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. We apologise for the time it is taking to fix the underlying issues in our payroll systems, and work through all the detailed calculations and approvals to finalise Holidays Act payments

Current employees can read more on your local intranet. 

Former employees - please register with us through our secure national portal, so we can keep you informed about any upcoming payments that may relate to you. The portal provides a single point of contact and source of information for all former employees nationwide.

We will also reach out directly to former employees using your last known contact details.

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. 

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

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

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 16 June 2025, we have made remediation payments to current employees on 17 payrolls, with Auckland, Counties Manukau, Capital and Coast, Hutt Valley, Nelson Marlborough, Southern, Taranaki, Wairarapa, Waitematā and four former shared services completed, and a partial payment made in Bay of Plenty, Hawke’s Bay, South Canterbury, Te Tai Tokerau.

Payments made total over $491.1 million across 65,562 current employees.

Payments to current employees are expected to be completed for almost all payrolls in 2025.

The first payments to former employees are expected to start in the second half of 2025 and continue into 2026.