The New Zealand investor visa you are searching for is dead

Every month a small, stubborn stream of searches lands on pages like this one. "Investor 2 resident visa". "Investor 2 resident visa nz". "Investor 1 resident visa", as though the lower number might have survived. It did not. Neither did the other one.

Both categories closed to new applications on 27 July 2022. Four years ago this month, and people are still shopping for them, because a good part of this industry never updated the page. Investor 1 and Investor 2 are still listed as live on some advisory sites, thresholds and enquiry form attached. If a firm cannot keep its own product page current across a four-year gap, price the rest of its advice accordingly.

So, in order: what the dead categories asked for, what replaced them, and the part of the replacement that nobody puts in the brochure.

The visa you are searching for closed on 27 July 2022

Investor 1 required NZD 10m held over three years, with no points test. Money in, questions few.

Investor 2 required NZD 3m over four years and then made you earn it: an English requirement, an age cap of 65, and a points test that ranked you against the rest of the pool.

The structural feature of both was the asset menu. Passive, bond-style qualifying investment counted. You could park capital in something dull, wait out the clock and collect residence at the end. That model died with the categories and has not come back in any form. If your mental picture of New Zealand is "lend the government money for four years", update it.

The presence rules used to run the other way

Here is the detail that catches people arriving from an old search result. The old categories wanted you in the country. Investor 1 required 44 days a year. Investor 2 required 146 days a year. Under today's Growth category the requirement is 21 days across the entire 36-month investment period.

Look at the shape of that rule. The cheaper route demanded far more presence than the expensive one. NZD 3m bought an obligation to spend roughly a third of every year in New Zealand. NZD 10m bought six weeks. New Zealand was selling absence and pricing it by the million. It still sells absence, and now it sells it cheaply. That, in my view, is the most interesting feature of the current programme, and the source of the confusion I come to below.

What actually replaced them

The Active Investor Plus visa, rebuilt from 1 April 2025 into two categories, Growth and Balanced. The English language requirement was removed outright. The presence requirement was cut.

The detail underneath matters more than the headline number. Growth capital is genuinely at risk. It cannot sit in bonds or listed equities. It goes into managed funds and direct investment into New Zealand businesses, and from 1 June 2026 up to 20% may go to qualifying philanthropy. Losing the capital does not void the visa conditions, which is rare and sensible drafting: the state asks you to take risk and does not punish you for the outcome. Balanced is the softer product at twice the price and twice the lock-up, and its presence rule flexes, reduced by 14 days for each additional NZD 1m placed in Growth assets. From February 2026, offshore holders may buy or build one New Zealand home valued at NZD 5 million or more, which quietly answers the question this cohort always asks first.

Fees start at about NZD 27,470, covering the principal applicant and immediate family: a partner in a genuine and stable relationship, and dependent children aged 24 and under. A resident visa is granted up front. The Permanent Resident Visa follows once investment and presence conditions are met, at 36 months for Growth or 60 for Balanced. Dual citizenship is allowed. The asset definitions and category mechanics sit in the full New Zealand programme breakdown.

On timing, treat the headline with suspicion. Immigration New Zealand reports an average of 36 working days to approve once investment evidence is filed, but that clock starts only after approval in principle, and applicants then have six months, extendable by six, to deploy the capital. End to end, plan for 6 to 15 months.

The repricing worked, the approvals have not caught up

734 applications covering 2,390 people in the first 14 months, against 116 applications in two and a half years under the old settings. That is not a tweak. That is the most successful repricing of an investor visa anywhere in a decade, and every immigration ministry in the developed world has read the file.

The conversion is the sober half. As at 24 May 2026: 734 lodged, 299 approved in principle, and only 294 actually approved. Roughly 40%. A chunk of that gap is queue rather than refusal. Even so, a 40% approval rate on a product with no language test and a 21-day floor tells you the source-of-funds work is real, and that the soft entry conditions have not made this a soft file.

The visa asks 21 days, the passport asks 1,350

This is where the pitch gets slippery.

Citizenship by grant requires five years as a resident and 1,350 days physically present in New Zealand, including at least 240 days in each of those five years. Not an average across the period. Each year, individually.

Now set that beside the visa. Growth asks 21 days across 36 months. Citizenship asks 1,350 days. Two orders of magnitude apart. Anyone marketing Active Investor Plus as a passport route is either hoping you will not do the arithmetic or has not done it themselves.

The language point runs the same way. There has been no language test for the visa since April 2025. Citizenship by grant still requires the applicant to understand and speak English, and from mid-2027 most adult applicants will also sit a formal citizenship test. The visa dropped the requirement. The passport kept it and is adding to it.

None of this makes the programme bad. It makes it a residence product. Buy it as residence and you will be pleased with it. Buy it as a passport with a three-week commute and you will find out in year six that you bought nothing of the kind.

FIF is the real price of living there

The tax pitch reads beautifully at first pass. Top personal rate of 39% on income over NZD 180,000. No general capital gains tax. No wealth tax. No inheritance tax, with estate duty abolished in 1992 and gift duty in 2011. No exit tax. Controlled foreign company rules, yes. CRS participant, yes.

Then read the footnotes. The two-year bright-line test taxes residential property. And the foreign investment fund regime taxes offshore portfolios on a deemed basis, which means tax on a notional return whether or not you sold anything and whether or not the portfolio rose.

New arrivals get the transitional resident exemption: roughly four years free of New Zealand tax on most foreign-source income, once per lifetime. Excellent, and precisely why the trap works. The FIF regime starts the day that exemption ends. For someone whose wealth sits in a global portfolio rather than a New Zealand operating business, year five is where the true cost of New Zealand appears. Here is the uncomfortable part: this is the single most under-disclosed feature of the programme. Fee schedules get published to the dollar. FIF gets a footnote, if it gets anything.

The verdict

If you came here searching for Investor 2, you were searching for a cheaper, more demanding, more passive programme than the one now on offer. It is gone. What replaced it costs more, locks capital up for longer and, in the Growth category, puts it genuinely at risk. It also asks almost nothing of your calendar, dropped the language test and hands you a resident visa up front. On its own terms that is a good trade, and the application numbers show the market agrees.

Two conditions before you sign. First, decide now whether you are buying residence or citizenship, because the two calendars cannot be reconciled: 21 days a cycle against 240 days in every one of five consecutive years. Pick one and build the family's life around it. Second, model the FIF position before you commit, not in year four with the transitional exemption expiring and your options narrowed to leaving or paying.

Do both and New Zealand is one of the better propositions in the developed world for people who want a stable base rather than a flag. Skip them and you will have bought a very expensive four-year holiday with a tax bill at the end.