Why and How to Apply for a Working Holiday Visa in New Zealand
Or "what is it that we are actually doing?"
Hi from Rhode Island, where we arrived last week after 18-hour days of cross-country driving. It’s hard to say which role was better to take. The driver, who had to stay focused through seemingly endless plains? Or the passenger, who had to sit in the just-arguably-safe nest of possessions that didn’t fit in our impressively packed car and stick their head out the window to yell “CLEAR” every time a blind spot needed checking? These are the steps no one tells you about in their glamorous move abroad, but we are embracing every one of them.
The goal for the next couple of blog posts is to document everything we have learned so far before we embark on our journey. We’ve already outlined many of the reasons for going in general in our previous posts (here’s our intro post, as well as Rachel’s and Chris’s individual posts if you’ve just started following along). But the most common question we have gotten during these first few phases is “why New Zealand,” which feels important to document at the beginning of all this, including to see how it changes over time! It also, admittedly, has been a question that has not been at the top of our radar amidst all of the steps it’s taken to get here, even if it’s the most obvious one.
While staying with family the weekend we made this decision, they jokingly suggested we just throw a bunch of places in a hat and go to the first one we picked out. While that might work for Chris, who has said he would often prefer to be “surprised” when he orders a meal (a foil to Rachel, who looks at a menu as a multiple choice test with a *right* answer), we knew we needed to do a little more planning on what would be feasible.
Pretty quickly we settled on, well, really the first thing we found when we started researching how to live and work abroad: a working holiday visa. A working holiday visa is an arrangement in which citizens of certain countries may stay in other countries for an allotted time period, and legally work certain kinds of professions, primarily in agriculture and tourism (though there is more breadth than you might expect!). The primary trip purpose has to be “holiday,” but you are allowed to work seasonal, temporary jobs.
This is a very cool arrangement, and is often reciprocal between countries! And unfortunately, the U.S. has very few of them given that it does not offer them. From our research, the three most straightforward, lowest-requirement working holiday visas for U.S. citizens that we were eligible for are in New Zealand, Australia, and South Korea.1
The working holiday visa appealed to us because we wanted to travel in a way where, rather than just vacationing, volunteering for up to 90 days, or visibly trying desperately to become the latest travel influencers, we could both explore jobs that are of interest to us that we might not have had the opportunity, bravery, or flexibility to try in our lives back in the States.
Also NEW ZEALAND! How could you pass up on a chance to spend some great time there? We’ve broken down our reasons into the Three H’s.
Happiness: New Zealand seemed like a place where we would genuinely be happy spending a year! It seemed like it has a great quality of life, friendly people, and lots of interesting work opportunities. Would you rather have mountains or oceans in your life? May we recommend a secret third option where you can have both? Apply for a working holiday visa today!
Hobbits: Maybe we’ll learn that New Zealanders are tired of the Lord of the Ring references, but we aren’t! Not only did New Zealand provide the breathtaking vistas in those movies, but it feels like a place that really captures that spirit of adventure and fellowship we’re looking forward to. Also a place where we can not only enjoy a great breakfast, but a great second breakfast, as well as a great elevenses, afternoon noon tea, and supper.
Happened to be on the list: In some ways like starter Pokemon, it’s nice to have a big choice boil down to straightforward options. It might be hard to pick from all the countries we could possibly visit, but among the three options we were eligible for with this visa, it made the most sense to start in New Zealand (but don’t tempt us to continue on in the other two).
While New Zealand is exciting in itself, there’s also something else it provided: a cover. As Chris described in his “coddiwompling” post, sometimes you just need something that gives you justification for the thing you think you want to do. We also had desires for some of the things our peers are already doing: further defining our careers, building a community, decorating a place of our own and having the same plates for more than a year. While we don’t believe the common refrain “you should do it while you’re young, because you’ll never have the chance again,” at the same time we recognized that we had created the circumstances that made this decision not only feasible, but also easy. Chris had intentionally accepted a temporary job substitute teaching, we had gotten six month leases to give ourselves flexibility in our next step, and we had said “not yet” to things like adopting a cat, buying a home, or acquiring a rare bonsai collection.
For those of you who are reading this and thinking “I could do this,” here are some steps and considerations for applying for the visa as a U.S. citizen:
Determine if you are eligible to apply.
Age: To apply for the working holiday visa, you need to be between the ages of 18 and 30 when you apply. As a 28-year old hurtling towards 30, this “when you apply” business is relevant — you can take advantage of the visa when you are 31...as long as you apply/are accepted before you turn 30.
Funds: You must demonstrate you have about $2600 USD and fare for a plane ticket to leave the country. It’s also worthwhile to think about a budget for the trip, and how much you want to be working and doing tourist activities while there.
Passport expiration: Your passport needs to be valid for up to three months *after* the date that your working holiday visa would expire. So, in our case, we plan to go to New Zealand in January 2024, meaning our visas would expire one year later in January 2025. Rachel’s passport would have expired in March 2025, which is just short of the three months needed. Even if her passport were valid through April, we wanted to have it extend longer in case we want to do additional travel after the visa expires! Luckily, we found a loophole for this late-stage discovery. To avoid the 6-8 week processing time (3-5 weeks expedited), you can go in person for a same-day renewal if you have a flight out of the country within 14 days and have not yet applied for your new passport (must be within 5 days if you have already applied). Given that Rachel is going on an international holiday trip with her best friend (the invitations really start rolling in when you’re the unemployed friend), she was able to apply for a same-day renewal (they don’t care that she’s coming back a week later!)
All this is a very long winded way of saying, it worked out, but as soon as you decide to embark on such a thing, make sure you have plenty of time on your passport! And get the big book so you don’t preemptively panic about running out of pages while abroad like Rachel did.
Medical examination: If you have lived in countries with TB incidence for a cumulative total of three months or more within the past five years, you are required to have a chest x-ray done by one of about twenty panel doctors in the U.S. that are approved by the New Zealand government. Once you submit your visa application, you are expected to complete this within two weeks. Depending on where you live, this involves some planning. As of this writing, there are two approved doctors in the Denver region, but none near Rhode Island. Our timing on Chris’s passport being renewed was super tight with our move away from Colorado, so we were lucky he was able to get an appointment the very last day we were in town!
Applying is a very straightforward and easy process. You literally just fill out an online form. If you’re thinking about doing this, you can also sign up for the email list in advance to start getting information, which we found helpful to verify that this would be feasible for us.
It costs $35 NZD or $21 USD for U.S. citizens to apply.
Wait! (You really thought it was going to be more steps than that)
As of the time of this writing, most visas are approved within 30 business days, and as quickly as 3 business days! We hope to hear back around or before the new year!
There have been a lot of steps on the path to get here, and we are grateful they have included stops in several places to see family and friends before we move, well, about as far away as possible for a year. We hope this post has gotten into a little more detail about what we’re doing and why than the “great question!” we’ve been hitting you all with for the past two months. Thanks for sticking with us :)
There are also a few other countries open to U.S. citizens, but they have some stipulations. Singapore has a limited number of visas only for people between 18-25 for up to six months. And in Ireland, you have to be a student or have graduated within the past year.