Fees for EOI

[nickydwuk]

I have just submitted our EOI - at last I hear you all cry. But I have one concern. According to the NZIS website I should pay £685 however when I came to the payment part I was only asked to pay NZ$400. I have looked on the website and the fees booklet - this was revised in November 2007 http://www.immigration.govt.nz/NR/rd...79A/0/1028.pdf - and this states that an online EOI will be charged at $400 regardless of country and a subsequent payment of NZ$1800 is charged for a skilled migrant permit. Can anyone shed any light on this as these two payments together would equate to much more than £685 regardless of how good or bad the exchange rate was?

[Taffy]

The online EOI is their preferred method, so it's way cheaper. The subsequent $1800 is the migrant levy. This would have been paid on top of the 685 pounds, so you've had a lucky escape

[nickydwuk]

According to their guide there is a registration fee of $400, then for skilled migrant visa/permit there is a further $1800 then the skilled migrant fee of $1200. A total of $3400. That works out at about ?1300. Almost ?200 more than before. Is this registration fee a new thing? Or is this fee of $1800 a replacement for the migrant levy? It is not clear at all.

[MotherBear]

You're quite right about it being confusing. They seem to waffle about all over the place, never making it clear exactly what you have to pay.

This is a simple diagram of when you pay, although it doesn't say what you pay each time. Personally, I would have thought that submitting an EOI is fraught with all sorts of possible pitfalls for prospective migrants and, therefore, INZ wouldn't expect to take a heap of money off you until you had at least got over the first hurdle. $400 sounds about right to start you off and I would have expected the heavy duty fees to come when you submit your ITA and are in with a shout. I don't know how many people could afford to fork out 600 odd quid on the offchance their EOI was going to go through. If you enter details as appropriate on here and firstly select EOI - Skilled Migrant - Online, it'll give you the $400 sum. Then if you go back and do it again but select Residence - Skilled Migrant, it'll give you the 685 GBP sum so there's obviously a difference depending which one you select. Initially you're only submitting the EOI, so, as I see it, you submit an initial fee with your EOI, then wait to see if you're going to be Invited to Apply (for residence), therefore you don't need to pay the bigger sum until you've actually received the invitation (ITA). This tells you how much the Migrant Levy will be and you pay this at the end before receiving your blue stickers.

Just my humble opinion . Someone out there must know for sure, having just done it for themselves. Come on, own up, whoever you are.

[nickydwuk]

Thanks for that MB, it was the $1800 listed in their booklet that threw me. I knew about the migrant levy & ?685. But I didn't know about this first $400. That really threw me. When I went to submit my EOI I withdrew it at first 'cos I thought I must have clicked a wrong button and come through to the wrong payment screen. It all worked out in the end except I have to pay an additonal ?200 (approx) to what I expected. Oh well, welcome to the world of immigration

[selchie]

Without checking my records, I can't tell you precisely what we paid. But there was a fee with the EOI, then more with the formal application (aka ITA), and then a migrant levy after we were approved and were to get our blue stickers. We might have paid about ?200 - ?300 for EOI and ?580 for the application. The levy was ?210 or ?230 for 2 people. All in all, I think we spent less than $2000US (~?1000 today).

I'm not sure what changes they've instituted since we finished the process. Interesting that we had to pay in ?UK (we're in US, had to go through London), but Brits can pay in $NZ.

Good luck straightening it out, Nicky.