A small number of New Zealand businesses accept cryptocurrency — cafés, tradespeople, online retailers, consultants with overseas clients. The technical side is easy. What takes thought is the conversion policy, the GST treatment and the conversation with your bank.
Two ways to accept it
Through a payment processor. The customer pays in crypto, the processor converts immediately at an agreed rate, and New Zealand dollars settle to your bank account. You never hold the cryptoasset, you carry no price risk, and your accounting looks like any other electronic payment. This is what most businesses should do.
Directly to your own wallet. The customer sends to an address you control. No processor fee, no intermediary — and you now hold a volatile asset, carry the price risk between receipt and conversion, and have to handle the accounting and eventual sale yourself.
Pay It Now offers merchant tools alongside its retail business and is the most prominent New Zealand-based option. International processors also serve New Zealand businesses. Check what settlement currency and bank arrangements each one actually supports here before committing.
GST: the part to get right
Two separate rules interact and people conflate them.
First, cryptoassets are not subject to GST when bought or sold. That carve-out removed a genuinely awkward problem where every crypto trade would otherwise have carried GST consequences.
Second, that carve-out does not exempt your supply. If you are GST-registered and you sell a taxable good or service, GST applies to that sale in the ordinary way, calculated on the New Zealand dollar value of the consideration you received. Being paid in Bitcoin rather than by EFTPOS does not change the GST on the coffee.
Practical consequence
You need a defensible New Zealand dollar value for every crypto payment at the time of the transaction, because that is what your GST return and your income figures are built on. Auto-conversion at the point of sale gives you that number automatically. Holding the crypto means establishing it yourself.
Income tax and holding the asset
The revenue is income in the ordinary way, at the New Zealand dollar value on the day you received it. If you convert immediately, that is the end of it.
If you hold the cryptoasset, you have made a second decision: your business now holds a volatile asset. Any gain or loss on eventual disposal has its own tax consequence, and Inland Revenue's treatment of cryptoassets as property acquired with a purpose of disposal generally means profits are income taxed at your applicable rate. Our tax guide covers the framework.
For most small businesses, holding is an unhelpful complication. If you want crypto exposure as a business, make that a deliberate treasury decision with proper governance rather than an accidental consequence of your payment method.
When accepting payments makes you a regulated business
Accepting cryptoassets as payment for your own goods or services generally does not make you a virtual asset service provider. What does is exchanging virtual assets for others, transferring them on behalf of customers, safekeeping them for others, or providing financial services relating to them.
Businesses drift across this line. A retailer who starts converting crypto for customers as a favour, or a consultant who begins holding client crypto, may be operating as a VASP with AML/CFT obligations: customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, suspicious activity reporting, an annual compliance report and an independent audit, all supervised by the Department of Internal Affairs, which became the sole AML supervisor for all reporting entities on 1 July 2026.
If you are anywhere near that boundary, get legal advice before rather than after. Our regulation page sets out the obligations.
Your bank will notice
Regular deposits from a crypto payment processor will eventually generate a question. New Zealand banks apply customer due diligence to business accounts and an unfamiliar payment source is exactly what triggers a review.
Get ahead of it. Tell your bank what you are doing before you start, keep invoices matched to settlements, and be able to explain the flow in one sentence. Note that BNZ has said its policy is not to provide banking services to virtual currency dealers whose primary business is dealing in cryptocurrencies — accepting crypto for unrelated goods and services is a different proposition, but it is a reminder that bank tolerance is not unlimited. Our bank policies page covers each institution's stated position.
Consumer law still applies
Being paid in cryptocurrency does not alter your obligations under the Fair Trading Act or the Consumer Guarantees Act, enforced by the Commerce Commission. Goods must still be of acceptable quality and services still provided with reasonable care and skill.
Refunds need a policy decided in advance. Crypto payments are irreversible, and the price will have moved by the time a refund is requested. Do you refund the New Zealand dollar amount or the quantity of cryptoasset? Decide, publish it in your terms, and apply it consistently — an unclear refund policy is a Fair Trading Act problem waiting to happen.
A sensible setup
- Choose a processor that settles New Zealand dollars to your bank account and auto-converts on receipt.
- Talk to your accountant before switching it on, particularly about GST mechanics for your specific supplies.
- Tell your bank what the incoming settlements are and where they come from.
- Write the refund policy and publish it in your terms of trade.
- Reconcile monthly, matching invoices to settlements and keeping the crypto-side records.
- Do not start holding crypto as a side effect. Make that a separate, deliberate decision.
Done that way, accepting crypto is a payment option with slightly more paperwork than a card terminal. Done carelessly, it becomes a GST question, a treasury exposure and a banking conversation all at once.