The New Zealand student visa, step by step, for an application filed from India

New Zealand’s student visa is called the Fee Paying Student Visa. Filed from India it costs NZD 850, about INR 47,000. Immigration New Zealand decides 80% of applications within eight weeks, and the visa itself can run up to four years.

Of the student visa applications made from outside New Zealand by Indian passport holders in calendar 2025, INZ approved 59%. Across all nationalities the figure was 83%. INZ does not publish why the rest were declined, so any ranked list of rejection reasons you have read was assembled by someone who does not have that data either.

What INZ does publish is its own test. Most of it is arithmetic, a set of printed numbers you either meet or you do not. The exception is the requirement INZ calls being bona fide, which asks an officer to form a view on whether you genuinely intend to study.

Which New Zealand student visa do you need, and what does it let you do?

Almost every Indian student going for a degree needs the Fee Paying Student Visa, which is the visa for someone paying international fees to an approved education provider. Immigration New Zealand publishes it as costing from NZD 850, lasting up to four years, and letting you work “up to 25 hours a week while studying and full-time in holidays”.

Before a school, a university or a private training establishment can enrol a single international student, it must be an approved signatory to the Education (Pastoral Care of Tertiary and International Learners) Code of Practice 2021. NZQA puts it flatly. Organisations “must not recruit or enrol international students until signatory status is approved”. The eight New Zealand universities and the polytechnics all clear this. A small private college may not, and that’s worth confirming before any deposit leaves your account.

The 25 hour figure is recent and most material still says 20. INZ raised it on 3 November 2025, and anyone already holding a 20 hour visa was not upgraded automatically. If you are applying now, your visa carries 25 hours from the start. Four years is the longest the visa can be issued for, and INZ says yours may run shorter than your course if you have paid for only one year of a multi-year programme, or if your passport expires first.

Can you apply with a conditional offer of place, or must it be unconditional?

You can apply with a conditional offer, and for a student waiting on final semester results that single fact is worth several weeks. INZ’s wording is that “if you are applying from outside of New Zealand, you can apply with a conditional offer of place from your education provider”, and that it “can assess your application and approve your visa in principle, but you will need to provide an unconditional offer of place before we can approve your visa”.

So the decision arrives in two parts. You lodge on the conditional offer, INZ works through the file and approves it in principle, and only then do you supply the unconditional offer and the tuition receipt. INZ also lets you pay your tuition fees after your visa has been approved in principle, which keeps several lakh rupees out of a university’s account while your visa is still undecided.

An offer of place is a document with required contents. INZ requires it to carry your name exactly as your passport shows it, the programme name and start date, whether you are full-time, the fee and what it covers, and the provider’s signature. It must also record the provider’s own view that you have the English and academic ability to succeed. Whether your three year Indian bachelors counts as equivalent is settled by the university against New Zealand’s qualifications framework, not by INZ.

How much money do you have to show, and what counts as acceptable proof?

For tertiary study you must show NZD 20,000 for each year, or NZD 1,667 for each month if the course runs under a year. At roughly INR 55 to the New Zealand dollar in late July 2026, that is about INR 11.1 lakh a year, or about INR 92,000 a month. This is living money, and it sits on top of tuition.

Funds to evidence = NZD 20,000 for each year of study + first year tuition as your offer states it + the cost of a ticket out of New Zealand

Take a twelve month taught masters. You evidence NZD 20,000 of living funds, the tuition figure printed on your own offer letter, and either a return ticket or the money to buy one. If your offer says NZD 42,000, the total you are proving is NZD 62,000 plus the ticket, roughly INR 34.3 lakh. What that year then actually costs to live through in Auckland or Dunedin is a separate calculation, and NZD 20,000 is only the minimum INZ will accept.

INZ names exactly what it accepts as evidence, and the list is narrower than most people assume.

• Bank statements showing the account holder’s name and the last three months of transaction history.
• Fixed term deposit certificates showing the deposit has been held for at least three months.
• A scholarship award letter.
• An education loan disbursal letter together with the sanction letter, from a nationalised or multi-national bank.
• Evidence of provident funds that can be withdrawn.

The three month history is the item you cannot shortcut, because a balance that landed last week has nothing behind it and a bank statement cannot be aged. The loan route matters for Indian applicants in particular, because it names the lender type, so a sanction letter from a co-operative bank or a non-banking finance company falls outside what the instruction describes. INZ adds two flat refusals on the tuition side. Screenshots of bank transfers are not acceptable, and neither are receipts from education agents.

If a relative is funding you, that is a separate form. The Financial Undertaking for a Student, form INZ 1014, may be given by only one person per student, and only by a relative or a friend. That person attaches three months of their own bank statements, or has their bank complete the confirmation section instead, and commits in writing to NZD 20,000 a year, the cost of outward travel, and maternity health services of at least NZD 9,000 where those apply.

The line on that form that ends most improvised arrangements is the declaration the guarantor signs. It reads “I confirm that the funds held in my bank account are my own and have not been borrowed or loaned from a third party for the purposes of this financial undertaking”, printed directly above a warning that a false statement is an offence for which the signatory may be imprisoned. So if money is borrowed and parked in a relative’s account to make the statement look right, it is the relative who signs that declaration, and the offence is theirs.

The outward travel evidence can be a fully paid ticket, funds held in New Zealand over and above your living money, an undertaking from an acceptable third party, or the sponsorship form INZ 1025. And if your programme runs longer than a year, you aren’t expected to hold every year’s money now. INZ says a credible plan for the later years, family income for instance, helps it decide whether you are genuine and whether you will leave when you should.

What does Immigration New Zealand mean by a genuine intention to study?

It means being what INZ calls a bona fide applicant, and unlike everything else on this visa it carries no number. New Zealand’s student instructions do not define it themselves. They point at the general instruction E5, which describes a bona fide applicant as someone who “genuinely intends a temporary stay in New Zealand for a lawful purpose” and who, in an officer’s opinion, is not likely to remain unlawfully, breach visa conditions, or be unable to leave.

For a student INZ turns that into four plain commitments. You plan to study the course named in your visa conditions and pay the fees, you will comply with the conditions, you will not stay without a valid visa, and you have plans to leave when you finish if you cannot get another visa.

It then publishes the questions it may ask, which are the questions your file should already answer.

• What your study plans are, and why you chose this course and this provider.
• What you intend to do afterwards, whether that is another visa or going home.
• Your previous education or training, and how the new course follows from it.
• Your financial evidence and where the money came from, since it must be genuinely available for you to use.
• How you are related to a guarantor or sponsor, if you have one.

On the other side, that you will leave, INZ names the evidence it wants. Travel history from your current and recent passports, including every page with visa records and entry and exit stamps. Evidence of your circumstances at home, which can be family relationships, a property or a business. A ticket out or the money for one. And if any country has ever declined you a visa, the refusal letter itself, or a letter explaining what happened where the original is gone.

Instruction A24.1 states that the officer considering your application “is not obliged to seek any further information, evidence, or submissions” and may decide on what you sent. INZ says the same on its public pages. Where you apply from outside New Zealand, it does not have to ask you for more before deciding. There is no guaranteed round of questions in which someone asks why you moved from commerce to data science, or why you are twenty-seven and going back to study.

That is also the honest answer to the statement of purpose question. The words statement of purpose appear nowhere in INZ’s operational manual, on its visa page, or in its student visa guide. What the instructions do allow is “any information or submissions showing that the applicant has a legitimate need to spend time in New Zealand for a specific period”, which is exactly the document an SOP is. Your university may demand a real SOP for admission. INZ simply leaves the space open and judges whatever you put in it.

Where an agent prepares the application, which is common in India, the exposure runs to the student. INZ’s instructions say a finding of false or misleading information “does not require an immigration officer to determine whether or not the applicant personally” knew the information was false, or knew that an agent had provided it. The declaration a student signs when someone else files for them says the same thing. Information entered in the online form by another person on your behalf is treated as information provided by you. Read every field before it goes in under your name.

Note. If you are declined while outside New Zealand you have no right to have the decision reconsidered. That right exists only for applicants who are in New Zealand, and only within 14 days. Offshore, an officer may look again if new and compelling information arrives promptly, but is not required to.

Do you need IELTS for a New Zealand student visa?

Not for the visa itself. INZ states that evidence of English language test results is not mandatory for a fee paying student, because it relies on your provider’s confirmation that you have the English and academic ability to succeed. Where a test requirement exists it comes from the university, not from immigration. A test result is not required, though INZ says it can help it assess whether your intention to study is genuine.

The exception is narrow. If your course sits at a private training establishment or a tertiary institution and its main purpose is developing English, INZ applies its own floor, and that floor is low.

The part that decides most real cases sits with the universities. They publish equivalency tables that convert an Indian Class 12 English mark into an IELTS band, which is why the question of studying there without IELTS has a real answer. The University of Auckland’s undergraduate English language equivalencies, effective for applications received from 1 August 2024, read like this for India.

Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, sets its own version of this, asking a minimum of 65% in English from CBSE, CISCE or those same three state boards, and 70% from every other board. The two tables are not identical, so read the one belonging to the university you are applying to. If your Class 12 English mark clears its line, the test you were told was compulsory may not be. Check your own programme’s page before booking anything, because postgraduate standards run higher than undergraduate ones and professional programmes often set their own.

Which medical and police documents does your course length trigger?

Your total time in New Zealand decides this, and nothing about your subject or your marks changes it. INZ says full fee-paying students do not usually need to provide a medical certificate, and on a Fee Paying Student Visa that holds however long your course runs. The chest X-ray is the requirement that does catch an Indian applicant, because that rule turns on how long you will be there and whether you come from a country with a low incidence of tuberculosis. India is not on INZ’s low incidence list.

A twelve month taught masters therefore needs the X-ray and nothing else. A two year masters or a three year bachelors needs the X-ray and a police certificate. The general medical comes back only in four situations, and course length is not one of them. INZ names them as being a PhD, MFAT scholarship or exchange student staying twelve months or more, having used intravenous drugs, having had a blood transfusion, or having been exposed to a serious infectious disease such as HIV or hepatitis B or C. An officer can also ask you for one. The X-ray goes through an INZ panel physician, and the certificate must be less than three months old when you apply, so booking it before you hold an offer wastes it.

Time you have already spent in New Zealand counts toward those thresholds. INZ’s own worked example is a student who has been there seven months and wants to do a six month course, which crosses twelve months in total. A chest X-ray issued within the last 36 months can sometimes be reused, but six consecutive months back in India since it was issued ends that exception.

The police certificate is a Police Clearance Certificate in Indian terms, needed from your country of citizenship and from any country you have lived in for five years or more since turning 17. It must be less than six months old when you apply, and INZ wants certified English translations of every police and medical certificate, including one that records no convictions at all.

What is the full document set, and in what order should you build it?

INZ lists the documents but not the order. Sequence matters here because three of these stages run on external calendars you do not control, and each stage below either takes real time or depends on the one before it.

1. Passport first. It must be valid for at least three months after the date you plan to leave New Zealand. Everything downstream, from the offer letter to the chest X-ray certificate, has to match the name printed in it, and INZ warns that mistakes in your identity details can delay or decline the application.
2. Academic documents and English evidence. Transcripts, Class 12 and degree certificates, and either a test score or the Class 12 English mark your chosen university accepts instead.
3. Apply to the provider and get the offer of place. A conditional offer is enough to start the visa, so don’t wait for results you don’t yet have.
4. Start the three month funds clock. Statements need three months of history and term deposits need three months of age, so the money has to settle a full quarter before you file.
5. Book the chest X-ray. Panel physician, and no more than three months before you apply, because the certificate has to be less than three months old when INZ receives it.
6. Apply for the police certificate if your total stay reaches 24 months, and get the certified English translation with it.
7. Write the case for genuine intent. Why this course, why this provider, how it follows from what you have already studied or done, what you do with it afterwards, and a document behind each claim.
8. Assemble and file online, with the insurance declaration, evidence of an outward ticket or the funds for one, and the guarantor form if someone else is paying.

Stages 4, 5 and 6 run in parallel and hold all the waiting, and stage 4 is both the longest and the one you cannot compress after the fact.

The upload specifications are tighter than they look. Your passport scan must be a PDF under 10 MB and must include the machine readable zone, the string of characters along the bottom of the information page. Your photo must be a JPG between 512 KB and 3.14 MB, taken in portrait within the last six months, with your face filling 70% to 80% of the frame. INZ adds that photos which are AI enhanced or altered do not meet its standards, which is worth checking, since phone cameras often apply enhancement without being asked.

How do you file the application from India, and what happens after you submit?

You file online, and since 2025 that is the only option. INZ states plainly that it no longer accepts paper applications for this visa. Its own paper guide, INZ 1013, says the same thing about itself. It cannot be used for an international student visa. The New Zealand Visa Application Centres in New Delhi, Chandigarh and Mumbai still exist for other visa types, but a Fee Paying Student Visa does not go through them.

The online service needs a RealMe account, which is New Zealand’s government login. You create it once, then upload your documents and pay in the same session. INZ asks you to enter your identity details exactly as they appear on your passport, and it advises applying about three months before you intend to travel. Application volumes run highest between November and March, when students are preparing for the first semester.

After you submit, the file joins a queue worked roughly oldest first. INZ decides 80% of student visa applications within eight weeks, and for university applicants specifically the median is around four weeks. It publishes the fee, the levy and the wait times by provider type, but not by nationality, so there is no India specific processing figure to look up.

If you applied on a conditional offer, the approval in principle arrives first, and with it a short deadline. INZ says AIP deadlines are usually ten days. If you need longer, request an extension from your immigration officer as early as you can, because missing the deadline will likely mean the application is declined. Ten days isn’t long to obtain an unconditional offer, transfer tuition internationally and produce the receipt, so line those up while you are still waiting.

An officer can also require more at any point. The instructions let one ask you to produce further information or evidence, to produce your passport, or to attend an interview, though no interview is a standard step, and INZ adds that if you do not respond in time it will assess the application on whatever it already holds.

Once everything is in, INZ emails the decision and issues an eVisa. If you are already in New Zealand and your current visa expires before a decision, INZ normally grants an interim visa automatically, with no fee, which lasts up to six months and expires 21 days after a decline. Neither the fee nor the levy is refunded if an application is declined.

Is there an age limit for a New Zealand student visa?

There’s no maximum age. INZ sets no upper limit on a student visa, which matters for the working professional in their thirties going back to study. Age has no bearing on eligibility, though it can make the bona fide question harder to answer convincingly. What INZ regulates instead is supervision of children, so a student under 10 needs a legal guardian with them unless they live in an approved hostel, and a student aged 10 to 17 can be placed with a residential caregiver the provider confirms.

Age becomes a hard limit much later. New Zealand’s residence categories require the principal applicant to be 55 or younger when the residence application is made, which is worth knowing early if residence after graduating is part of why you are going at all.

What are you allowed to do once the student visa is granted?

You can work 25 hours a week during term and full-time during scheduled breaks, and the holiday right has conditions. You need to be studying for at least one academic year, on a course worth at least 120 credits, across a minimum of two semesters over at least eight months. Doctoral and research masters students are treated differently again and have no limit on their hours at all, as long as they keep studying full-time.

Three conditions run alongside those work rights.

• You cannot be self-employed. INZ requires an employment agreement with an employer, so freelancing or consulting on the side is not permitted, however small.
• Changing your education provider requires a whole new student visa, even when the course itself stays the same. Where a change of programme is allowed, an officer has to be satisfied that the original visa would have been granted for the new course and that you are still bona fide, weighing how long ago the first visa was issued and whether the level or subject has shifted significantly.
• Insurance is a condition of the visa itself. You agree to hold travel and health cover from the start of your course until the visa expires, meeting the Code of Practice and acceptable to your provider. Doctoral students are the one exception.

That insurance condition exists because student visa holders are not generally eligible for publicly funded health and disability services, and New Zealand’s reciprocal health agreements cover Australia and the United Kingdom, not India. You do not need an NZeTA on top of the visa, since a valid New Zealand visa already covers your entry. If you want to leave and return during your programme, check that your visa carries multiple entry travel conditions, because INZ only commits to granting those automatically to people who applied from inside New Zealand.

Family follows separately. You cannot include a partner or children in your own application, but a master’s or doctoral student can support a Partner of a Student Work Visa, which lets the partner work without holding a job offer. Dependent children can get student visas only where you are studying a PhD or hold a New Zealand government scholarship.

What happens after the qualification is another application entirely, and the length of the Post Study Work Visa follows from your qualification level and how long you studied for it, rather than being a flat three years for everyone.

Sources

• Immigration New Zealand, Fee Paying Student Visa (from NZD 850, 80% within 8 weeks, up to 4 years, 25 hours a week, the full documents list, the conditional offer and approval in principle wording, the insurance condition and the doctoral exemption, passport validity, the end of paper applications, and the five application steps)
• Immigration New Zealand, Student fund requirements (NZD 20,000 a year and NZD 1,667 a month, the five acceptable forms of evidence, the three month rules, sponsorship, the approval in principle deadline of usually 10 days, and the refusal of transfer screenshots and education agent receipts)
• Immigration New Zealand, Financial Undertaking for a Student, form INZ 1014, June 2025 (one guarantor per student, relative or friend only, three months of bank statements or the bank confirmation section, the NZD 20,000 and NZD 9,000 undertakings, and the declaration that the funds are not borrowed)
• Immigration New Zealand, Genuine intentions to study in New Zealand (the four commitments, the questions INZ may ask, and the evidence it names on travel history, previously declined visas, onward travel and home country circumstances; accessed 29 July 2026)
• Immigration New Zealand Operational Manual, E5.1 Definition of bona fide applicant, with E5.10 Determining whether an applicant is a bona fide applicant, E7.10 Considering an application, E7.35 Declining an application for temporary entry and A24.1 (the definition and factor list, the interview and further-evidence powers, the 14 day onshore reconsideration right and its absence offshore, the rule that an officer is not obliged to seek further information, and the strict liability treatment of information supplied by an agent)
• Immigration New Zealand, Who needs an X-ray or medical examination (the chest X-ray trigger at 6 months or more for a student visa applicant from a country without a low incidence of TB, and the rule that a Fee Paying Student Visa applicant needs no medical examination however long the stay, apart from four named exceptions; read 4 August 2026)
• Immigration New Zealand, Countries with a low incidence of tuberculosis (the full list, which runs Iceland, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Isle of Man, Israel and Italy where India would sit, and does not include India; read 4 August 2026)
• Immigration New Zealand Operational Manual, A4.25 Medical and Chest X-ray Certificates (clause (d)(i), which excuses an applicant for a student visa as a fee paying foreign student from providing either certificate, and A4.25.1, which still requires TB screening for anyone with TB risk factors; effective 8 December 2025, read 4 August 2026)
• Immigration New Zealand, Student Visa guide, INZ 1013, October 2025 (the police certificate rule at section D8, guardianship, interim visas, and the statement that international student visas must be applied for online; this is the paper application guide, its health sections state the generic temporary entry rule and do not carry the fee paying student exemption, so the health rules on this page come from the INZ pages above)
• Immigration New Zealand, Working on a student visa (25 hours a week, the 120 credit and two semester conditions for full-time holiday work, unlimited hours for doctoral and research masters students, and the ban on self-employment)
• Immigration New Zealand, Check or change your student visa conditions (the increase from 20 to 25 hours on 3 November 2025, the requirement for a new visa when changing provider, and the limits on a variation of conditions)
• Immigration New Zealand, Applying online (the RealMe account requirement, document upload and online payment, the passport scan and machine readable zone rule, and the photo specifications)
• Immigration New Zealand, Offshore student visa application decisions for 2025 (India 7,235 applications, 4,276 approved at 59%, and 83% across all nationalities)
• Immigration New Zealand, Fees Guide, INZ 1028, May 2026 (Band C for Indian citizens applying from outside New Zealand, the student visa fee of 485 plus a 265 immigration levy, the NZD 325 variation of conditions, and the no-refund rule)
• NZQA, Becoming a signatory to the Code (an organisation must be an approved signatory before it enrols any international students)
• University of Auckland, Undergraduate English Language Proficiency Requirements and International English Language Equivalencies (the India rows at 70, 75, 80 and 85 per cent, and footnote 11 naming the Maharashtra, Karnataka and West Bengal boards; effective for applications received from 1 August 2024)
• Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, standard undergraduate English requirements (65% in English from CBSE, CISCE and the three named state boards, 70% from all other boards, and IELTS 6.0 with no band below 5.5)
• European Central Bank, euro foreign exchange reference rates (EUR 1 = INR 108.9610 and EUR 1 = NZD 1.9693 on 28 July 2026, giving the NZD 1 = INR 55.33 rate used for every rupee figure on this page)

Related reading. The wider guide to studying in New Zealand for Indian students sets the context, and the masters in New Zealand page covers how programme length changes what you can do afterwards.