing two years or more, so if you get sick, the GP visit, the prescription and the hospital bill are private, at unsubsidised rates. The interesting exception is the UK’s 36-month option, which crosses the two-year line and qualifies. UK citizens also have a reciprocal agreement covering treatment that needs prompt attention for conditions arising after arrival, on the same basis as a New Zealander, though it does not let you enrol with a GP practice.

Accidents are different, and this is New Zealand’s famous exception. ACC covers everyone in the country, visitors included, for injuries by accident. Break a leg on a trail or come off a bike and treatment and rehabilitation while in New Zealand are covered regardless of fault, and in exchange you cannot sue for compensation for the injury itself. ACC is precisely why most schemes still require insurance: it does not cover illness, it does not fly you home, and it stops at the border. Comprehensive travel or medical insurance for the whole stay is a visa condition on most schemes and plain good sense on all of them, and Immigration New Zealand can ask to see it when you arrive.

Driving and buying a car

Your overseas licence works in New Zealand, but the clock on it is changing exactly when 2026 arrivals will care. Arrive before 1 November 2026 and you can drive for 18 months from arrival; arrive from that date and you get 12 months, which is shorter than a UK or Canadian visa and shorter than a 12-month visa plus the seasonal extension. If your plans run past the window, converting to a New Zealand licence is straightforward for most nationalities, with the practical test waived for experienced drivers from a schedule of countries. The rules, the fines and the roads themselves, which are more demanding than most new arrivals expect, are covered in our driving guide, along with the FAQ on exactly this licence transition.

Buying a cheap car or van is a working holiday tradition and legally simple. When you buy, you file a notice of acquisition with the transport agency online, the seller files theirs, and the vehicle needs a current warrant of fitness and registration. Vehicle insurance is not legally compulsory in New Zealand, but third-party cover is cheap and protects you from the one bill that can end a trip, damage to someone else’s nicer car. If you go the campervan route and plan to sleep in it, the June 2026 self-containment rules decide where that is legal, and our freedom camping guide covers them, including the register where you can check any vehicle before buying it. For flatting instead, the bond and flatmate rules are in our bond refund and flatmate rights guides.

Frequently asked questions

Who can get a New Zealand working holiday visa

Citizens of the 45 scheme countries, aged 18 to 30 at application for most, and 18 to 35 for the UK, Canada, Argentina, Chile, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia and Uruguay. You need the funds for your scheme, an onward ticket or the money for one, insurance for most schemes, and you must not have held a New Zealand working holiday visa before. Approval rates run at 97 to 98 per cent.

How much does the New Zealand working holiday visa cost

From NZ$770, which is the $670 application fee plus the $100 International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy, at the pricing in force since October 2024. The seasonal-work extension visa costs from $800. Apply only through immigration.govt.nz, since third-party sites charge more for the same application.

How long can I stay on a working holiday visa

12 months for most nationalities. Canadians can choose 23 months, Britons 12, 23 or 36 months, and the Austria, Malaysia and Singapore schemes run six months. Anyone can add three months by doing three months of seasonal horticulture or vineyard work. The visa must be activated within 12 months of being granted.

Can I extend a New Zealand working holiday visa

Once, by three months, if you complete at least three months of seasonal horticulture or viticulture work such as picking, pruning or packing crops. Nursery and food processing work do not count. UK and Canadian holders can separately apply for the unused balance of their longer entitlements using paper form INZ 1223. Beyond that, staying means a different visa, most commonly the Accredited Employer Work Visa.

Can I freelance or be self-employed on a working holiday visa

No. Since 20 April 2026 working holiday visas require you to work for an employer, under an employment agreement or a contract for services. Sole trading, freelancing for your own clients and running a business are not permitted, and no open work visa lets you employ others. Anyone already doing such work before the change can continue until their current visa expires.

Do working holidaymakers pay tax in New Zealand

Yes, standard PAYE at the same rates as residents, starting at 10.5 per cent and reaching 17.5 per cent above $15,600. You need an IRD number, applied for online in about two days through the new-arrival route. Do not join KiwiSaver, as temporary visa holders are not eligible, and over-deducted tax comes back through the automatic year-end assessment or an early return when you leave.

Can I use New Zealand’s public health system on a working holiday visa

Generally no. Public healthcare requires a visa allowing a stay of two years or more, so a 12-month visa means paying privately for illness, which is why insurance is required by most schemes. The 36-month UK option does qualify, UK citizens have reciprocal cover for conditions needing prompt attention, and ACC covers accident injuries for everyone regardless of visa.

Can I drive for my whole working holiday

On your overseas licence, only within the time window: 18 months from arrival if you land before 1 November 2026, and 12 months if you land on or after that date. A UK 36-month visa, a Canadian 23-month visa or a 12-month visa plus extension can outlast the window, in which case convert to a New Zealand licence while your overseas one is still recognised. The practical test is waived for experienced drivers from most Western countries.

When do the 2027 scheme dates come out

Immigration New Zealand publishes the full year’s opening dates for capped schemes in its news centre each January. The remaining 2026 openings are listed in the table above, and once a capped scheme fills its 2026 places it stays closed until its 2027 opening date. Uncapped schemes, including Germany, France, Japan and the USA, accept applications year-round.