Fair Trading Act changes
In May 2026, the Government introduced the Fair Trading Amendment Bill to provide a strong deterrent for unfair and misleading conduct, introduced a new ‘safe harbour’ statutory defence to support the takedown of scam websites and makes changes to enable product safety standards to be kept up to date.
On this page I tēnei whārangi
These changes aim to better protect consumers and provide businesses that trade fairly with a level playing field.
About the Fair Trading Act
The Fair Trading Act protects everyone in New Zealand from unfair trading practices and covers everything from ensuring that pricing isn’t misleading through to prohibiting pyramid schemes.
The Act prohibits businesses and individuals in trade from being misleading about their products or services, with penalties for those who breach the law. This includes making false claims, exaggerating benefits, or presenting prices in a misleading way, such as advertising discounts that don’t offer genuine savings, hiding surcharges, or displaying prices that differ from what’s charged at checkout. The Act also deals with unfair contract terms and has specific requirements for certain types of sales conduct like uninvited sales and auctions.
New penalties
In October 2025, the Government announced it would increase the maximum penalties for breaches of the Fair Trading Act:
- Penalties for breaching most provisions, including misleading and deceptive practices, will increase from a maximum of $200,000 for individuals and $600,000 for body corporates to the greater of:
- $1 million for individuals or $5 million for body corporates; or
- 3 times the value of the commercial gain made or loss avoided; or
- the value of the consideration for the transaction(s) that constituted the contravention.
- Maximum penalties for breaching management bans will increase from $60,000 to $200,000.
- Maximum penalties for breaching consumer information requirements, consumer transaction rules, and impeding enforcement will all increase from $10,000 to $60,000 for individuals and from $30,000 to $200,000 for body corporates.
- Most breaches will move from a criminal liability regime to a civil liability regime. Conduct that is serious or deliberate will remain criminal offences – such as demanding payment without intending to supply, serious product safety breaches, or obstructing the Commission in its enforcement role.
The courts will continue to have discretion to consider a range of factors when imposing penalties under the Fair Trading Act – including the nature of the conduct, whether the firm has breached the Act before, and the size and scale of the firm and the breach it made.
Safe Harbour
In November 2025, the Government announced it would introduce a statutory defence under the Fair Trading Act. This will enable online service providers to disrupt suspected scam content quickly and confidently.
These changes have been included in the Fair Trading Amendment Bill. The Bill was introduced in May 2026.
Read Hon Nicola Willis and Hon Cameron Brewer’s joint Ministerial announcement:
Tougher penalties for misleading pricing incoming(external link) — Beehive.govt.nz
Read the Bill:
Fair Trading Amendment Bill(external link) — New Zealand Parliament
Product safety standard changes
The Fair Trading Amendment Bill proposes that product safety regulations should have the option of delegating the specification of technical standards, and other technical matters, to MBIE. This would mean that, when new versions of standards become available, MBIE would be able to update the legal requirement to reflect this, rather than continue specifying a superseded standard. MBIE would do this through ‘product safety notices’, which would be secondary legislation (ensuring there is transparency). This will help ensure product safety standards are kept up to date.
This would make it possible to change how New Zealand’s existing product safety standards are updated over time, namely for:
- Baby walkers
- Children’s nightwear
- Children’s toys
- Cigarette lighters
- Household cots
- Multipurpose ladders
- Pedal bicycles
Cabinet would continue to make decisions about what products are subject to product safety regulation, using the current process.
Select Committee
Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee is currently considering the Fair Trading Amendment Bill. Submissions are open until close on 16 July 2026 and can made be made via the Parliament website:
Fair Trading Amendment Bill(external link) — New Zealand Parliament
Related documents
Worked examples of how the new penalties regime will work in practice.
Fair Trading Act Penalties Amendments: Worked examples [PDF, 69 KB]
The Cabinet paper and other material about these changes have been proactively released: