Sample invoice NZ: the $200 and $1,000 lines

$200 and $1,000. Those two figures decide what a New Zealand invoice has to carry, and almost everyone gets the second one right for the wrong reason — they think of it as the line where a tax invoice becomes a proper tax invoice. There has been no such document since 1 April 2023. Inland Revenue's own wording is that new laws which took effect that day "replaced the requirement to use tax invoices with a more general requirement to provide and keep certain records known as taxable supply information". The bands survived the change. The document they used to attach to did not.

If you searched for a sample invoice and want the short version first: below is a New Zealand job invoice with every item the law asks for at each level, and the heading on it does not say "Tax Invoice" because it no longer has to.

Three bands, three different documents

The requirements step up twice, and the steps are cheap to remember because each adds exactly one thing.

Two things fall out of that table which are worth saying out loud, because summaries usually skip both.

Below $200 you need not give the customer anything. The relief is real, and it is from providing the document, not from the tax: the GST on that job still belongs in your return, so your own record of it has to exist even where the customer's does not.

Above $1,000 the buyer's details are only required where the buyer is registered. A private homeowner is not, so a $4,100 bathroom job for a household is not caught by that third line at all — the $1,000 band matters on commercial work, where the other side needs the document to claim its own credit.

The words "tax invoice" are not required anywhere

This is the part that causes the most unnecessary worry, so here it is without hedging: a heading is not a legal requirement. Neither is a single document. Inland Revenue describes the change as moving from a position where "you needed to keep a single physical document, like a tax invoice" to one where "various records like invoices, bank statements, supplier agreements, and contracts can be used".

What that means on a building site is that a signed variation order, a rate schedule in the contract and a bank statement can together be the taxable supply information for a supply, provided the required items are somewhere in them. What it does not mean is that you should stop issuing invoices. A customer who has to assemble three documents to work out what you charged pays late.

A sample invoice for a New Zealand job

Here is a plumbing job in Auckland, over $1,000, to a GST-registered body corporate — that is the case where every requirement bites at once.

Whitcombe Plumbing & Gas Limited · 142 Great North Road, Auckland 1021 · GST 123-456-789

>

Invoice R-00101 · Date 20/08/2026

>

To: Mount Eden Body Corporate Services Limited, 214 Mount Eden Road, Auckland 1024

>

Subject: Bathroom renovation, Mount Eden

>

| Item | Qty | Unit | Description | Price | Total | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | 1.1 | 26.00 | hr | Installation hour, plumbing | NZD 105.00 | NZD 2,730.00 | | 1.2 | 1.00 | job | Handover and instruction on site | NZD 135.00 | NZD 135.00 | | 1.3 | 1.00 | ea | Basin mixer tap, chrome | NZD 202.24 | NZD 202.24 | | 1.4 | 1.00 | ea | Shower system with thermostat | NZD 501.48 | NZD 501.48 |

>

Net total NZD 3,568.72 · 15 % GST NZD 535.31 · Gross total NZD 4,104.03

>

Payable net by 03/09/2026 (7 days).

Every required item is there: trade name, GST number, date, description, the buyer's name and address, and all three amounts. Nothing on it says "tax invoice". Work priced per unit rather than as one line also survives a query — "plumbing work" is a category, and a category invites a phone call three weeks later.

15 per cent, and the two ways of showing it

New Zealand has one GST rate and has had it for a long time: 15 per cent since 1 October 2010 under s 8(1) of the Goods and Services Tax Act 1985, up from 12.5 per cent. There is no reduced rate for renovation, none for new housing, and no construction reverse charge — the domestic reverse charge proposed in 2009 was never enacted in that form. A New Zealand trade business billing building work charges 15 per cent, and the interesting questions are about the document, not the rate.

On the document itself you may show either the three figures — exclusive, GST, inclusive — or a single GST-inclusive figure with a statement that GST is included at the standard rate. The three-figure form is better on commercial work because the other side is going to key the GST amount into its own return, and a figure they have to derive is a figure they can derive wrongly.

Twenty-eight days, and the clock starts when they ask

For supplies over $200, taxable supply information must reach a GST-registered buyer "within 28 days of a request (or by an alternative date agreed to by the parties)". Note where the period starts. It is not twenty-eight days from the job, from the month end or from the payment — it is twenty-eight days from the moment the customer asks.

That matters in one situation and it recurs: a commercial client's bookkeeper comes back in March about a job you did in September and wants the paperwork. The obligation is live, the clock has just started, and the job records have to be findable. A numbering series that runs unbroken and a document attached to the project it belongs to is what makes that a two-minute answer instead of an afternoon.

When the customer writes your invoice for you

Buyer-created documents are common where a head contractor self-bills its subcontractors, and the rules got easier. Since 1 April 2023 a GST-registered buyer can provide buyer-created taxable supply information without Inland Revenue approval. What is required is agreement: the parties "agree only the buyer will provide the taxable supply information", and where that is not part of the normal terms of business between them, they "record the reasons for agreeing to buyer-created taxable supply information".

Anything approved before that date still works — "any buyer-created tax invoice arrangement approved by Inland Revenue before 1 April 2023 can continue to be used as taxable supply information after this date". The trap in a self-billing arrangement is not legal, it is practical: the numbers are now issued by somebody else's system, so your own series has a hole in it unless you record the buyer's document against the job.

Correcting an invoice you have already sent

You do not rewrite it. The correction is its own document — supply correction information — and it carries four things: your name or trade name and GST number, the date the correction was provided, details identifying the taxable supply information being corrected (an invoice number does the job), and the correction itself, "including, if relevant, a correction to the amount of tax charged".

This is the same discipline that applies to a payment claim under the Construction Contracts Act, where a document's date of service decides the consequences: the original is a record of what was said at the time, and it stays. If you are billing progress payments on commercial work, the document that starts the statutory clock is a different one again — see Payment claims and payment schedules: twenty working days, which has requirements an ordinary invoice does not meet.

Two invoices for the same job, and what the second one costs

Same work, same money, same customer — a GST-registered property manager, $4,104.03 including GST.

Invoice A shows the trade name, the date, the line items, the net total, the GST amount and the gross total. It does not show the GST number, because the template was built for private customers.

Invoice B shows all of that plus the GST number and the customer's name and address.

Invoice A is short of two requirements at once: the GST number is mandatory above $200, and the buyer's details are mandatory above $1,000 where the buyer is registered. The customer's bookkeeper will not pay it and will not claim on it, so the money moves when the corrected document arrives — typically a fortnight later, and on a job where retentions are also being held back, that fortnight compounds. Retentions have their own separate regime and their own separate risk: Retentions are trust money, account or no account.

The cost of Invoice A is not a penalty. It is a fortnight of your money sitting in somebody else's account because a field was missing — which is the most common and least dramatic way a small trade business runs out of cash.

Whether you have to charge the 15 per cent at all is a separate question with its own figure, and one large job can answer it for you: Registering for GST in New Zealand: the $60,000 you may already have crossed.

---

Position as at 24 September 2026, checked against Inland Revenue's published guidance on taxable supply information. This describes the rules and is not tax advice. The $200 and $1,000 bands are set by the Goods and Services Tax Act 1985 and have not moved since 1 April 2023 — they are amounts in the Act rather than indexed figures, so the thing to watch is not an annual adjustment but an amending Act; ird.govt.nz/gst/tax-invoices-for-gst carries the current bands and is updated when they change.

What Zirko does here: it puts the seller's GST number, the buyer's name and address and the per-line GST on the document, issues the number from the server in an unbroken series, and freezes the figures onto the issued invoice so the sent version and the stored version are the same document. What Zirko does not do: it does not know whether your customer is GST registered — that is a fact about them, and it decides whether the $1,000 band applies — and it does not start or track the 28 days, because that period runs from a request your customer makes, not from anything the software can see.