NZ Tenancy Agreement Form 2026: Free, Paid, or Built From Your Property

I have used all three options at different points. They are not equivalent. Here is what each actually does, what it costs, and where each one breaks down in practice.

Option 1: The MBIE standard form (free)

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment publishes the official Residential Tenancy Agreement template on tenancy.govt.nz. It is free, it is legally complete, and it is updated to track the current state of the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 (including the 2024 amendments).

It is also a PDF you fill in by hand. You print it, you write the names, the address, the rent, the bond, the start date, and the inspection clauses with a pen, and you hand it across the table. There is no auto-fill from a property record because there is no property record. There is no property-specific list of inclusions because the form does not know what your property has. The Healthy Homes statement, the smoke alarm note, the insurance disclosure - all manual.

This is the right option when you are doing exactly one tenancy in your life and want the legally cleanest, free-est, no-vendor-involved path. The instant you have two properties, or your first tenant turns over and you have to do the agreement again from scratch for the same address, the friction starts to compound.

Option 2: A paid template pack ($90 +)

Several NZ sites sell template packs - tenancy.co.nz is the largest, but there are smaller competitors offering similar bundles. The pitch is essentially "we have lawyered-up the MBIE form, added property-management clauses you actually need, and we keep it updated when the law changes."

The honest read: most of what these templates add is sensible, and most of what they charge for is template upkeep. You pay around $90 for the right to use the bundle on one tenancy. Multi-property packs and unlimited-use plans run higher. When the law changes (which it did in January 2025 with the RTA Amendment Act), you re-pay.

This works well for the landlord who wants a more polished agreement than the MBIE form and is happy to pay per-agreement for it. It does not work well as you scale, because each agreement is a fresh transaction with the template vendor, none of the property data flows in automatically, and you still end up filling in the same address, rent, bond, and tenant names by hand for every new tenancy at every property.

Option 3: Generate from your property record (RentManager, free)

When you have a property record in RentManager - the address (validated against LINZ and NZ Post), the bond bank account, the inclusions, the Healthy Homes status, the bedroom count, the smoke alarms register, the inspection cadence - building a tenancy agreement is a one-screen step. You go to your tenancy, click "Draft agreement", review the auto-filled fields, and download a property-tailored PDF that incorporates the standard MBIE clauses plus everything that is true about your specific property.

The output is a fully ready-to-sign PDF that we then hand off to an e-sign ceremony (multi-signer, audit-trailed, RTA-acceptable). The tenancy goes live the moment the last signature lands. The rent ledger starts from the agreement's start date. The bond record points at the agreement as the source document. Inspections, communications, statements - all attached to the same tenancy from minute one.

And the math: this is on the free Starter plan ($9/month for 1 property; $19/month for up to 5). No per-agreement charges. You can re-draft as many times as you want before sending. When the law changes, the generated agreement changes automatically the next time you draft one - no re-purchase.

The new option: snap your existing paper agreement (free)

The thing I am proudest of in RentManager right now is what we ship at rentmanager.nz/upload-agreement. Drop your signed tenancy agreement on the page (PDF or up to 4 photos of the paper original from your phone) and we read it, extract the address, the tenant names, the landlord, the rent, the bond, the dates, the special clauses, and offer to create your account fully populated with that data. No typing.

This solves the cold-start problem. If you are reading this article you probably already have at least one paper tenancy agreement floating around in a folder or a glovebox. That agreement is the source of truth for everything our software does. Re-keying it into a fresh account is the most boring task in property management, and it is the one thing standing between you and a software-managed tenancy. So we did it for you.

The way it works: you upload, we send the image or PDF to Anthropic for processing only (they do not use the data to train their models - it is in their commercial terms), you see a confirmation page showing the address we recognised and a map of where the property sits, you enter your email, we send you a password-setup link, and you log in to a fully populated dashboard. Total time: 2 minutes including reading the email. If you have a Google account you can skip the email step entirely and be in the dashboard in 30 seconds.

If we cannot read tenant names or rent (we are honest about what our tooling can and cannot do - some agreements have handwritten signatures with no typed name beside them, some have rent left blank because the landlord filled it in by hand later), the page will mark exactly which fields were missing and offer you a manual sign-up path. We never claim to have read fields we did not actually read.

Side-by-side

What every NZ tenancy agreement must include, regardless of path

This is where the existing tenancy agreement guide goes deeper, but the short list: names of all parties, property address, start date, periodic-or-fixed (with end date if fixed-term), rent amount + frequency, bond amount and where it is lodged, landlord contact for urgent issues, the inspection cadence, the Healthy Homes Standards statement, smoke alarm declaration, insurance disclosure (and the relevant excess), pet terms, and any agreed inclusions like a heat pump or a parking space.

The two clauses that catch landlords off-guard:

• Rent increase wording. Notice is 60 days, no more than once every 12 months (s.24 RTA 1986). Putting a "we may increase rent on 30 days' notice" line in your agreement does not override the statute. Tenants can challenge any increase that does not match the statutory minimum, and the Tribunal will side with them.
• "No pets" without a documented basis. The 2024 RTA Amendment Act (pet bond provisions effective December 2025) changed how pet refusal works. You can still refuse pets on documented grounds (body corporate rules, building covenants, property-specific concerns), but a blanket "no pets ever" clause without a reason will not survive a challenge. RentManager has a pet rules engine that surfaces what is actually defensible at your specific address.

What I left out of this article on purpose

I did not get into the boarding-house variant. That has its own agreement form and a different set of rules - I wrote about running rent-by-room operations from my own portfolio in how I ran a 3BR Auckland apartment with boarders. The "build from property record" path covers boarding houses too (each room has its own variant tenancy, each gets its own agreement), but the operational reality is different enough that it deserves its own piece.

I also did not get into the e-sign ceremony itself. The short version: Ed25519 digital signatures, multi-signer support, every signer sees the same document hash, audit trail captures who signed when from which IP. The Tribunal accepts the output as a valid signed agreement.

So which one do you actually pick?

If you are doing one tenancy in your entire life and you do not want any vendor involvement at all, use the MBIE PDF. It is free, it is legally complete, it is the cleanest possible path.

If you already have a paper agreement that is in force right now and you want to digitise the tenancy (because you are tired of doing the rent tracking by spreadsheet, because the bond is up for renewal, because the tenant wants to update their email), snap a photo of it. Two minutes and the rest of your account is wired up around that agreement.

If you are about to do a new tenancy and you want the agreement, the rent ledger, the bond record, and the inspection schedule all set up in one go, create a free account, add the property once, and use the "Draft agreement" button when you set up the tenancy. The first agreement is free; subsequent ones at the same property reuse the property record and take 30 seconds.

The paid-template path is real and works for a slice of landlords who specifically want the polish of a lawyered-up template without using software. I am not going to pretend it has zero merit. But the per-agreement spend never makes sense to me when the same workflow is free in software that also does rent tracking, bond, inspections, communications, and tax-time reports.

Two minutes to try it: drop your existing agreement here.