2021 Resident Visa: If you are a work visa holder in New Zealand or a critical purpose visitor visa holder you were eligible for residence under the new 2021 Resident Visa. Some critical purpose visa holders arriving in New Zealand between 30 September 2021 and 31 July 2022 on long term were also eligible for this new visa. This stream ended on 31 July 2022.
Straight to Residence: To be eligible for this residence visa you must be working for an accredited employer or hold a job offer from one. Your role must be on Tier 1 of the Green List. You must meet the requirements set out on the list for your role.
Data calculation/treatment
Immigration NZ meet their legal obligation to protect personal information by randomly rounding totals base three. This is best practice from Stats NZ. It does mean figures can be different to their previously published data.
Immigration New Zealand (INZ) has started the transition process to an enhanced visa processing system in 2022. Due to this system change, there was a significant adjustment in the Residence 2021 accepted numbers for March 2022.
Changes to data collection/processing
As part of Immigration NZ continuing work to unify the data available in the Migration Data Explorer, they have renamed some application criteria that appear in the Population dataset. In particular:
The Resident Global Impact Visa application criterion is now named Global Impact.
The substream for the 2021 Resident Visa has been changed from 2021 Resident Visa to Skilled.
The substream for the Global Impact Visa has been renamed from Entrepreneur Category to Entrepreneur. This groups it alongside other application criteria that allow residence for entrepreneurs, such as the Entrepreneur Category and Entrepreneur Plus Category criteria.
The substreams Humanitarian and Humanitarian/International have been merged with the International/Humanitarian substream.
At URL provided, click on 'Data Explorer' tab, scroll down, select 'R1 Residence Decisions' in Dataset, 'Calendar Year (Year ended Dec)' in Time period, and for variables, select following combinations:
'Nationality, Decision'
'Application Stream, Nationality, Decision'
'Application Stream, Gender, Decision'
'Application Stream, Age range, Decision'
'Application Stream, Application Substream, Decision'.
For each table, click on button 'Download Data as CSV'.
From the dataset Migration Data Explorer: R1 Residence Visa Decisions 2025, this data was extracted:
Sheet: R1 Application Stream National
Range: E2:E5747
Provided: 5,061 data points
Dataset originally released on:
January 2026
Purpose of collection
This migration data is collected to address the overarching research themes and enduring questions that relate to migration in New Zealand
Method of collection/Data provider
This is a measure of the number of visa applications in New Zealand, with breakdowns by visa type and demographic characteristics, at specific points in time.