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If you have years of skilled work behind you but no qualification that earns points, New Zealand opened a residence route for you on 24 August 2026. It is called the Skilled Work Experience pathway, one of three ways to qualify for the Skilled Migrant Category resident visa, New Zealand's main route to permanent residence (PR) for skilled workers. There are no points to add up: Immigration New Zealand (INZ, the agency that runs visas) sets conditions on your occupation, your experience and your pay, and if every one holds, you can apply.
Our post on what changed on 24 August 2026 covers the rest of that day.
You work in a skilled job, you have done that kind of work for years, and some of those years were worked in New Zealand. Your qualification is the part that does not help you here: it may be a diploma, a trade certificate, or nothing formal at all. If you have never worked in New Zealand, this pathway is not open to you yet, because part of the experience has to be worked here.
INZ sets the pathway out on its Skilled Migrant Category page. You need:
The two experience figures add up to five years in total, two of them worked in New Zealand. These are separate tests: clearing four and missing one means you do not qualify yet.
INZ sorts every occupation into a skill level, and this route accepts levels 1 to 3. Levels 4 and 5 cannot use it, however long you have done the work. Our post on New Zealand's occupation classification explains how a job title turns into a code and a level.
Two published lists sit on top of that. "If your job is on the Red List, you cannot use this pathway." And "If your job is on the Amber List, you must meet higher requirements": more pay, and all five years worked in New Zealand rather than only two. Look your own job up on INZ's lists rather than assuming a similar-sounding title behaves the same way.
Not all of them, and this is where people get caught out. The experience has to be relevant to the job you apply with, so unrelated earlier work does not carry this application. And "You cannot count self-employment as relevant work experience for this pathway". The New Zealand half has a further condition: those two years must have been paid at the rate this pathway requires, not merely worked here.
INZ sets a wage threshold for the Skilled Migrant Category based on the median wage, the wage in the middle when every New Zealand wage is lined up. This pathway asks for pay above that plain threshold, and an Amber List occupation has to clear a higher figure again. We do not print the amounts, because the thresholds "are based on the median wage and are updated each year". INZ publishes the current figures, and the multiple each pathway uses, on its pay rates page. One rule works in your favour: "Once your threshold is set, it does not change."
Yes. Across the Skilled Migrant Category you need a job or job offer with "an accredited employer", and it has to be "permanent or fixed-term for at least 12 months, or a contract or continuous contracts for at least 6 months" (INZ, Skilled Migrant Category Resident Visa). Accreditation is something the employer holds, so ask a prospective employer directly whether they have it.
Most people building this experience are already on the Accredited Employer Work Visa, and our post on whether you need a job offer compares the New Zealand routes on that question.
Not yet, but INZ has said it intends to allow it. In its announcement of 5 March 2026 it said "Migrants who need up to 12 additional months of skilled work experience to meet SMC requirements will be able to apply to extend their AEWV to complete the skilled work experience they need to apply for residence", and that "This ability to extend an AEWV is scheduled to be introduced in 2027" (INZ news, 5 March 2026).
Read that as an announced intention with a date attached, not as a rule you can rely on today.
The Skilled Migrant Category's general requirements apply here as on the other two routes. You must be "aged 55 or younger when you apply", "in good health" and "of good character", which means a medical examination and police certificates (police clearance certificates from the countries you have lived in).
On English there are two ways through. A result from an approved test "must be no more than 2 years old at the time you apply", and the main applicant needs an overall IELTS score of 6.5 or the equivalent. Or you can rely on an English-speaking background, which INZ defines by citizenship of Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom or the United States plus "at least 5 years working or studying in one of these countries, or in Australia or New Zealand" (INZ, English language requirements).
All three lead to the same resident visa, and they ask different questions. The points route wants "6 points to be eligible" from your qualification, an occupational registration or your income; our guide to the Skilled Migrant Category explains it, and our free SMC points calculator adds the points up for you. The Trades and Technician pathway sits between the two: a named trade occupation, a qualification at trade-certificate level or above, and four years of experience counted from the day you finished it.
This route asks for none of that. No points, no qualification, no post-qualification clock. It asks for more years than the trades route, more of them in New Zealand, and better pay, and in exchange your credentials do not come into it.
It "lets you live, work and study in New Zealand indefinitely", and you can "include your partner and dependent children aged 24 or younger in your visa application". Travel conditions on a first resident visa run for two years, after which most people apply for the Permanent Resident Visa.
Our report has assessed this as its own New Zealand route since it opened on 24 August 2026, from the answers you give in the questionnaire. From your work history it works out how many years of skill level 1 to 3 experience you have and, separately, how many were worked in New Zealand, and compares both with what this pathway requires. It checks your occupation against INZ's skill levels and its Red and Amber lists, and compares your pay with this pathway's wage bar at the value we hold, which the report prints so you can see what was applied.
It is equally clear about what it does not decide. It does not know whether your experience is directly relevant to the job you will apply with, whether any of it was self-employment, or whether it was paid at the threshold in force at the time, and it says so beside the requirement rather than quietly assuming. It hands you three required checklist steps instead: check your job on INZ's occupation lists yourself, because they use a different coding system from the questionnaire; gather the evidence INZ asks for and recount your years under those two rules; and, on the Amber List, check the harder conditions that come with it. It never tells you that you qualify. Only INZ decides that.
The honest argument for a report here is what this post has just shown. Several conditions have to hold at once, one of them quietly deletes years you thought you had, and the same career reads very differently against the three routes. One questionnaire, with every New Zealand route measured against the same answers, beats reading four pages and hoping you read them the same way.
The questionnaire is free, and so is the eligibility summary at the end of it. Paying unlocks the full report, with the requirement-by-requirement detail and the checklist steps above.
To see how this pathway and the other New Zealand routes read against your situation, start the free assessment for New Zealand, or read more on our New Zealand page. Before you apply, check INZ's Skilled Migrant Category pages, which are the authority on all of this.
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