Do I need a police certificate for a New Zealand visa?

INZ's rule: "If you plan to stay in New Zealand for 24 months or longer, you must provide a police certificate with your visa application." The operational manual makes clear that the 24 months counts time already spent in New Zealand, so a second or third temporary visa can push you over the line even when the new visa itself is shorter.

On age, INZ says: "If you are aged 17 and over, you may need to provide us with a police certificate as evidence of your good character."

This is where most of the confusion lives, because INZ publishes two different tests depending on what you are applying for. They are not the same rule and they are not interchangeable.

• Residence — the country or countries you are a citizen of, plus every country where you have spent 12 months or more over the last 10 years. INZ is explicit that the 12 months need not have been in one stay: intermittent visits add up.
• Temporary entry — the country or countries you are a citizen of, plus any country you have lived in for five or more years since turning 17.

If you have read somewhere that the rule is "12 months in a country since age 17", that is two rules mashed together and it is wrong. Check which test applies to the visa you are actually reading about, on the INZ page for that visa.

INZ publishes a country-by-country tool telling you which authority issues the certificate and how to apply, covering roughly 230 countries. It is an interactive filter rather than a list of pages, so we link to the tool rather than reproducing entries we cannot cite individually.

Less than 6 months old when you submit the application. INZ also notes that if a certificate reaches a year old before a decision is made, it may ask for a fresh one — which happens more often than you would like on the slower visa categories.

There are re-use windows. INZ's manual allows a certificate to be re-used for 24 months for further temporary visas and for Partnership and Dependent Child residence applications, and for 36 months for fee-paying students and New Zealand university PhD students.

You pay whatever the issuing country charges. INZ publishes no figure, because it is not INZ's fee.

For the UK, the certificate comes from the ACRO Criminal Records Office — which also covers people living in Scotland. Two things INZ warns about specifically:

• A result of "No Live Trace" does not mean a clean record. It means there are stepped-down convictions, and INZ says those still must be declared.
• The blue Subject Access Request certificate is not acceptable to INZ. It is a different product from the police certificate INZ wants.

We have only sourced the UK detail. Requirements for other countries are on INZ's country tool, and we would rather send you there than restate something we could not read on the day.

Police certificates are the most common reason an application sits unfinished. Some jurisdictions issue in days; others take months, need fingerprints taken locally, or require an application made in person in the country itself.

Combine that with the two clocks — less than 6 months old at submission, and a medical certificate that must be less than 3 months old at submission — and the order to work in is: start the police certificates, then gather everything else, then book the medical last.