IRD Number and Tax for Backpackers in New Zealand
An IRD number is your New Zealand tax number, it is free, and you need one before your first payday. Without an IRD number and a completed tax code declaration your employer must deduct 45 percent of your pay instead of the roughly 17 percent you actually owe. Apply once you have arrived and opened a New Zealand bank account; Inland Revenue aims to process applications in 8 to 10 working days.
This is the least interesting page on this site and the one that will save you the most money. A traveller who starts a kiwifruit season without an IRD number loses roughly NZD 270 a week to the no-notification rate, and getting it back means filing paperwork from the other side of the world months later. Twenty minutes now, or a small fortune and an argument with a foreign tax authority later.
What an IRD number is
It is an eight or nine digit number that identifies you to Inland Revenue, New Zealand's tax department. Every person who earns money here needs one. It is free, it is yours for life, and if you come back to New Zealand in ten years you use the same number again.
Nobody should ever charge you for one. There are services that will submit the application on your behalf for a fee; they are doing something you can do yourself in under half an hour, and their existence is the reason this paragraph is here.
How to get one
The order matters, because the application asks for things you will not have on day one.
- Arrive and have your visa approved. The application wants your visa details.
- Open a New Zealand bank account. This is the step people skip and then get stuck on. Applicants who are not New Zealand residents need either a fully functioning New Zealand bank account or a customer due diligence form completed by a New Zealand reporting entity. Take your passport, your visa and an address to a branch in your first week.
- Apply online through the Inland Revenue website. The route for someone who has just landed is the "new arrival to New Zealand" application. You will upload identification, your visa and your bank account details.
- Wait 8 to 10 working days. That is Inland Revenue's target for processing. Asking for it by post adds up to another 20 working days, so take it electronically.
- Give the number to your employer along with a completed IR330 tax code declaration.
You can apply from overseas before you travel, but the bank account requirement makes it awkward, and most travellers find it simpler to do the whole thing in their first week in the country. Either way, do not wait until you have a job offer. Apply the week you land, so the number is in hand before the first shift.
Choosing a tax code
The IR330 asks you to pick a code, and the code tells your employer how much to deduct. Most backpackers need one letter.
- M — your main or highest-earning job. This is the right answer for the overwhelming majority of travellers with one job at a time. It assumes you have no New Zealand student loan and are not entitled to Working for Families or a New Zealand pension.
- SB, S, SH, ST — secondary tax codes, for a second or third job held at the same time. Which one depends on your total expected annual income across all jobs. Inland Revenue publishes a short questionnaire that picks it for you.
- No code at all — the no-notification rate of 45 percent. This is not a code you choose; it is what happens when the form is missing.
If you hold two jobs simultaneously, which is common in Queenstown in summer, use M for the bigger one and the correct secondary code for the other. Using M twice underpays tax during the year and produces a bill at the end of it.
What you will actually pay
New Zealand has no tax-free threshold. Tax starts at the first dollar, at these rates for the 2026-27 year:
| Taxable income | Rate |
|---|---|
| Up to NZD 15,600 | 10.5% |
| NZD 15,601 to 53,500 | 17.5% |
| NZD 53,501 to 78,100 | 30% |
| NZD 78,101 to 180,000 | 33% |
| Over NZD 180,000 | 39% |
On top of income tax sits the ACC earner's levy, which funds the no-fault accident compensation scheme and rose to 1.75 percent of liable earnings from 1 April 2026. It is worth understanding what you are buying: ACC covers your treatment and a portion of your income if you injure yourself, including injuries at work, and including injuries while snowboarding on your day off. For a traveller doing physical seasonal work, that is not a bad 1.75 percent.
Put together, a full-time worker on the adult minimum wage of NZD 23.95 an hour loses about 17 percent of gross pay to PAYE and ACC combined. The full arithmetic, week by week, is in how much backpackers earn in New Zealand.
What will not come out of your pay
KiwiSaver. The retirement savings scheme is open only to citizens and people entitled to live in New Zealand indefinitely, so working holiday visa holders are not eligible and must not be auto-enrolled. If a payroll system has enrolled you anyway, tell them: those are your wages.
The tax year, and the refund at the end of it
The New Zealand tax year runs from 1 April to 31 March, which catches out everyone whose home country uses January or July. After the year ends, Inland Revenue issues most wage earners an automatic income tax assessment: it already has your PAYE data from your employers and works out whether you paid too much or too little.
Backpackers frequently paid too much, for a specific and predictable reason. PAYE is deducted as though your current weekly earnings will continue all year. Work hard for four months of harvest and then travel for six, and you will have been taxed as if you earned a full-time annual income when you actually earned a third of one. That gap comes back to you.
Two things you must do to receive it. Keep your myIR account live and check it after 31 March, and make sure Inland Revenue has bank account details it can pay into. A refund cannot be paid to an account you closed on your way to the airport, so if you are leaving mid-year, either keep the New Zealand account open until your assessment arrives or give Inland Revenue an overseas account and updated contact details before you go.
Resident or non-resident
You become a New Zealand tax resident if you are present here for more than 183 days in any 12-month period, counting part days. A traveller on a 12-month working holiday visa who actually stays the year is therefore normally a tax resident, taxed at the ordinary rates above. Somebody who comes for a three-month cherry season is not. It rarely changes what comes out of a weekly payslip, but it does change what you may need to declare at home, and it is the one part of this that is genuinely worth asking an accountant about if your home country taxes worldwide income.
The part that is not good
The system is efficient and it is also unforgiving of admin. Nobody chases you to fix a wrong tax code, no employer is obliged to notice that you have been on the 45 percent rate for two months, and the money is not returned automatically the moment the error is corrected — you wait for the end-of-year assessment, which may be eight months away. New Zealand's tax administration is genuinely one of the easier ones in the world to deal with, but only if you deal with it on day one. Left alone, it quietly costs you the price of a flight home.
Before your first shift
The full checklist of what has to be in place before a New Zealand employer can put you on the payroll — visa, IRD number, bank account, written agreement — is set out in our overview of backpacker jobs in New Zealand. If the visa itself is still open, start with how the working holiday visa works. And if an employer has offered you a bed instead of a payslip, read work for accommodation in New Zealand before you agree to anything.
With the paperwork sorted, search current listings and set an alert for the region you are heading to.
