Once your application is accepted for consideration your case will be immediately allocated to an immigration officer. If you have supplied all the documentation requested when you were invited to apply for a resident visa, the processing time may take up to six months.
Processing times may vary depending on whether further documentation is required or if there are any medical conditions or character issues that need assessment.
Once your application is accepted for consideration your case will be allocated to an immigration officer within nine months. If you have supplied all the documentation requested when you were invited to apply for residence, the processing time may take up to 12 months.
As you are applying for a resident visa without a skilled job offer from a New Zealand employer, it may be necessary to perform a settlement and contribution interview. These can take time to plan and while we endeavour to complete these interviews and follow up assessment within our timeframes, they can take longer to finalise.
Important note for all applicants: If you have been sent an Invitation to Apply (ITA) and you choose to apply, please be sure to send us all the documentation we request on the document check sheet attached to the front of the ITA. We can not fully assess the application until we have all the documentation.
New Zealand carefully plans allocation of permanent residence places. The Government's annual residence programme gives priority to skilled and business migrants and the partners of returning New Zealanders. Demand for places under the capped family stream (which comprises parent, adult child and sibling resident visa cases) currently exceeds the number of places available.
There is a current waiting time of 18 to 24 months for a place to become available within the family capped stream (parent and adult sibling applications). In practice this means that an application will usually take 18 to 24 months from the time of lodgement to be allocated to a case officer for assessment.
We will allocate your application to an immigration officer within 14 days of your application being received by our branch and you will receive an acknowledgement letter.
The current processing time frame for partnership and dependent child applications is six to twelve months.
You will receive an acknowledgement letter within 14 days of your application being received by us.
The application will normally be allocated to an immigration officer within two years of being accepted and the assessment may take six to 18 months.
There are guidelines concerning the medical status of people applying for visas to visit, study, work, or live in New Zealand.
If you have an existing medical condition or there are questions arising from the Medical and Chest X-ray Certificate (INZ 1007) PDF that you have submitted with your application for a temporary or residence visa, we are required to refer your documents to an independent medical assessor for their opinion on your health.
It may take six weeks for certificates referred to an assessor to come back to us. Following this you may be asked to provide additional information in the form of specialist reports clarifying the nature and prognosis of your condition.
Please be aware that no decision can be made on the outcome of your temporary or resident visa application until all questions regarding your medical status have been resolved.
The processing time may differ across individual applications and can be brought forward or pushed further back depending on risks perceived in individual applications. The processing time frames as at 1 August 2011 are:
The following is a list of factors which determine what we consider to be a 'positive profile' student.
The following is a list of factors which determine what we consider to be a 'positive profile' visitor.
If your application does not meet the above criteria, it does not mean that the application will not be approved. It simply means that the application may take longer to finalise.
