Holidays Act Remediation

Like many public and private organisations across New Zealand, Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora has been impacted by Holidays Act 2003 compliance issues. 
 
If you worked for Health NZ, one of the former District Health Boards, or Health Alliance, Health Partnerships, Health Source or Northern Region Alliance at any time since 1 May 2010, you may have been paid incorrectly for your leave. This affects around 90,000 current and 130.000 former employees

Health NZ is committed to addressing these issues, to ensure current and former Health NZ staff receive their correct leave entitlements.

When Health NZ was established, it inherited more than 20 separate payrolls. Each payroll was set up differently, with different practices and local arrangements in place, and a majority were no longer suited for modern payroll requirements. The complexities of the Holidays Act, the size of the workforce, the hours people work and the variety of the employment arrangements, as well as the state of the payroll systems and processes, all make this a very challenging programme of work.

Work to calculate and finalise payments is a complex and painstaking task requiring a large amount of manual processing as well as specialist skills. Project teams around the country are working hard to complete this work as soon as possible. Before payments can be approved, each project team needs to complete a rigorous series of checks and testing, to ensure that any remediation payments will be correctly calculated and leave entitlements will be correct in the future. Each project team is remediating current employees, then former employees.

As of 10 October 2025, we have made remediation payments to current employees on 21 payrolls, with Auckland, Canterbury, Capital and Coast, Counties Manukau, Hutt Valley, Nelson Marlborough, Southern, Tairāwhiti, Taranaki, Wairarapa, Waitematā, West Coast and four former shared services completed, and a partial payment made in Bay of Plenty, Hawke’s Bay, South Canterbury, Te Tai Tokerau and Waikato.

Payments made total over $647.7 million across 86,334 current employees.

If you have partially registered, please complete the 'Get Started' section now. This will help ensure you receive any amounts owed when the former employee payments are ready in the payroll/s where you worked.

If you normally use a private VPN service on your computer, you may need to turn this off to access the portal.

If you are currently overseas and can't register on the portal from that location, here are some options: 

• try again when you travel to a different country 

• assign power of attorney for someone in New Zealand to act on your behalf. 

There is information on the portal about how to register for those with power of attorney or representing the estates of deceased former employees.

We are legally obliged to pay any amounts owed, no matter how small.