Tutorial: How to extend your Working Holiday Visa in New Zealand

To extend your WHV, you will need to prove you have completed 3 months of seasonal work (planting, maintaining, harvesting or packing) in horticulture or viticulture. Any work outside of these specified roles (e.g. working in a plant nursery or in food processing and manufacturing) does not qualify.

These 3 months of work do not have to have been with the same employer, nor do they have to be full-time or consecutive. For example, if it rained 4 days during a working week and you only worked 1 full day, this still counts as 1 week towards your 3 months of work.

There are several ways to prove your seasonal work.

• 12 payslips: you can attach 12 payslips to your extension application.
• Employer’s letter: your employers can certify the number of weeks worked for them.
• IRD summary: go to the official IRD website and log in to your myIR account. In your Tax summary, you can select “More”, then “Print income details”. Select the time period (“Last 12 months”, for example) and click on “Print income details”. This will give you a summary of all your payslips for the selected time period, sorted by employer, in PDF format. If you have worked in different fields, feel free to highlight the lines corresponding to seasonal work.