Editorial Policy for PAYE Calculator NZ

Every statutory figure on this site comes from the organisation that sets it: Inland Revenue for tax, ACC levies, KiwiSaver and student loans; Employment New Zealand for the minimum wage and the Holidays Act; Statistics New Zealand for earnings data.

We do not source rates from other calculators, news articles, blog posts or accounting firm summaries. Those are frequently out of date, and a site that copies them inherits their errors. Where a competing page publishes a superseded figure, we say so and cite the current one rather than quietly disagreeing.

No page on this site contains a typed-in rate. Every statutory rate, threshold and cap is stored once, with a citation to the page it came from, and each page renders from that store.

This is a structural guarantee rather than an editorial promise. Two pages cannot disagree about the ACC cap because neither page contains it. It also means a rate change is a one-line edit that updates every page mentioning it at once.

The full rate set is re-verified against its sources each 1 April, when the New Zealand tax year turns over. Each source URL is re-checked, the constants are updated together, and the verification date is stamped on every page.

Rates were last verified on 30 July 2026 for the 2026–27 tax year. Dated changes, including figures already published for future years, are recorded on the rates changelog.

Editorial care is not enough on its own, so parts of it are enforced by tests that fail loudly:

• the calculation engine is checked against Inland Revenue's own Payday Software Developers Casebook, the reference set payroll vendors certify against
• several assertions are pinned to hand-computed values, so when a bracket moves the test fails and the arithmetic has to be recomputed by hand before the new figure ships
• internal links are audited for broken targets, orphaned pages and anchor text that does not match its destination
• every page is checked for layout failures at five screen widths

House style is deliberately plain, and a few rules are enforced across every page:

• Every claim carries a number. Not "several deductions" but "four deductions". Not "a cap applies" but the cap.
• Explicit, never inferential. Dates are written in full rather than as "this year", and organisations are named in full on first use.
• State, do not advise. The site reports what the rules are and what the arithmetic gives. It never says what you should do.
• Publish the limits. What the calculator does not model is published as prominently as what it does.

If a figure here is wrong we want to know, and a report with a source attached can usually be resolved the same day.

• Send the page address, the figure shown and the source you are comparing against to corrections@payecalculatornz.co.nz.
• Reports are checked against the primary source, not against our own previous reasoning.
• A confirmed error in a statutory figure is fixed as a priority, and because rates live in one file the fix reaches every affected page at once.
• A correction that changes a published rate is recorded on the rates changelog with the date. We do not silently overwrite a figure and leave the page looking as though it always said that.

The site takes no payment to feature, rank or recommend a KiwiSaver provider, bank, accountant, payroll product or any other commercial party. There are no affiliate links, and no page has been written or edited at a third party's request.

If that ever changes, the relationship will be disclosed on every page it touches and this policy will be updated before the first such page goes live.

AI tools are used in building this site, in the same way a spellchecker or a code editor is. They are not used to source a statutory figure, and no rate reaches a page because a model produced it.

Every figure traces to a cited primary source and is checked against that source. Accuracy is our responsibility regardless of what produced a first draft.