What is agency-published legislation?
Agency-published legislation is secondary legislation that is published by the administrating agency responsible for the secondary legislation. Usually, the administering agency publishes their secondary legislation on their website or in the Gazette, as required by the empowering legislation.
The PCO also drafts and publishes secondary legislation. However, this page discusses agency-published legislation, not PCO-published secondary legislation.
Pilot to collect and provide access to agency-published legislation
The PCO’s functions include making the NZ Legislation website a single point of access for all New Zealand’s legislation over time. This includes providing access to PCO-published secondary legislation and agency-published legislation.
To begin to do this, we have developed a pilot of a secondary legislation service that makes agency-published legislation available through this website.
The pilot secondary legislation service involves using the PCO’s automated data collection tool to identify, monitor, and collect agency-published legislation from agency websites and the Gazette. We then publish, to the extent that we can readily determine, the minimum legislative information for that legislation on the NZ Legislation website, include the full text in search results, and provide a link back to the agency website where the secondary legislation is published. This makes agency-published legislation available on this website for search, and connects it to its empowering provisions in Acts.
We seek to match agency-published legislation
The pilot service involves seeking to match agency-published legislation to its empowering provisions and Act. Matching and failure to match does not affect the legal standing of agency-published legislation and does not imply that the legislation is or is not in force.
Agencies are gradually adopting the interim secondary legislation web specifications. This will improve match rates over time during the pilot phase. Where we are unable to match agency-published legislation on this website, we mark it as unmatched so visitors can undertake their own checks with the relevant agencies. Please direct any questions about the status of secondary legislation to the administering agency.
See Known issues with agency-published legislation in the pilot phase below.
Is all agency-published legislation available through this website?
We aim to collect and publish as much agency-published legislation as possible on this website as part of the pilot. However, the collection will remain incomplete in the current pilot phase. Whether or not an instrument is collected does not affect whether legislation is validly made or in force.
Over time the pilot service will be replaced with a full production service. To enable the full production service, administering agencies will be required to publish and make their legislation available in a manner that enables the PCO’s technology tools to identify, aggregate, and utilise agency-published legislation and minimum legislative information and make it available through this website. Agencies will also be required to publish a consolidation when their legislation is amended, in a very similar manner to PCO’s publication of consolidated versions.
See Known issues with agency-published legislation in the pilot phase below.
Known issues with agency-published legislation in the pilot phase
There are known data quality issues during the pilot phase that will not be fully resolved until the end of the transition to the full production service. Whether or not an instrument is collected does not affect whether legislation is validly made or in force. Issues include:
completeness – the pilot only includes agency-published legislation that the data collection method has located so far
correctly showing the relationship between as-made principal versions, consolidations, and amendments
distinguishing current from revoked legislation – instruments are shown as in force by default unless an end date is provided in the minimum legislative information (see Interim Secondary Legislation Website Specifications for more on this) or the legislation title explicitly states its status
matching legislation to its current empowering provision
issues arising from how agencies arrange and rearrange their websites
distinguishing legislation from other instruments published by agencies
providing real-time updates to all agency-published legislation; approximately half of the agency collections are being updated daily
accurately linking to empowering provisions in schedules to Acts
the collection does not include local authority legislation, including bylaws made by a local authority (see section 161A of the Local Government Act 2002).
The recording of an instrument as “matched” or “unmatched” does not affect whether legislation is validly made or in force. An item of secondary legislation may be “matched” or “unmatched” for a range of technical reasons.
Our automated tool may have:
failed to collect the secondary legislation text
failed to find an enabling Act in the text
failed to match an enabling Act against data held by the PCO
failed to find an empowering provision in the secondary legislation text
failed to match an empowering provision against data held by the PCO.
These issues will be addressed as agencies meet the upcoming new publication requirements and as we develop the full production secondary legislation service to replace the current pilot.
What happened to Other Instruments links previously included on this website?
Before 2026, the NZ Legislation website provided links to Other Instruments. This incomplete collection has been superseded by the collection of agency-published legislation under the pilot.