New Zealand Currency

Saving for your trip to New Zealand? Once you get here of course you’ll be swapping your own money for New Zealand dollars so here’s a quick guide to get you up to speed on what we use here.

Firstly, one thing you probably didn’t know about New Zealanders is that they don’t often have any cash on them at all. Being a small but diverse group of people New Zealanders are often used as a test market for, among other things, banking products. We were one of the first countries to start using the debit cards which we call EFTPOS. Since that began in the late 1980s, we have become totally reliant on those little cards to the point where we’d be hard-pressed to give a donation or take a bus without visiting an ATM. It’s a good thing we don’t tip in this country. Who’d have the change? And if you go out for dinner with a bunch of Kiwis and then decide to split the bill, plan on staying for a while as everyone does the “I’ll pay for us and then you pay his and she will pay me and then…” dance.

As a visitor you’ll be please to find that New Zealand currency is a straight forward affair. The notes are called dollars and the coins are cents. We don’t even have any nick names for the any of it unless you count ‘bucks’, as in “Give me five bucks and I’ll buy you a pie.”  The dollar coins are gold, so you may see a sign asking you for a “gold coin donation”, but in general, it’s all dollars and cents. Here are the denominations.

Coins:

10 cent coin

20 cent coin

50 cent coin

1 dollar

2 dollar

Notes:

5 dollar note

10 dollar note

20 dollar note

50 dollar note

100 dollar note

Photos:

(Piggybank) Új-Zéland by nyuhuhu on Flickr

New Zealand Currency by Marie on Nileguide