Working Holiday Insurance for New Zealand & Australia

New Zealand requires it. Australia does not. Medical and comprehensive hospitalisation insurance is a condition of the New Zealand Working Holiday visa for every nationality except those applying under the Ireland, Japan, Malaysia and United Kingdom schemes, it has to stay in force for your whole stay, and you can be asked to show it before or on arrival. Australia lists no insurance requirement in the eligibility criteria for either the subclass 417 or the subclass 462 visa, and nobody will ask for it at the airport.

The requirement is not the reason to buy it. What separates a working holiday policy from a normal two-week travel policy is paid manual work. Farm work, construction and hospitality are excluded by a lot of cheap policies, and those are exactly the jobs most people go out to do. Budget roughly $500 to $1,000 for a year, aim for at least $100,000 of medical cover, check whether adventure sports are included or need an add-on, and buy something you can extend from abroad without flying home.

We get why people skip it. It's the most boring line item in the whole planning process, you're 22 and feel invincible, and it's an easy $500 to $1,000 to cut when you're trying to stretch a budget. We nearly didn't bother either. But a broken ankle on a hike, a scooter spill or a burst appendix in a country where you're not a citizen can cost you five figures out of pocket. That's exactly the kind of bad luck that happens on a working holiday, because you're doing more physical, outdoorsy, unfamiliar stuff than you would at home. This isn't scaremongering. Most trips are fine. But insurance is the one thing on this whole site you genuinely can't fix after the fact, so sort it before you fly, not after something happens.

Australia does not require insurance for the working holiday visa. The eligibility criteria for the subclass 417 and the subclass 462 cover your age, your passport and whether you are bringing dependent children. Insurance is not among them, and nobody checks it at the airport.

What decides your exposure is Medicare, and whether you can use it at all depends on the Reciprocal Health Care Agreement list. Australia has agreements with eleven countries: Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Germany, France, Spain, Canada, the United States and Japan are not on that list. If your passport is one of those, you arrive with no public cover of any kind.

An agreement is not the same as Medicare, either. Services Australia describes the cover as care for an illness or injury that cannot wait until you get home, delivered as a public patient in a public hospital, plus some PBS medicines at the general rate. Private hospitals, elective procedures, dental work and ambulances sit outside it, and ambulance cover in particular is not free in most states. The agreements also differ from each other: New Zealand and Ireland get public hospital treatment and PBS medicines but not out-of-hospital care, which the UK agreement does include. Services Australia says plainly that you still need your own travel health insurance.

One thing we cannot tell you cleanly, because the official pages do not spell it out: whether an agreement extends to someone on a 417 or 462 specifically. Eligibility is written around having been a resident of the partner country and holding a visa, and some agreements exclude student visas while others do not. Treat any Medicare access you get as a floor to fall back on, not as the policy.

Immigration New Zealand requires all applicants to hold medical and comprehensive hospitalisation insurance, except those applying under the schemes with Ireland, Japan, Malaysia or the United Kingdom. It has to remain in force throughout your stay, and you can be asked to produce evidence of it before or on arrival. This is the one country on this site where the policy is part of the visa rather than a recommendation.

Then there is ACC, and it causes more confusion than anything else about New Zealand. The scheme is genuinely unusual: it is no-fault, and ACC states that it covers everyone, including visitors, who is injured in an accident in New Zealand. People read that and conclude they can skip insurance. They cannot.

The practical read: ACC takes the edge off the single most expensive scenario, a serious accident needing treatment while you are in the country. It does nothing about illness, nothing about getting you home, and nothing once you have left. A policy that covers medical treatment and repatriation is doing the work ACC does not, which is also roughly what the visa condition is asking you to hold.

The excess, sometimes called the deductible, is the amount you pay yourself before the insurer covers the rest. Say your excess is $250 and a GP visit plus a scan comes to $600: you pay the first $250, and the insurer covers the remaining $350. The actual figure varies by provider, and often by claim type too, so check the number for a medical claim specifically rather than the headline figure on the pricing page.

Most working holiday visas run for 12 months, and your policy should run at least as long. If a second year in Australia is part of the plan, that usually means 88 days of specified regional work, with a further stretch unlocking a third year. New Zealand's own extension route works differently: the Working Holiday Extension Work Visa adds three months at a time, after three months of horticulture or viticulture work.

Plans change either way, so buy a policy you can extend or renew from wherever you are, not one that forces you to fly home first to sort it. It's also worth having cover from the day you leave, not just from when you land. Delays, lost luggage and anything that goes wrong in transit are exactly what a policy is there for, before the working holiday part of the trip has even started.