New Zealand outreach rules
Cold calling rules in New Zealand
You may cold call a New Zealand business, and there is no government register to screen the number against first, because New Zealand does not have one. That is the opposite surprise to the UK, where there are two and you must check both. The rule that does bite is not about the call at all. It is about how you got the number, and it changed in May 2026.
General information, not legal advice. Checked against the Commerce Commission, the Privacy Commissioner and DIA on 29 September 2026.
The thing that is not there
There is no government do-not-call register
Every guide written for an Australian or British audience starts by telling you to wash your list. In New Zealand there is no statutory list to wash it against, and that single absence reshapes the whole method.
What exists instead is the Name Suppression Service, run by the Marketing Association, an industry body rather than a regulator. It holds three files: a do-not-call list, a do-not-mail list, and a deaths information list. The do-not-call file holds domestic landline subscribers, plus mobile numbers from 2018 onwards.
Two things follow from it being an industry service rather than a government one. Access is a paid annual subscription, quoted by the Marketing Association at $1,357 to $6,255 plus GST depending on which file you take and whether you are a list owner or a data service provider, so roughly NZ$1,561 to NZ$7,193 a year with GST included. And a subscriber takes the file and either flags the matches in its own database or excludes them programmatically before the calling list is generated. Nothing screens for you.
The Marketing Association's own page opens by noting that governments elsewhere operate compulsory suppression services that must be accessed before an outbound campaign runs. Read where it sits, that sentence is about other countries and explains why New Zealand has an industry service instead. It is not a statement that screening is compulsory under New Zealand law, and we are not going to turn it into one. If you are a Marketing Association member, check your own membership terms, because that is where an obligation would live.
Three countries, three different answers
Every market in this cluster is wrong in a different direction
Which is why a team selling into all three cannot carry one mental model. The register question alone has three answers.
| Market | What you have to do before you dial |
|---|---|
| Australia | Screen against the Do Not Call Register. Business numbers are not eligible for it, so a genuine business line is not on it, and mobiles are the grey area. An industry standard sets the permitted hours. |
| United Kingdom | Screen against both the CTPS and the TPS. There is no business exemption: companies sit on one, sole traders on the other, and you cannot tell which from a company name. |
| New Zealand | There is no government register to screen against. An industry suppression file exists and you pay to use it. No regulator guidance sets calling hours. |
The Australian phone rules are at cold calling rules in Australia and the UK ones at cold calling rules in the UK. For how the three countries differ on email rather than the phone, see cold email laws by country.
What actually governs the call
Two laws, and only one of them is about selling
Neither is the spam Act, which is the one every article about New Zealand outreach cites.
| The law | What it covers, and whether it reaches a B2B call |
|---|---|
| Fair Trading Act, uninvited direct sales | An uninvited approach at home, at a workplace or by phone, for goods or services at $100 or more, bought for personal, domestic or household use. A sale to a business for business use is outside it. Where it does apply, the seller must explain the five working day cancellation right before the agreement is made, send the written agreement within five working days, and penalties run to $10,000 for an individual and $30,000 for a business. |
| Privacy Act 2020 | How you obtained, hold and use the person’s details. A named person at a company is personal information, so this applies to ordinary business prospecting rather than only to consumer marketing. From 1 May 2026 it includes IPP3A, below. |
| Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 | Email, fax, instant messaging and text. Not phone calls: DIA says so directly. It is the reason a sequence that mixes email and calls is running under two separate rule sets. |
The part that is genuinely new
IPP3A, and why it lands on prospecting rather than on calling
In force from 1 May 2026. It is the most consequential thing on this page and the least written about, because most guidance on New Zealand outreach predates it.
IPP3A applies when you collect personal information about someone from a source that is not that person. Buying a contact list is that. Pulling a named decision maker out of a third-party database is that. Having a data provider append a direct dial is that. In each case you now have to take reasonable steps to make that person aware, as soon as reasonably practicable after you collected it, of six things:
- That you collected the information
- The purpose you collected it for
- Who the intended recipients of it are
- The name and address of the agency collecting it and of the one holding it
- Which law authorised or required it, if one did
- Their right to access it and to correct it
The Privacy Commissioner lists exceptions, and two of them matter here. There is no obligation where the individual has already been made aware, and none where the personal information is already publicly available. A name and a work number published on the company's own website is a very different starting point from a purchased list, and that difference is now a compliance difference rather than a stylistic one. There is also an exception where telling the person is not reasonably practicable in the circumstances. We are not going to tell you that any of these covers your situation. Read the Commissioner's guidance against how your own list was built.
Before the list goes near a dialler
A checklist you can work through
Written for a team selling into New Zealand from somewhere else, which is where the wrong assumptions come from.
- Know where every contact came from. After IPP3A, provenance is the first question, not an audit afterthought, and a list you cannot trace is a list you cannot defend.
- Separate the publicly available contacts from the purchased ones. They now sit under different obligations, so tag them at import rather than trying to work it out later.
- Decide whether you are subscribing to the Name Suppression Service. It is not legally required as far as we can establish, it is not free, and complaint risk is lower with it than without it.
- Stop assuming the spam Act applies. It governs the email leg of your sequence and says nothing about the call leg.
- Set calling hours yourself, because nobody sets them for you, and set them on New Zealand time rather than on your own.
- Keep a dated record of every call against the prospect it belongs to. When a complaint arrives months later, the record is the whole defence.
- Check that nothing you are selling into New Zealand is aimed at personal, domestic or household use, because if it is, the uninvited direct sales rules attach and the cancellation right comes with them.
Where software helps, and where it does not
What Empiraa Signal does about this
Signal places calls through your own Twilio account and keeps every call beside the prospect it belongs to, so you have a dated record of who was called, when, and what came of it. It also records where a company entered your workspace, which is the provenance question IPP3A now asks of you.
What it does not do. Signal does not subscribe to the Name Suppression Service on your behalf and does not screen numbers against it, and it does not send an IPP3A notification for you. Both of those are yours. Any vendor whose software claims to make you compliant in New Zealand is selling you something, because the obligation sits with whoever collected the information and whoever makes the call.
For the Australian rules, the phone side is at cold calling rules in Australia and the email side at is cold email legal in Australia.
Questions people actually ask
New Zealand cold calling, answered
Can you cold call a business in New Zealand?
Yes. New Zealand has no government do-not-call register to screen against, and the consumer protections that govern uninvited sales calls apply to goods and services for personal, domestic or household use, so a genuine business-to-business call sits outside them. What still applies is the Privacy Act 2020, which governs how you got the person’s details in the first place.
Is there a do-not-call register in New Zealand?
Not a government one. The only suppression list is the Name Suppression Service run by the Marketing Association, an industry body. Its do-not-call list holds domestic landline subscribers plus mobiles from 2018 onwards, and a marketer pays an annual subscription to access it rather than screening against it for free. The Name Suppression Service.
Does New Zealand’s spam law cover phone calls?
No, and this is the most common mistake made about New Zealand outreach. The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 covers email, fax, instant messaging and text. The Department of Internal Affairs states plainly that it does not cover telemarketing such as phone calls. If you run email and phone in one sequence, only the email half is governed by that Act. DIA on what the spam law covers.
What hours can you make sales calls in New Zealand?
Neither the Commerce Commission’s guidance for businesses nor Consumer Protection’s guidance sets permitted calling hours. That is the opposite of Australia, where an industry standard sets them precisely. It does not make any hour sensible: a call at dinner time is still a call at dinner time, and New Zealand is two hours ahead of eastern Australia, which catches out teams dialling from Melbourne on a schedule built for Melbourne.
What changed for prospect data on 1 May 2026?
IPP3A came into force. When you collect personal information about someone from a source other than that person, you now have to take reasonable steps to make them aware of six things, including that you collected it, why, and how to access and correct it, as soon as reasonably practicable. Buying a contact list or lifting a named person’s details from a third-party database is exactly that kind of collection. There are exceptions, including where the information is already publicly available. The Privacy Commissioner on IPP3A.
Do the five-day cooling-off rules apply to a business-to-business sale?
No. The uninvited direct sales rules in the Fair Trading Act cover goods and services bought for personal, domestic or household use at $100 or more. A sale to a business for business use is not an uninvited direct sale, so the written agreement and the five working day cancellation right do not attach to it. Commerce Commission guidance.
Question not answered here? Ask ANI and get a straight answer.
Show your working
Primary sources
Checked against these on 29 September 2026. They are the authority; this page is a plain-English reading of them, and it is general information rather than legal advice.
- Department of Internal Affairs, spam law for businesses and the spam FAQ, for what the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act covers, that it excludes telemarketing, and the deemed consent test for email.
- Commerce Commission, selling over the phone or door to door for the definition of an uninvited direct sale, the personal, domestic or household use boundary, the five working day cancellation right and the penalties.
- Consumer Protection, telemarketing and door-to-door sales for the written agreement timing and for who runs the do-not-call service.
- Office of the Privacy Commissioner, IPP3A for the 1 May 2026 commencement, the six notification items and the exceptions.
- Marketing Association, Name Suppression Service for what is on the do-not-call file, the subscription pricing and how subscribers are expected to apply it.
Two things deliberately left out. We found no New Zealand rule requiring a caller to display a number or to identify themselves on a sales call, the way the Australian industry standard does, so this page says only that neither regulator's guidance sets one rather than asserting that none exists. And the Marketing Association describes suppression services as compulsory in a sentence about other countries, which we have not read as a statement about New Zealand law. If either turns out to be wrong, tell us at team@empiraa.com and we will correct it and say that we did.