New Zealand has no single summer shutdown. Property agreements, court rules and statutes each carve out their own block of year-end dates, and those blocks start and finish on different days. If you reach for the wrong one, a December deadline can land a fortnight from where you thought it would.
The calculator offers six settings. Picking between them is a question about the document that created your deadline, not about when anyone's office happens to be shut.
The same deadline, six different answers
Take a trigger date of Thursday 18 December 2025 and a period of five working days after it, counted on the national calendar with the start date excluded and the end date counted. Change nothing but the summer window:
| Shutdown setting | Result | What moved it |
|---|---|---|
| No Shutdown | Monday 29 December 2025 | Only the weekends and the Christmas and Boxing Day holidays drop out |
| Fixed Statutory-Style | Monday 5 January 2026 | 25 December to 2 January is excluded |
| ADLS / TLANZ–REINZ | Wednesday 7 January 2026 | 24 December to 5 January is excluded |
| RMA | Thursday 15 January 2026 | 20 December to 10 January is excluded |
| Courts Rules | Friday 16 January 2026 | 25 December to 15 January is excluded, so 24 December is still day 4 |
| ADLS LIM / TLANZ–REINZ | Monday 19 January 2026 | 24 December to 15 January is excluded, and a weekend follows it |
Three weeks separate the top row from the bottom one, on identical inputs. These windows look interchangeable on a menu, and they are not.
Every row uses the same setup. Only the Shutdown Period changes:
- Mode: Default Mode → Deadline
- Start date: 18 December 2025
- Direction: Forward
- Period: 5 working days
- Include start date: off
- Include deadline date: on
- Region: No Anniversary
Open the Courts Rules row in the calculator, then change the Shutdown Period to step through the others.
Which window your deadline runs on
Work from the instrument that created the period. Each window below is inclusive of both its start and end dates.
| Setting | Dates excluded | Reach for it when |
|---|---|---|
| No Shutdown | None | Your working-day definition adds no summer block. Weekends and the holidays from your selected region still apply. |
| ADLS / TLANZ–REINZ (24/12 ↔ 5/1) | 24 December–5 January | The signed sale and purchase agreement uses its general working-day definition. |
| ADLS LIM / TLANZ–REINZ (24/12 ↔ 15/1) | 24 December–15 January | You are working out the LIM date, which the agreement gives a longer window. |
| Fixed Statutory-Style (25/12 ↔ 2/1) | 25 December–2 January | The statute relies on the general definition in section 13 of the Legislation Act 2019 rather than supplying its own. |
| Courts Rules (25/12 ↔ 15/1) | 25 December–15 January | The governing court-rule definition uses the shared summer exclusion. Check separately whether it also excludes an anniversary day. |
| RMA (20/12 ↔ 10/1) | 20 December–10 January | The RMA working-day definition governs the process. |
These are date-range shortcuts. Selecting one tells the calculator which days to skip; working out which instrument governs your deadline is still your call.
The property agreement: ADLS, and the LIM trap
Most practitioners still call the form the ADLS Agreement. ADLS rebranded as The Law Association in 2023, so the current published form is the TLANZ/REINZ Agreement for Sale and Purchase. That is why the calculator keeps ADLS first in the label and names the current publishers after it.
In the published Eleventh Edition 2022 (4) sample, the general summer exclusion runs from 24 December to 5 January inclusive. The same definition then extends the end date to 15 January, but only for the defined LIM date. That single carve-out is why there are two property settings rather than one.
The trap is applying the longer window to everything. A transaction that involves a LIM does not put every condition, notice and settlement step onto the 15 January window; only the LIM date itself gets it. Check the edition you are working from and any further terms, because an amended agreement can redraw both windows.
One more thing the agreement does that the setting won't cover: it also excludes the anniversary day of the province in which the property sits. That is a separate Region choice. The regional anniversary guide covers how to pick it, and the property settlement guide works a full example end to end.
Court-rule working days aren't court opening hours
The 25 December to 15 January working-day exclusion appears in the High Court Rules, the District Court civil rules, both sets of Court of Appeal rules, and the Supreme Court rules. Where one of those definitions governs a period, those dates come out. This is not an office closure you can work around by filing early.
Three things get conflated here, and keeping them apart saves a lot of argument:
- Rule 1.3 working days. 25 December to 15 January is excluded when you are computing a period that runs on that definition.
- Rule 3.2 court holidays. The Christmas court-holiday period runs from 24 December through 3 January, and rule 3.2 also picks up other days, including the anniversary day of the region where the court sits.
- Published operating hours. The Ministry of Justice announces each year when individual courts and services physically close and reopen.
A registry can be open on a date that rule 1.3 excludes, and a closure notice does not shift every deadline in the proceeding. So for a rule 1.3 calculation, leave Region at No Anniversary: the rule 1.3 definition carries no regional anniversaries, and importing rule 3.2's court-holiday list into a rule 1.3 count needs a source that says so.
That shared summer window is why the setting is called Courts Rules rather than High Court Rules. The full definitions are not identical. Civil Court of Appeal and Supreme Court calculations use the Senior Courts Act definition, which also excludes the anniversary day of the province where the court is located; the Court of Appeal criminal rules do not. Use the separate Region control where the governing definition requires an anniversary, and do not substitute a registry closure schedule for the working-day definition.
The RMA window starts earliest
The RMA working-day definition excludes 20 December to 10 January inclusive, five days earlier than the statutory default. That catches out anyone counting a 20-working-day clock through late November. It carries no regional anniversaries either, so leave Region at No Anniversary for a statutory RMA count.
Before you rely on it, confirm the RMA still governs the process and that no transitional provision has moved you onto a replacement rule. The RMA working-day guide goes through the statutory timeframes, the provisions that stop the clock, and the current reform position.
What "Fixed Statutory-Style" covers
The 25 December–2 January option mirrors the general working-day definition in section 13 of the Legislation Act 2019, which is the fallback where a statute uses the term without defining it.
The label is deliberately "Statutory-Style" rather than "statutory": plenty of New Zealand legislation supplies its own definition instead, and the RMA and the High Court Rules are the two you are most likely to meet. Read the Act that creates your period before reaching for this one, and leave Region at No Anniversary unless that Act also excludes an anniversary day.
One thing the calculator can't do for you
It will not work out your trigger date. Service dates, when service is legally treated as complete, filing cut-off times — all of that sits upstream of the count, and a precise answer from the wrong start date is still wrong. Settle the trigger first, then choose the window, then check the excluded dates in the result to confirm the window you meant is the one that applied.
For statutory boundary wording such as "from", "after", "within" or "before", see Section 54 NZ: Do Start and End Dates Count?.
Sources
- TLANZ/REINZ Agreement for Sale and Purchase, Eleventh Edition 2022 (4) sample
- The Law Association: ADLS members vote to rebrand
- Real Estate Authority: sale and purchase agreement guidance
- Legislation Act 2019, section 13 general working-day definition
- High Court Rules 2016, rule 1.3 working-day definition
- High Court Rules 2016, rule 3.2 court holidays
- District Court Rules 2014, rules 1.4 and 2.1
- Senior Courts Act 2016, section 4 working-day definition
- Court of Appeal (Civil) Rules 2005, rules 3 and 4A
- Court of Appeal (Criminal) Rules 2001, rule 3
- Supreme Court Rules 2004, rule 3
- Resource Management Act 1991, section 2 working-day definition
- Ministry of Justice: court and tribunal hours, December 2025 and January 2026
Sources checked 2 August 2026, and the six results above are covered by executable calculator tests. General information about calculator settings, not legal advice.
