City pages
City shortlists are ordered by register facts, in this order.
- Year first licensed
Taken from the licence number itself, whose first four digits are the year the licence was issued. Earlier years rank first. We use the licence number because the register publishes no separate first-registration date; we checked the filing history as an alternative and it begins later than the earliest licences, so it would understate the longest-standing licensed immigration advisers.
- Licence type
Full licences rank ahead of provisional and limited licences, because a full licence permits unsupervised advice on any immigration matter.
- Name
Alphabetical, as a tiebreaker.
This measures time since first licensing, and nothing more. It does not measure continuous practice, whether immigration work is full-time, how many clients have been served, the complexity of that work, gaps in licensing, or competence. We order by it because it is objective, checkable against the register, and cannot be bought, not because a longer-standing licensed immigration adviser is a better one. The full A to Z list for each city is one click away and carries every licensed immigration adviser equally.
Immigration lawyer listings
The immigration lawyer list is not exhaustive, and cannot be. The licensed immigration adviser side covers every person on the IAA register. There is no equivalent register of immigration lawyers, so this list is assembled by research, and an immigration lawyer can be absent simply because their immigration practice is not identifiable from the public sources we searched. Absence from these pages says nothing about an immigration lawyer. If you know of one who should be listed, tell us on the corrections page.
Team size, used to order firms below, counts the immigration lawyers a firm names publicly. It does not count licensed immigration advisers the firm employs, legal executives, consultants or support staff, and it measures how many people a firm names, not how good they are.
New Zealand lawyers are exempt from immigration adviser licensing, so they never appear on the IAA register. The immigration lawyer pages are a researched, curated list instead. Firms are found two ways, then verified:
- search research across immigration-lawyer queries; and
- published Immigration and Protection Tribunal appeal records: immigration lawyers who regularly appear as counsel.
Each is then confirmed as a New Zealand lawyer with an immigration practice, from the firm's own website or, for barristers with no site, from the NZ Law Society register.
A firm may be full-service while one of its immigration lawyers does only immigration work. It is disclosed on every profile, never used to exclude anyone.
Firms with a local office are listed first, ordered by the size of their named immigration team and then alphabetically. Inclusion is free and cannot be bought; corrections and additions are welcome via the corrections page.
Groups
What we are trying to do here. Choosing an immigration professional is normally guesswork: everyone's website says they are experienced and dedicated, and none of it can be checked. Our answer is to put hard facts in front of you, facts that come from a register or a published decision, that you can verify yourself, and that nobody can pay us to change, and then let you decide. No awards, no rosettes, no “featured partner”, no memberships anyone can buy.
The group badge is shorthand for those facts, not a score for the person. It is not a quality rating, a ranking of skill, a recommendation, or our opinion of anyone. It never affects the order listings appear in, and it cannot be bought. Every fact behind a badge is shown next to it, and you can filter on those facts directly in search rather than relying on the badge at all.
The signals are for matching, not for judging. Several of them tell you what kind of practice someone runs. Which of those you want depends entirely on what you need:
- Coming to study, and want one place to handle the school and the student visa? A licensed immigration adviser whose business also does education placement may suit you better than one who does not.
- Looking for work as well as a visa? A business that also offers recruitment or job placement may be exactly the right fit.
- Applying from overseas and want someone in your own time zone and language? A licensed immigration adviser based outside New Zealand may be the practical choice.
- Facing a tribunal appeal or a deportation liability notice? Then a published record of appeals in that specific category is likely to matter more to you than any of the above.
- Have an employment problem tangled up with your visa? An immigration lawyer who practises in more than one area may be more use than one who does immigration alone.
None of these are marks against anyone. Offering education placement, recruitment services, practising in several areas of law, or operating from overseas are all lawful, common, and useful to the right client. We disclose them so you can match on them.
The five groups
Groups are named rather than numbered, and each carries a gem of the same shape in its own colour. The shape never changes because no group outranks another as a person. The name is always shown beside the gem so you never have to remember a colour, and so the badge means the same thing in greyscale or to a reader with a colour-vision deficiency.
- Fire— Extensive matched published appeal record, clean signals
- Water— Five or more matched published appeals, clean signals
- Earth— Some matched published appeal record
- Wind— No matched published record, clean signals
- Stone— No matched published record, plus a business or location signal
How the groups are spread. Most people sit in the middle groups, because most immigration work never reaches the tribunal and so produces no published record at all. A band is largely a statement about how much public decision history exists for someone, which is not the same as how good they are, and not even the same as how much work they have done.
| Band | People |
|---|---|
| T1 | 14 |
| T2 | 54 |
| T3 | 226 |
| T4 | 774 |
| T5 | 684 |
| Band | People |
|---|---|
| T1 | 15 |
| T2 | 9 |
| T3 | 40 |
| T4 | 17 |
| T5 | 11 |
“Extensive matched published record” below means ten or more matched Immigration and Protection Tribunal appeals, at least one in the last five years, including at least one appeal type with five or more decided cases at a 50% or higher allowed rate (compiled as described under tribunal appeal records). It is a description of a count, not a compliment.
What goes into a band for licensed immigration advisers
Four things, all checkable:
- The matched published appeal record: how many tribunal decisions we can attribute to them with certainty.
- Education or study placement services offered alongside immigration advice. Taken from any of: the business name registered with the IAA, the business's own website, Immigration New Zealand's published education agent performance data, a New Zealand university's published list of registered education agents, or Immigration New Zealand's list of education agent organisations when the business's own website is on the same domain as one of them, by its website or its email. A name is matched only when it identifies the business, not when it only describes the trade.
- Recruitment or job placement services offered alongside immigration advice. Taken from the registered business name or the business's own website.
- Licence type and registered business location.
Which produces:
- Fire: extensive matched published record, full licence, New Zealand-based, no education or recruitment signal.
- Water: five or more matched published appeals, New Zealand-based, no education or recruitment signal.
- Earth: any other matched published appeal record.
- Wind: no matched published record, New Zealand-based, no education or recruitment signal. Provisional licences sit here or below while under supervision.
- Stone: no matched published record, together with an offshore base or an education or recruitment signal.
What goes into a band for immigration lawyers
Two things: the matched published appeal record as counsel, and practice breadth.
It is not a conclusion about the immigration lawyer's whole practice. It records whether immigration is the only area identified on their current firm profile, corroborated by the optional self-declared practice areas on the NZ Law Society register where that field is filled in. An immigration lawyer may well do work their biography never mentions.
- Fire: extensive matched published record and an immigration-only public profile.
- Water: five or more matched published appeals and an immigration-only public profile.
- Earth: any other matched published appeal record.
- Wind: no matched published record, immigration-only public profile.
- Stone: no matched published record and more than one practice area identified.
Caveats, stated plainly
For some people it undercounts badly. That is a limitation of our matching, not a fact about them.
Tribunal decisions almost always name the counsel or representative by initial and surname only, “J Bloggs”, not a full name. Where that could be more than one person on the register, we leave the decision out rather than risk crediting it to the wrong practitioner.
A common surname can therefore withhold a practitioner's entire published record, and their band drops accordingly. We take that side deliberately: a missing decision is recoverable, a misattributed one is not. If appearances of yours are missing, tell us on the corrections page and we will verify them against the published decisions and update the profile.
The rest, briefly:
- A recently licensed immigration adviser cannot yet have a published record.
- Offering education or recruitment services, practising across several areas of law, and being based outside New Zealand are all lawful and common. We disclose them so you can judge specialisation and proximity for yourself.
- Bands cannot be bought, and never affect how listings are ordered.
Tribunal appeal records
Profiles may show a record of published Immigration and Protection Tribunal decisions in which the person appeared for the appellant, compiled from the Ministry of Justice tribunal decisions database. A decision is attributed only when:
- the name resolves to exactly one register entry admitted or licensed before the decision date; or
- the firm named in the decision singles that person out.
Self-represented appellants, anonymised counsel and ambiguous name matches are all excluded. The effect is deliberate: a record may undercount, but it should not misattribute.
Success rates are shown alongside the all-appellant rate for the same appeal type, because outcomes reflect case selection as much as advocacy.
The appeal type is the tribunal's own: the residence category a decision names for itself, such as Family (Parent), and whether a deportation appellant was a resident or a non-resident. Where a decision names no category it is shown as not stated rather than guessed at. Deportation appeals decided under the Immigration Act 1987 are kept as a type of their own, and procedural minutes are not counted as appeals.
Supervision
A provisional licence holder must work under the direct supervision of a licensed immigration adviser who holds a full licence. The IAA register names that supervisor on the provisional licence, with the supervisor's own licence number and the date of appointment. We read it for every provisional licence and join it on the licence number, so no name matching is involved.
A profile names someone's supervisor, or lists who a licensed immigration adviser supervises, only while both hold a current licence and the supervisor a full one, at the latest monthly refresh.
The register drops the supervisor's name once a provisional licence is upgraded to a full one, so we keep every appointment each read shows and never delete one. A licensed immigration adviser who holds a full licence today and was the appointed supervisor on an earlier provisional licence shows that on their profile, with the date of the most recent such appointment on record. The person they supervised is not named, and nothing is counted. Our record starts with the register reads of September 2026, together with the provisional licences that had already ended by then, so supervision of someone who upgraded before that is missing.
The search page can narrow the list to licensed immigration advisers supervising now, or now or before. Supervision is a stage in licensing, not a rating: it orders nobody, and a licensed immigration adviser missing from that list may still take on a provisional licence holder.
What we include
Profiles exist for every licensed immigration adviser who has ever appeared on the register, including people whose licences have expired, been surrendered or been cancelled. Keeping lapsed licences visible is deliberate: checking someone's history is exactly what a register-backed directory is for. Non-current profiles carry a prominent status notice.
Which firm someone is shown at
The business on a licensed immigration adviser's profile comes from the register, read afresh each time the page is built rather than stored by us. That is why it corrects itself: when the register records a move, these pages follow without anyone editing anything.
There is one exception, and it exists because the register is republished monthly while people change jobs on their own schedule. A licensed immigration adviser can tell us they have left a firm, and a firm can tell us someone has left it. In both cases that person comes off the firm's page straight away, because a firm's own list of its people is the firm's to state.
What appears on the licensed immigration adviser's own page depends on who said it, and the difference is deliberate. If the licensed immigration adviser tells us, their page says they are not currently associated with an organisation: it is their own statement about themselves. If the firm tells us, the page keeps showing what the register says and adds the firm's statement beside it, attributed to the firm. We do not let one party quietly change what another party's page says about them.
Either way it is a stopgap and it expires by itself: the moment the register records the change, the register's answer governs again. A difference between a register and a firm is ordinary, people work out notice periods and move between roles, and nothing here is a statement about anybody's licence or standing. None of it can be bought, and it has no effect on ordering anywhere on this site.
Corrections
If something here does not match the official register, the register wins. Use the corrections page and we will fix errors promptly, or check the IAA register directly.