New Zealand Employment Law for Expats: Good Faith, the 90-Day Trial & Personal Grievances (2026)

New Zealand’s employment law is built on a single, unusual organising principle — good faith — and two features define the expat experience: the 90-day trial and the personal-grievance system. The trial period lets employers take a chance on a new hire with a limited safety valve; the personal-grievance regime gives employees, once past it, a genuinely accessible route to challenge unfair treatment, with reinstatement on the table. It is a balanced, relatively litigation-light system that treats the employment relationship as a relationship rather than a pure contract. This chapter sets out the 2026 framework: good faith and minimum rights, the 90-day trial, dismissal and the personal grievance, leave entitlements, and how disputes are resolved — because understanding the trial period and the grievance deadline is the practical core.

What is ‘good faith’, and what minimum rights apply?

The Employment Relations Act makes good faith the foundation of the employment relationship. Employers and employees must be active and constructive in maintaining a productive relationship, responsive and communicative, and honest — and, crucially, an employer proposing a decision that may affect employees (dismissal, restructuring, changes to terms) must provide affected employees with relevant information and a genuine opportunity to comment before deciding. Good faith is not a vague aspiration; it is a legal duty that shapes the fairness of every process, and a failure of good-faith process can make an otherwise reasonable decision unlawful.

Every employee must have a written employment agreement (individual or collective), and there are minimum statutory entitlements that cannot be contracted out of: the minimum wage, four weeks’ annual leave, public holidays, sick leave, bereavement and family-violence leave, rest and meal breaks, and protection from unjustified dismissal. A contract term purporting to remove these is simply unenforceable.

New Zealand also has strong anti-discrimination protections (prohibiting discrimination on grounds including sex, race, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, family status and more) and specific protections around harassment and health and safety (the Health and Safety at Work Act imposes serious duties on employers). The framework is protective but not heavy-handed — it emphasises fair process and genuine relationship over rigid formality, which is characteristically New Zealand.

How does the 90-day trial period work?

The 90-day trial period is New Zealand’s distinctive flexibility mechanism. An employer and a new employee (it must be someone not previously employed by that employer) can agree, in writing and genuinely before the employee starts work, a trial period of up to 90 days. During it, the employer may dismiss the employee and the employee cannot raise a personal grievance for unjustified dismissal — giving the employer a limited window to assess the hire without the usual dismissal-process requirements.

The conditions are strict and strictly enforced: the trial must be agreed in writing before the employee commences (an employee who starts work before signing cannot be put on a valid trial), the clause must be correctly drafted, and the dismissal must occur within the trial period with the required notice. Any defect — a late signature, a poorly drafted clause, work started first — invalidates the trial and exposes the employer to a personal grievance. Employers get this wrong frequently, and the courts do not forgive procedural failure.

Note the eligibility rules have changed over time: the 90-day trial was historically available to all employers, then restricted to employers with fewer than 20 employees, then extended back to all employers — so verify the current position, as this is a politically contested feature that shifts with the government. Even during a valid trial, the duty of good faith still applies in how the employer conducts itself. For an employee, the practical point is: know whether you are on a trial period (it will be in your written agreement), because it materially affects your protection in the first 90 days, per our New Zealand employer compliance guide.

How does dismissal and the personal grievance work?

Outside a valid trial period, dismissal must be justified — and New Zealand’s test has two limbs: it must be substantively justified (a genuine reason: misconduct, poor performance, or a genuine redundancy) and procedurally fair (a fair process was followed — investigation, the chance for the employee to respond, genuine consideration). The legal test is whether the employer’s actions, and how it acted, were what a fair and reasonable employer could have done in all the circumstances. A good reason applied through a bad process is still an unjustified dismissal.

An employee who believes they were unjustifiably dismissed — or subjected to an unjustified disadvantage, discrimination, or harassment — can raise a personal grievance. The deadline is generally 90 days from when the grievance arose or came to the employee’s attention (with a longer window, recently extended in some cases, for sexual-harassment grievances — verify current limits). Remedies include reinstatement (the primary remedy in principle, though not always ordered), reimbursement of lost wages, and compensation for hurt and humiliation (which can be substantial). Compensation may be reduced for the employee’s own contributory conduct.

Redundancy must be genuine (a real business reason, not a pretext to remove someone) and conducted with a fair, good-faith process: genuine consultation, provision of information, consideration of alternatives and redeployment, and fair selection. There is no statutory redundancy compensation in New Zealand — redundancy pay is a matter of contract or negotiation — but a redundancy that is not genuine, or is procedurally unfair, becomes an unjustified dismissal with the full personal-grievance remedies. Process is everything, and the 90-day grievance deadline is the critical constraint for any aggrieved employee, per our New Zealand visa guide.

What are the leave and working-time entitlements?

Annual leave: a statutory minimum of four weeks of paid annual leave after 12 months of continuous employment (accruing through the year), with holiday pay calculated under the Holidays Act. Public holidays: 11 a year, and if you work on one you are entitled to time-and-a-half plus an alternative day off (a ‘day in lieu’) — a genuinely generous public-holiday regime.

Sick leave: employees are entitled to paid sick leave (10 days a year after six months, which can accumulate to a cap), usable for the employee’s own illness or to care for a sick dependent. Bereavement leave and family-violence leave (a distinctive and progressive New Zealand entitlement providing paid leave for those affected by family violence) also apply. Parental leave: eligible employees can take extended parental leave (up to 52 weeks), with a government-funded paid parental leave payment for a substantial portion.

Working time: there is no rigid statutory maximum working week in the European sense, but agreements must specify hours, employees are entitled to rest and meal breaks, and the health-and-safety framework limits fatigue and unsafe hours. New Zealand’s working culture is a genuine draw: it strongly values work-life balance, the outdoors, and time with family, and long-hours presenteeism is far less prevalent than in Asia or parts of Europe. The combination of four weeks’ leave, generous public holidays, and a culture that expects you to use them is one of the real quality-of-life advantages of working in New Zealand.

How are disputes resolved?

New Zealand’s dispute system is designed to be accessible and to favour early resolution. The first step is usually mediation through the free government service (Employment Mediation Services) — a genuinely effective, low-cost, and widely-used forum that resolves the large majority of employment disputes without formal adjudication. Both parties are expected to attempt mediation in good faith, and many personal grievances settle there.

If mediation does not resolve it, the matter goes to the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) — an investigative (rather than adversarial) body that determines employment disputes relatively informally and cheaply — with appeal to the Employment Court and beyond. The investigative model means the ERA actively inquires into the facts rather than relying purely on the parties’ advocacy, which makes it more accessible to unrepresented employees.

Practical advice for expats: raise a personal grievance within the 90-day deadline (this is the single most important constraint — miss it and you generally lose the right); use mediation first (it is free, effective and expected); keep records (your agreement, correspondence, any warnings, notes of meetings); and be aware that New Zealand’s system rewards good faith on both sides — an employee who engages constructively and an employer who follows fair process both fare better. Legal representation is available but often unnecessary at the mediation stage. It is one of the more accessible and less adversarial employment-dispute systems in this series, reflecting the good-faith philosophy that underpins the whole framework.

What about restraints, IP and collective agreements?

Restraint-of-trade clauses (post-employment non-competes) are enforceable only so far as they protect a legitimate proprietary interest (confidential information, client connections) and are reasonable in scope, duration and geography; New Zealand courts will read down or strike out restraints that go further than necessary. Unlike some jurisdictions, there is no requirement to pay for a restraint — but an overbroad one is simply unenforceable, so employees should not assume a wide restraint binds them, and should take advice.

Intellectual property created in the course of employment generally belongs to the employer, subject to the contract’s terms. For most roles this is straightforward; specialist inventors and creators should check their agreement.

Collective agreements and unions exist (New Zealand has a union movement, stronger in the public sector, education, healthcare and some industries), and collective bargaining is protected under the good-faith framework. Union density in the private professional and technology sectors where many expats work is modest, but where a collective agreement covers a workplace, it governs those terms. For most professional expats, employment is individual, governed by their written agreement, the minimum statutory entitlements, and the good-faith and personal-grievance framework — a system that is protective, process-focused, relatively litigation-light, and, in keeping with the national character, oriented toward relationship and fairness rather than confrontation.

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