Editorial policy

How we verify facts

Every substantive claim on this site — every fee, threshold, age limit, quota, processing time and eligibility rule — traces back to a primary source. In order of preference:

1. Immigration New Zealand's published pages and fee schedules at immigration.govt.nz.
2. The INZ Operational Manual, which contains the actual text of immigration instructions. Where a public-facing page and the Operational Manual differ in detail, the Manual is the rule.
3. New Zealand legislation — principally the Immigration Act 2009 and the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act 2007.
4. Official government announcements for changes that have been announced but have not yet taken effect.

Third-party sites are never a source for a fact on this site. They are occasionally useful for finding out that a change happened; they are never the evidence that it did.

What we do when we cannot verify something

We write around it, and we say so. A page that admits it does not know the current figure is more useful than a page that guesses one confidently. You will see phrasing like “INZ does not publish this figure directly” or “confirm the current amount before you pay” — that language is deliberate and it means exactly what it says.

We specifically do not: infer a fee by arithmetic and present it as published; carry forward a figure from an older version of a page without re-checking it; or repeat a number because several other sites agree on it.

Dates, and why they are at the top of every page

Immigration rules in New Zealand have changed substantially and repeatedly since 2024. A guide that was accurate when written can be wrong within months. So every page shows two dates before the article starts: when it was first published, and when it was last reviewed against the primary source.

“Last reviewed” means a person checked the facts on that date, not that the file was touched. We do not bump review dates to manufacture freshness.

Fees: why our numbers look different

Immigration New Zealand generally presents a visa fee as a single “from $X” figure. That figure usually bundles together an application fee, an immigration levy, and — for visitor categories — the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy.

Where we can source the components, we publish them separately as well as the total, because the components behave differently: some are refundable in circumstances where others are not, and some apply to travellers who are exempt from others. See our fees reference.

How our statistics are derived

The figures on our New Zealand immigration statistics page are not written into that page by hand. They are computed from our underlying datasets when the site is built, and a separate script independently re-derives every published figure from the source data and fails the build if any number on the page disagrees with it. That is deliberate: a statistics page exists to be quoted, and a figure that silently goes stale after a data update would be quoted long after it stopped being true.

Where Immigration New Zealand does not publish a value, we exclude it from the relevant average or count and state the real denominator in the statistic itself. We never estimate one, and we never fill a gap by interpolating between the values either side of it. Where a field is not verified well enough to publish at all, we say that on the page instead of quietly leaving the gap unexplained.

Those statistics are licensed CC BY 4.0 — free to republish with a link to that page as attribution. You do not need to ask us first.

The line between information and advice

New Zealand regulates immigration advice. Under the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act 2007, giving immigration advice without a licence is an offence; publishing general information about immigration is expressly exempt.

We stay on the information side of that line by rule, not by instinct:

• We explain what the published rules require. We do not assess whether a particular person meets them.
• We do not recommend a visa pathway to an individual, review documents, or advise on how to present a case.
• We describe what options exist after a decline. We do not advise which one someone should take.
• Where a reader plainly needs advice, we say so and point to the IAA register.

Corrections

When we find a material error — a wrong fee, an outdated rule, a mischaracterised requirement — we correct the page and update its review date. Where the error could have led a reader to act against their own interest, we note the correction on the page itself rather than quietly editing it.

If you have found an error, please tell us. Include the page and, if you have it, the official source that shows the correct position — that gets it fixed fastest.

Use of AI

We use AI tooling in research and drafting. It does not change the standard applied to what gets published: every fact on this site is checked against a primary source by a person before it goes live, and anything that cannot be verified that way does not get published as fact. We treat AI-generated claims exactly the way we treat third-party sites — as a lead to check, never as evidence.

Independence

We take no payment from immigration advisers, law firms, education agents or employers to appear, rank or be recommended on this site. We have no commercial relationship with Immigration New Zealand or any other government body. See about this site for how it is funded.