Guide · Money
Moving your money, and what it costs.
Getting your money here costs you in three or four places at once, and only one of them is called a fee. Carrying NZ$10,000 or more in cash means filling in a form at the border, which is a report and not a tax. There is a four-year tax exemption for people who have not been New Zealand tax residents in the previous ten years, and most arrivals have never heard of it. And the credit record you spent years building at home does not come with you. This guide puts published prices and official rules against each of those. It names no best provider and ranks nothing.
The short answer
Four things about money decide most of your first month here, and none of them is which app you use. What a transfer costs you. Whether you are carrying enough cash to have to report it. Whether you are a transitional tax resident. And the fact that you arrive with no credit history at all.
Everything below is either a published price with the date we read it, or a rule from the department that administers it. We do not say which service to use.
What a transfer costs
A transfer from your old country to a New Zealand account is priced in up to four places. Two of them are printed. Two are easy to miss.
| The cost | Who charges it | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Sending fee | The bank or service you send from | Published. ASB charges $5.00 online and $30.00 through an Advice Centre to send one out. |
| The exchange rate | Whoever converts the money | Not published as a fee. It is the gap between the rate you get and the rate the market is trading at. |
| Banks in the middle | Correspondent and intermediary banks | Published, and it varies by currency. On ASB's table, $5 for US dollars, $10 for Indian rupees, $20 for pounds or euros, $25 for yen or Singapore dollars. |
| Receiving fee | The New Zealand bank the money lands in | Published. ASB charges $15.00 on a payment it receives into an NZD account, waived at NZ$100 or less. ANZ charges $15, with nothing under NZ$300. |
The second row never appears on a receipt as a charge. A transfer advertised with no fee can still cost more overall, because the margin on the exchange rate is where the difference sits. The only way to see it is to compare what actually lands in the New Zealand account against what the amount you sent was worth at the market rate that day.
The third row is the one almost nobody is told about. Money moving between two countries often passes through a bank neither of you chose, and that bank takes its cut on the way past. ASB publishes the amount by currency, and their own wording is worth quoting: even when the sender has paid all the charges, “it is possible that the recipient may still have fees deducted from the amount that they receive”.
Non-bank transfer services are priced the same way, in the same four places. Their numbers are on their own sites, published the same as the two above.
Bringing cash: the NZ$10,000 report
New Zealand Customs requires a Border Cash Report from anyone carrying NZ$10,000 or more, or the equivalent in any currency, into or out of the country. It is a report. Declaring it costs nothing and there is no limit on the amount you can carry. But not declaring it is a criminal offence, and Customs lists fines, imprisonment and seizure of the cash among the consequences. The requirement sits under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009.
Two details catch people out.
- "Cash" is wider than notes. New Zealand Customs counts travellers cheques, cheques, money orders and postal orders, bearer bonds, bills of exchange and promissory notes toward the same threshold.
- Filling it in online does not finish it. The online form at bcr.customs.govt.nz can only be completed within 72 hours of the trip, and you still have to speak to a Customs officer when you arrive. There is a paper version, form NZCS 337, and if you have not filled anything in before passport control an officer will give you one.
Not declaring it is a criminal offence, and Customs lists fines, imprisonment and seizure of the cash among the consequences. That is the whole reason to know the number before you pack.
Four years of transitional tax residency
Most people arrive not knowing this exemption exists, and what it is worth depends entirely on a household's own income and assets. Inland Revenue's temporary tax exemption applies to a person who was not a New Zealand tax resident at any time in the 10 years before they qualified as one. IRD calls that person a transitional resident, and most of their foreign income is exempt from New Zealand tax for about four years.
Exempt, on Inland Revenue's list: overseas interest, dividends, foreign investment fund income, rent, and most other foreign-source income. Not exempt: income you earn overseas from a job or from providing personal services. Which category any particular income falls in is a question for a tax agent.
The exemption starts on the first day of New Zealand tax residency. You become a tax resident on whichever of two things happens first: reaching 183 days in New Zealand within any 12-month period, or having a permanent home here, which the law calls a permanent place of abode. The exemption then runs until four years after the end of the month you became a tax resident. From that point New Zealand taxes worldwide income.
Three conditions sit around it. The exemption is available once only. Applying for Working for Families tax credits, Best Start included, ends it. And IRD lists three ways it can be ended early: including the income in a return, telling Inland Revenue it is no longer wanted, or confirming to another country's tax authority that New Zealand tax will be paid on the overseas income.
Your credit history stays behind
Whatever record you built at home, New Zealand lenders cannot see it. You start with an empty file, and Consumer Protection is blunt about what that means: “Having no credit history means there's no way for future lenders to see if you are a risk or not. This can have the same negative impact as having bad credit.”
Three companies hold credit records here: Centrix, Equifax and Experian. You can ask any of them for your own report, and Consumer Protection says they should deal with the request within 20 days, or tell you why it is taking longer. The file a landlord or a lender reads is the one that exists on the day they check it.
What is on it, and for how long:
- A credit score is a number usually out of 1,000, and Consumer Protection describes a score above 700 as good.
- Payment defaults, meaning something more than 30 days overdue and referred for collection, stay on the file for five years, even once the debt is fully paid.
- Most other information stays four to five years.
- Some things are kept indefinitely, including identification information and multiple bankruptcies.
Spending on your old card
Until your pay is landing in a New Zealand account, you are spending here on a card issued somewhere else, and every one of those purchases is a foreign currency transaction to your bank at home. Their fee for that is in their own published fee guide, under a name like offshore service margin, foreign transaction fee or international service fee.
For a sense of scale, New Zealand banks charge in the same way in the other direction. ASB publishes an offshore service margin of 2.10% on Visa credit and Visa Debit transactions in a currency other than New Zealand dollars, and 1.10% on its FastCash and Cashflow cards. Your own bank's figure will be its own, and only your bank's fee guide has it.
It is a small percentage on a large first month. Rent in advance, a bond, a bed and a phone are large early purchases, and a percentage margin applies to each of them. Your own bank's fee guide has the rate that will apply to you.
How these figures were made
Every fee on this page was read from the organisation that charges it, on 9 September 2026, and every rule from the department that administers it. Where a source carries its own document date we give it, which is why the ASB figures name a fee guide dated 18 June 2026. The government pages do not carry one, so the only date we can give for those is the day we read them. Bank fees are re-checked against their published guides every three months.
We name ANZ and ASB because they publish their fees in full, which makes them checkable. This page does not compare them, does not say which to use, and does not rank any transfer service against another.