Migration - Work visa applications, by decision and nationality 2016–2025

Approved In Principle: Employer prepared visa application documents and received approval in principle prior to advertising job position and recruit successful employee candidate. Work visa applications lodged under the Approval in Principle will still be subject to other assessment criteria such as medical, character, background/qualification etc of the applicant.
Crew: a visa for temporary entry to join a foreign ship.
Immigration and Protection Tribunal Order: a temporary visa issued pending applicant's appeal decision by the Tribunal.
Job Search: a visa that allows the applicant to look for a job for less than 12 months while legally residing in New Zealand.
Long-Term Business Visa/Investor: the Long-Term Business Visa was replaced by the Entrepreneur Work Visa. This visa is for people who want to work in their own business in New Zealand. To apply, you'd need to provide a detailed business plan, have at least NZ $100,000 to invest in your business, and be able to claim 120 points on our points scale.
Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE): The scheme allows the horticulture and viticulture industries to recruit workers from overseas for seasonal work when there are not enough New Zealand workers.
Special visa under Section 61: the Minister may grant at absolute discretion, a visa as a special case under section 61 of the Immigration Act.
Working Holiday: This visa lets people 18 to 30 years old (or 35 years old for some countries) have their 12-month holiday in New Zealand and work here too.
Work to Residence: Once you have been in New Zealand for 2 years on a Work to Residence visa, you may be eligible for residence status under the Residence from Work Category.

Immigration NZ meet their legal obligation to protect personal information by randomly rounding totals in the tool base three. This is best practice from Stats NZ. It does mean figures can be different to their previously published data.

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 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.

At URL provided, click on 'Data Explorer' tab, scroll down, select 'W1 Work Decisions' in Dataset, 'Calendar Year (Year ended Dec)' in Time period, and for variables, select following combinations:
'Application Substream, Decision Type'
'Application Substream, Application Criteria, Decision Type'
'Application Substream, Nationality, Decision Type'
'Nationality, Decision Type'
'Application Substream, Age range, Decision Type'
'Application Substream, Gender, Decision Type'.

For each table, click on button 'Download Data as CSV'.

This migration data is collected to address the overarching research themes and enduring questions that relate to migration in New Zealand

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.