New Zealand Student Visa Fees, Processing Time and Approval Rate from India

Immigration New Zealand charges NZD 850 for a Fee Paying Student Visa filed from India, which is about INR 47,600. That single figure is three separate charges added together, and it is the only part of the bill INZ sets. The chest X-ray you need is priced by a private clinic in your own city, and the police certificate, if your course is long enough to trigger one, is priced by the Ministry of External Affairs.

Indian passport holders filed 7,235 student visa applications from outside New Zealand in 2025 and INZ approved 4,276 of them, or 59%. Nothing is refunded on a decline, and an applicant who filed from India cannot ask INZ to look at the decision again. For NZD 850 you are buying one attempt.

Every dollar figure below is converted at NZD 1 = INR 56.01, the rate on 3 August 2026. It comes from the European Central Bank’s daily euro reference rates, where EUR 1 bought INR 109.9725 and NZD 1.9636 that day, so 109.9725 divided by 1.9636 gives 56.01.

What does Immigration New Zealand actually charge for a student visa from India?

NZD 850, and it is not one fee. INZ adds an application fee, an immigration levy and a tourism levy, then publishes the total as “From NZD $850”. The Fees Guide, form INZ 1028, May 2026 edition breaks it into the three lines below.

Indian applicants pay Band C. INZ splits its fee table three ways, and the Fees Guide puts it plainly. If you are outside New Zealand, “citizens of Pacific countries specified below pay the fee in Band B” and “citizens of all other countries pay the fee in Band C”. India is not on the Pacific list.

Total INZ charge = Band C application fee + immigration levy + IVL for each person on the application

New Zealand has also signed bilateral fee-waiver agreements with eleven countries, and India’s absence from that list matters less than it first appears. Most of those waivers cover only visitor and residence applications. The waiver reaches a student visa for six of them, Finland, Iceland, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines on courses under 60 days, and the United States. Even those applicants still pay the tourism levy, because the Fees Guide states that “fee waivers do not apply to the IVL”.

A two year degree doesn’t feel like tourism, but the levy applies anyway. INZ confirms the NZD 100 charge attaches to student visas and that it funds “conservation”, “infrastructure used for tourism” and “other initiatives related to tourism”.

The two levies behave differently, which matters the moment a family is involved. The immigration levy is charged once per application. The tourism levy is charged per person on it. INZ’s wording is that “all family members included in an application have to pay the IVL” while “you only have to pay one application fee and immigration levy for all of the people included in your application”.

Note. INZ bills in New Zealand dollars and publishes no rupee price, so your card issuer’s cross-currency markup lands on top of the 47,609. Your bank sets that markup and prints it in its own schedule of charges.

What do you pay outside Immigration New Zealand, for the chest X-ray and the police certificate?

Both of the remaining bills go to Indian providers, and INZ prices neither of them. The health check costs more, and it is where Indian students most often buy more than INZ asked for.

Most students on a degree do not need the general medical examination at all. The twelve month rule that gets repeated everywhere belongs to other student visas, not this one. INZ’s health page says that if “you are applying for a Fee-Paying Student Visa or Pathway Student Visa, you do not need to have a medical examination, no matter how long you are staying in New Zealand”, unless you have used intravenous drugs, had a blood transfusion, been exposed to a serious infectious disease, or INZ asks. The full medical does still apply to a PhD place, an MFAT-funded scholarship or an exchange place lasting over 12 months. For an ordinary master’s or bachelor’s applicant it does not.

The chest X-ray is a different question and you almost certainly do need it. INZ requires one from any student visa applicant “staying for 6 months or more” who is “from a country that does not have a low incidence of TB”, and India is not on that low-incidence list.

Both tests have to be done by a doctor or radiologist on INZ’s own panel, and the results travel to INZ electronically through a system called eMedical, so you never carry a report anywhere. INZ runs a searchable list of approved panel physicians covering cities across India. Check whether the clinic you have picked does radiology as well as medicals, because the two services are listed separately.

Pricing is left entirely to the clinic. INZ says only that “you must pay any costs related to your X-ray and medical examinations” and tells you to “ask the clinic about the costs when you make your appointment”. Most panel clinics publish no tariff at all, so a phone call beats a search. Three of them do publish, and the three together are more useful than any single number.

Read the X-ray column first, since that is the only test most Indian degree applicants need. The same certificate, on the same INZ form, costs three and a half times more in Pune than in Mumbai. The second column is what you pay for walking in having been told you need the general medical, and the difference between the columns runs from about six thousand rupees to nearly nine. These three were read on 4 August 2026 and clinics change them without notice, so confirm yours when you book.

The police certificate has a narrower trigger than the X-ray. INZ asks for one when “your total time in New Zealand will be 24 months or longer across all visits”, and exempts anyone “aged 16 or younger”, so a one year master’s does not need one. Time you already spent in New Zealand on other visas counts towards those 24 months even if you left years ago. INZ also “will not accept a receipt showing that you have applied for a certificate”, so you’ll need the finished document in hand before you file, and it must be less than six months old at that point.

INZ’s country lookup sends an Indian citizen living in India to the Regional Passport Office of the Ministry of External Affairs, and declines to price it, saying only that “you may need to pay a fee”. Passport Seva does price it. Its current application instruction booklet lists a Police Clearance Certificate at Rs. 750 with no tatkaal option. That puts the full outside-INZ bill at roughly INR 2,850 for a two year course, or the X-ray alone for a one year master’s.

Is there a VFS charge or a New Zealand embassy fee on top?

No, on either count. INZ closed the paper route for this visa, so no application centre ever receives your file and none can charge you for handling it. The visa page states that “we no longer accept paper applications for this visa” and that “all applications must now be submitted online”. The Fees Guide agrees by omission, since its two-page fee table lists no receiving-centre fee, no service fee and no collection charge against any visa at all. The High Commission in New Delhi does not price, receive or decide a student visa either.

VFS Global does still run New Zealand visa application centres in India, and they matter for the visa types that remain on paper, so this answer is worth pinning to your exact visa rather than to student visas in general. We have not printed what those centres charge for those other visas. VFS Global’s India pages would not open for us, and a number we have not seen on VFS’s own site is not one we will put in front of you.

What the online route does not remove is the cost of the documents themselves, which is the X-ray, the police certificate where it applies, and any notarisation or certified English translation your own paperwork needs.

How long does Immigration New Zealand take to decide a student visa?

INZ publishes two figures and they answer different questions. Eight weeks covers 80% of university applications. The median is three. Book your flights against the eight weeks, because the three week median is what tempts people to book far too early. The wait times page rebuilds itself weekly from the last four weeks of decisions, so it moves.

Note. Those are the figures INZ published on 4 August 2026. Because the page rebuilds weekly, check it yourself on the day you file rather than trusting any number you read anywhere, including this one.

Both columns are counted in working days, which INZ defines as excluding Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. INZ does not publish how it converts those working days back into the weeks it prints, so treat the figure as a floor and give yourself calendar room beyond it.

Where you enrol changes your wait before anything about you does. A polytechnic applicant waits six and a half weeks at the median where a university applicant waits three, so the same student with the same documents sits in a slower queue purely because of where the offer came from.

There’s no India-specific processing time, and any page quoting one has made it up. INZ groups student visa wait times by type of education provider and by nothing else.

When should you apply, working backwards from your intake date?

INZ’s advice is to apply “3 months before their intended travel date”, and the documents you attach have expiry dates of their own, so the order you do things in decides whether you pay for anything twice. Take Semester One 2027 at the University of Auckland, which begins on Monday 1 March 2027.

The X-ray is the one document with a three month shelf life, so book it late in that sequence. A student who gets it done in July for a December application has bought it twice.

One choice quietly costs you weeks. INZ lets you delay paying tuition until it has approved your application in principle, which keeps several lakh rupees in your own account while the file is open, and it warns in the same breath that “your application will take longer to process” because it then has to wait for your payment receipt before issuing the visa. If your intake is tight, pay early. If your intake is comfortable, keep the money.

What is the New Zealand student visa approval rate for Indian applicants?

59% in 2025, up from 48% in 2024, against 83% across all nationalities. INZ publishes this by nationality, which few countries do. The counts below cover people who were outside New Zealand when they applied, across the fee paying, pathway, English language, scholarship and exchange student visas.

That 59% needs careful reading. Approvals and declines do not add up to 100%. India’s two rates sum to 98%, the counts fall 121 short of the stated 7,235, and INZ does not explain the residual on the page, though it says elsewhere that it rounds its statistics randomly to base three.

“Declined” in INZ’s own glossary is also wider than a refusal. Its definitions sheet counts applications “withdrawn due to a client request, withdrawn and replaced by a new application or withdrawn due to a subsequent application being approved” inside that same figure. Some of the 39% are students who pulled their own file, so the share turned down on merit sits below 39%.

A much friendlier Indian number appears in INZ’s student statistics workbook, which shows 15,594 approvals against 4,099 declines for Indian nationals in the 2025/26 financial year, or 79%. It counts something else. That table includes applications filed from inside New Zealand, visa extensions, changes of conditions and dependants, and those categories run at 91% to 99% approval. Across the last decade the fee-paying substream alone approved 96,285 Indian applications and declined 32,560, which is 75%. The 59% is what a first application filed from India actually faces.

What does a declined application cost you, and can you challenge it from India?

It costs you the whole NZD 850 and you cannot challenge it. The Fees Guide states on its first page that “if we decline your application or request, we will not refund the fee and levies”, and INZ closes the obvious gap separately by saying of the tourism levy that “we do not refund the IVL, even if we decline your application”.

The reconsideration route exists but not for you. INZ will re-examine a declined temporary visa within 14 days for NZD 220, and it attaches three conditions. You must have applied for the visa while in New Zealand, you must still be in New Zealand when you ask, and you must still hold a valid visa. The Fees Guide corroborates the shape of this, listing a reconsideration fee only in the band for people already in the country and leaving the offshore bands empty. An applicant in Hyderabad or Ludhiana meets none of the three, and INZ’s instruction to everyone else is to “submit a new application with all relevant information”, which means paying NZD 850 again.

The decline rate and the no-refund rule combine into one number worth having in the budget. At the published 2025 approval rate, Indian applicants collectively paid NZD 1,441 in INZ charges for every visa actually granted, about INR 80,700, because 850 divided by 0.59 is 1,441. That’s a cohort average, and it won’t appear on your own invoice.

INZ publishes no list of common decline reasons anywhere on its site, for any nationality, so the ranked lists of rejection causes circulating online were assembled by people who did not have that data either. What INZ does publish, item by item, is the document set it requires.

Which immigration fees come after the student visa?

A variation of conditions on a temporary visa costs NZD 325, about INR 18,200, and the Post Study Work Visa costs NZD 1,670, about INR 93,500. The second is larger than the student visa you just bought.

You can avoid the variation entirely. When INZ raised student work rights from 20 hours a week to 25 on 3 November 2025, it did not upgrade anyone automatically, and said that students on a 20 hour limit “will need to apply for a variation of conditions or a new student visa”. Its own statistics show what that cost the people already in the country. INZ decided 1,224 variation applications in November 2025 against 113 in October, roughly eleven times as many in the month the rule changed. Apply now and your visa carries 25 hours from the day it is granted, at no extra charge.

The Post Study Work Visa has a strangely shaped price. Its application fee is only NZD 320, lower than the student visa’s 485, but the immigration levy attached to it is NZD 1,350, more than four times the fee itself and over five times the 265 you paid as a student. Anyone budgeting for the whole stay should carry that 1,670 from the start, because it falls due at the point when the tuition is spent and the first salary has not arrived.

Sources

• Immigration New Zealand, Fees Guide, form INZ 1028, May 2026 (the Band C student visa fee of 485, the 265 immigration levy, the Band rule for citizens outside New Zealand, the bilateral fee-waiver table and the rule that waivers do not apply to the IVL, the per-application versus per-person levy rule, the 325 variation of conditions, the 320 plus 1,350 post-study work visa, the 220 reconsideration listed only in the in-New-Zealand band, and the no-refund statement)
• Immigration New Zealand, Fee Paying Student Visa (the “From NZD $850” headline, “80% within 8 weeks”, the end of paper applications, the conditional offer of place, and the warning that delaying tuition payment makes the application take longer)
• Immigration New Zealand, Who needs an X-ray or medical examination (the Fee Paying Student Visa exemption from the general medical, the chest X-ray rule at six months for applicants from countries without a low incidence of TB, and the PhD, MFAT scholarship and exchange student exception)
• Immigration New Zealand, Countries with a low incidence of tuberculosis (the list India does not appear on)
• Immigration New Zealand, How to get an X-ray or medical examination (the panel physician requirement, eMedical, the three month validity, and “you must pay any costs related to your X-ray and medical examinations”)
• KIMS Health, Trivandrum, visa medical fees (INR 2,100 for a chest X-ray alone and INR 11,030 for the full New Zealand general medical, for applicants 15 and over)
• Lilavati Hospital and Research Centre, Mumbai, New Zealand medical examination charges (INR 700 for the X-ray certificate at 11 and over, INR 6,630 for the general medical certificate at 15 to 69)
• Ruby Hall Clinic, Pune, visa medical services (INR 2,500 for X-ray only and INR 7,500 for the New Zealand medical above 15 years)
• Immigration New Zealand, Police certificates (the 24 months across all visits rule, the exemption for applicants aged 16 or younger, the refusal to accept a receipt, and the six month validity)
• Immigration New Zealand, Student visa wait times (the 50% and 80% definitions, the working-days basis, the four provider rows as published on 4 August 2026, and the advice to apply three months before travel)
• Immigration New Zealand, Overseas student visa application decisions for 2025 (India 7,235 applications, 4,276 approved at 59%, 2,838 declined at 39%, 83% across all nationalities, and the scope covering the fee paying, pathway, English language, scholarship and exchange student visas)
• Immigration New Zealand, Overseas student visa application decisions for 2024 (India 11,338 applications, 5,452 approved at 48%)
• Immigration New Zealand, Student applications decided statistics, prepared 9 July 2026 (the definition of a declined application, the Indian financial-year rows, the fee-paying and dependant substream splits, and the monthly variation of conditions counts)
• Immigration New Zealand, When you can get refunds on some visa application fees (no refund once an application has been processed, even if declined)
• Immigration New Zealand, Paying the International Visitor Levy (the NZD 100 amount, that student visas carry it, and that it is not refunded on a declined application)
• Immigration New Zealand, How to get a temporary visa decision reviewed (the 14 day limit, the NZD 220 fee, the three conditions requiring you to have applied from inside New Zealand, to still be there and to still hold a valid visa, and the instruction to submit a new application otherwise)
• Immigration New Zealand, Changes to student visa work rights (the move from 20 to 25 hours on 3 November 2025 and the requirement for existing holders to apply for a variation of conditions or a new student visa)
• Passport Seva, Ministry of External Affairs, application form instruction booklet V3.0 (Table 4 Fee List, Police Clearance Certificate at Rs. 750 with no tatkaal option)
• University of Auckland, Semester teaching days charts 2027 (Semester One 2027 begins Monday 1 March)
• European Central Bank, euro foreign exchange reference rates (EUR 1 = INR 109.9725 and EUR 1 = NZD 1.9636 on 3 August 2026, giving NZD 1 = INR 56.01)