The AEWV in Practice: Three Checks, and the Wage Rule That Moved

Two of the three approvals belong to your employer

The Accredited Employer Work Visa is New Zealand’s main temporary work visa, and the thing to understand about it before anything else is that most of the process happens before you are involved.

Three approvals sit in front of the visa. First, your employer has to be accredited. Second, the specific job has to pass a job check. Only then does the visa application, the part that is actually about you, begin. Immigration New Zealand is explicit that the employer sends you the link to the online application form, so you cannot start the process yourself even if you want to.

This is why AEWV timelines slip in ways that look inexplicable from the outside. A candidate is told the visa takes eight weeks and cannot understand why nothing has happened in four months. Nothing had happened because the job check had not been lodged.

Step one: the employer’s accreditation

An employer who wants to hire migrant workers has to hold AEWV employer accreditation. There are three types, and which one an employer holds tells you something useful about how prepared they are.

Standard accreditation is for New Zealand businesses wanting to hire up to five migrants. High volume accreditation is for businesses wanting to hire six or more. Triangular accreditation covers businesses that place migrants with controlling third parties while remaining the employer, and it carries no limit on numbers.

Accreditation is not specific to you or to your role. It is a status the business holds, and if your prospective employer has never hired a migrant before, this step exists and has not started.

Step two: the job check, and the job token

With accreditation in place the employer applies for a job check on the specific role. Before they can do that they may need to advertise the job to establish that no New Zealand citizens or residents are available. Immigration New Zealand’s own process sets that out as a step between accreditation and the job check.

When the job check is approved, Immigration New Zealand sends the employer a job token: a unique email link, sometimes called a job check number, which the employer forwards to you and which is what lets you apply. The visa then links you to the employer who offered you that token.

There is a token reuse rule, and it is worth knowing mainly so that you do not plan around it. If you got your current AEWV on or before 9 March 2025, your employer may be able to resend the token from your most recent application, which spares them a new job check. If you applied for your current AEWV on or after 10 March 2025, Immigration New Zealand states that you cannot reuse a job token at all: the employer must get a new job check approved and send a new token. For anyone entering the system now, that is the only path.

Step three: your application, and what it asks

Now the part that is about you. To apply you must have an offer of full time work from an accredited employer, meet work experience or qualification requirements depending on your job, meet further requirements that vary with the skill level of the job, and show you can speak and understand English if your job is at skill level 3 to 5.

If you are applying for another AEWV after having already stayed the maximum time allowed, you must also have spent the required period outside New Zealand first.

What the visa then permits is worth reading precisely. You can work for the accredited employer who has offered you at least 30 hours of work a week. You can study for up to three months in any twelve month period, or do any study required as part of your employment. And you may be able to support a visitor or work visa for your partner, and a visitor or student visa for your dependent children, though what you can support depends on your job and how much you earn.

If your situation changes and you want to change employer, job or location, or some combination of those, you have to apply to vary your visa conditions, apply for a Job Change, or apply for a new visa. The visa is tied to the employer who sent the token, not to the labour market.

Immigration New Zealand published a processing figure for the visa itself, as at 20 August 2026, of 80 per cent within eight weeks. Read that as covering the third step only. It says nothing about the two approvals in front of it.

One thing worth knowing whoever you are dealing with: New Zealand employers and agents cannot charge you fees for a job or make you pay any of their recruitment costs.

The wage rule moved, and most guidance has not caught up

Here is the change that matters most, because almost every article written about this visa before 2025 is now wrong about it.

The AEWV used to be a median wage visa. Sector agreements and wage exemptions existed precisely so that certain industries could pay below the median, and Immigration New Zealand records that before 10 March 2025 employers could hire AEWV workers at less than the median wage for jobs covered by one of those arrangements.

That framework is gone. Immigration New Zealand states that the sector agreements and wage exemptions in place before 10 March 2025 no longer apply, and that from 10 March 2025 an AEWV hire must be paid at least the market rate for the job, along with any other legal pay requirements such as the New Zealand minimum wage.

Market rate is a defined term and it is not a single number. Immigration New Zealand defines it as the range of pay a New Zealander or resident would be paid within to do the job, or equivalent work. So the test is comparative rather than absolute, and it is assessed against the specific role.

The mechanics run across two stages. A pay range is approved at the job check stage and it must be at or above the pay threshold. The actual pay rate on the visa is then determined at the visa application stage. Once it is set, Immigration New Zealand says your employer must continue to pay you the amount you were offered in your job offer, throughout your employment, and that the amount is listed in your visa conditions.

One legacy of the old system survives, in hedged terms. Immigration New Zealand says you may not need to provide evidence that you meet the AEWV minimum skill requirements if your job was part of the meat processing, seafood processing or care workforce sector agreements, or the tourism and hospitality wage exemption, and that this continues even though the agreements themselves ended. Its own AEWV page attaches a pay condition to that, so if you think it applies to you, check your job against the published list rather than assuming.

Where the median wage still decides things

The median wage has not left New Zealand immigration. It has moved to the part of the journey that matters more.

For AEWV workers who want to claim their New Zealand work experience towards a residence application, Immigration New Zealand states that unless an exception applies they must have been paid at least the median wage that was in place when their visa application was accepted, and at least the current median wage when they apply for the resident visa.

Read those two conditions together and the planning point is sharp. Unless an exception applies, you can hold a perfectly valid AEWV, paid at market rate, entirely compliantly, and still find that the years you spent here do not count towards a work to residence pathway because the pay never reached the median. The visa rule and the work experience rule are now different rules, and only one of them is checked when you arrive.

Two qualifications on that. Immigration New Zealand sets out the requirement in the context of the work to residence pathways, so check the route you are actually aiming at rather than assuming it governs every residence application. And documented exceptions exist, including the care workforce sector rate and, for bus drivers who applied on or before 6 April 2024, a lower hourly figure.

Anyone taking an AEWV with residence as the actual goal should be testing the offer against the residence threshold, not the visa threshold. Our page on the skilled migrant routes sets out where those years have to land, and the short term work visa options page covers the alternatives if the arithmetic does not work.

How long you can actually stay

The AEWV is advertised as up to five years, and the length you get is not a choice.

Immigration New Zealand calculates a maximum continuous stay from three things: when you applied for your first AEWV, the skill level of your job on either the ANZSCO classification or the National Occupation List, and how much you are paid.

The headline split is five years for most jobs, and three years if your job is at ANZSCO skill level 4 or 5. What matters is that several separate routes reach the five year maximum, and skill level is only one of them.

Immigration New Zealand lists them. A job at ANZSCO skill level 1, 2 or 3. A job at skill level 4 or 5 that is recognised at skill level 3. A job at National Occupation List skill level 1, 2 or 3 that appears on the list of NOL occupations usable for an AEWV or a Specific Purpose Work Visa. Being paid at least a specified hourly rate, published as NZD 52.50 an hour when read on 20 August 2026. Holding a job on the Green List. Holding an approved Transport Work to Residence job at or above a lower specified rate. Holding a care workforce job eligible for the Care Workforce Work to Residence Visa at or above its sector rate. Or having applied on or before 6 April 2024 for a job then covered by the transport sector agreement.

Only if none of those apply, and the job is at ANZSCO skill level 4 or 5, does the three year maximum bite. So a skill level 4 or 5 role can still reach five years on pay alone, or on Green List status. That is the opposite of what the headline split implies, and it is the single most useful thing on the page.

Two consequences follow. If your visa is granted for less than your maximum continuous stay, you can apply for further AEWVs to reach that maximum. And when you have stayed as long as you are allowed, you must normally leave New Zealand for twelve months in a row before returning on another AEWV. Immigration New Zealand notes one way round that: if you are offered a higher skilled job whose total stay allowance is five years, you can return before completing the twelve months.

English requirements are not static either. Immigration New Zealand records that they changed on 1 June 2026 for people in skill level 3 occupations. It also publishes exemptions, including for applicants who have already shown they can speak and understand English as part of a previous AEWV application, and for skill level 3 applicants whose AEWV expires on or before 1 December 2026. So a second application does not automatically mean sitting the requirement again.

If you are weighing an offer and are not sure which skill level or maximum stay applies to it, our eligibility check takes two minutes and will place you against a destination and a broad route, though the skill level question is one to resolve against the job description itself.

The mistakes we correct most often

Reading the eight week processing figure as the time from job offer to arrival. It covers the visa application, not the accreditation or the job check.

Assuming the AEWV still has a median wage threshold. Since 10 March 2025 the requirement is the market rate for the job.

Assuming that because the visa no longer requires the median wage, the median wage no longer matters. It governs whether the work experience counts on a work to residence pathway.

Treating the pay range approved at job check as the pay rate on the visa. The rate is determined at the visa stage, and from then on the employer must keep paying the offered amount.

Assuming a job at ANZSCO skill level 4 or 5 is capped at three years. Pay level, Green List status and the transport and care workforce residence pathways each reach five years independently of skill level.

Planning a second application around reusing a job token. That closed for anyone who applied for their current AEWV on or after 10 March 2025.

Treating the maximum continuous stay as renewable. It is a total across one or more AEWVs, after which you normally have to leave for twelve months in a row.

Changing employer, role or location without varying conditions or applying for a Job Change. The visa is linked to the employer who sent you the job token.

Paying an employer or agent for the job itself, which they are not permitted to charge for.

What to do with this

If you have an offer, ask the employer two questions before anything else. Are you accredited, and has the job check been approved. If the answer to either is no, your timeline starts from there rather than from today.

If residence is the point of the exercise, test the pay against the median wage even though the visa does not require it, because that is the number the residence application will be measured against years from now. Our licensed New Zealand advisers work that comparison first, since it is the one that decides whether the whole plan holds together. If a job offer is in front of you and the answer matters, it is worth a conversation before you accept.

Sources

• Immigration New Zealand, Accredited Employer Work Visa
• Immigration New Zealand, Overview of AEWV employer accreditation and job check
• Immigration New Zealand, Wage rates for work visas
• Immigration New Zealand, Sector agreements and wage exemptions for AEWV workers
• Immigration New Zealand, How long you can stay on an AEWV
• Immigration New Zealand, Applying for another AEWV