One number moves GST from something you have heard about to something you administer: NZ$60,000 of turnover. The test around that number is short, but two parts of it are routinely misread — the window it measures, and the direction it looks.
You must register for GST in New Zealand once your turnover passes NZ$60,000 in any rolling 12 months — that is revenue, not profit, and the test looks both backwards at the last 12 months and forwards at the next 12. Below the threshold you may register voluntarily, but if you are not registered you must not charge GST.
The NZ$60,000 figure is as at August 2026, and has sat at that level since 2009 — worth re-checking if you are reading this much later. Turnover means the money coming in before any costs come out: a business with NZ$70,000 of sales and NZ$4,000 of profit is over the threshold, because the test never asks about profit.
If you sell on both sides of the Tasman, the two systems share a name and little else: Australia’s registration threshold is AU$75,000 with GST at 10%, while New Zealand’s is NZ$60,000 at 15%, and registering in one country does nothing in the other.
The most common misreading is to treat the threshold as a tax-year total: add up the sales from April to March, stay under NZ$60,000, relax. The actual test is any twelve consecutive months, checked continuously — a window that slides forward a month at a time, indifferent to where the tax year starts.
That distinction bites when growth straddles a year boundary. A seller who does NZ$28,000 in the last nine months of one tax year and NZ$34,000 in the first three months of the next never shows a year total anywhere near the line — but the twelve-month window covering that stretch holds NZ$62,000, and that is the number the test reads.
The other thing the test does that people do not expect: it looks ahead. If you reasonably expect your turnover to pass NZ$60,000 in the next twelve months, you must register — before the money arrives. Sign a NZ$70,000 contract in July and you are over the line in July, not in the month the final invoice goes out.
“Reasonably expect” is a judgement, not a formula, and hope is not expectation — a launch you think might do well is a different thing from a signed contract. If you are near the line and unsure which side your pipeline puts you on, that is a short conversation with your accountant, and a much cheaper one before the fact than after it.
Three things, mainly.
You charge 15% on domestic sales. A workshop ticket you sell for NZ$230 becomes NZ$200.00 for you and NZ$30.00 of GST collected for Inland Revenue — collected being the operative word, because that NZ$30.00 was never your money. It rests in your account between returns the way a friend’s coat rests on your chair: present, but not yours to wear.
You file GST returns. Most small sellers file two-monthly. The return reconciles what you collected on sales against what you paid on costs, and one of those numbers usually surprises new registrants in a good way.
You claim GST back on business costs. The GST inside your software subscriptions, your equipment, your accountant’s own bill comes back to you through the return. This is the half of registration that works in your favour, and for a business with heavy input costs it can outweigh the admin.
Below the threshold, registration is voluntary. It tends to make sense when your customers are mostly GST-registered businesses, who claim the GST back so your effective price barely moves, or when your input costs are large. It costs you the filing cadence either way.
One direction of error is much worse than the other. If you are not registered, do not charge GST. Collecting a tax you are not registered to hand over is a bigger problem than crossing the threshold a little late, and it is printed on every invoice you have issued.
GoCushy treats registration as a switch you flip once, in whichever direction is true for you.
Not registered: leave GST off. Invoices come out clean — no GST line, no rate, no number — which is exactly what an unregistered seller’s invoice is supposed to look like. There is nothing to walk back later.
Registered: enter your GST number once, and every invoice from then on carries it, with 15% shown on domestic sales and the inclusive, exclusive and GST figures reconciling to the cent. The GST guide in the docs walks through turning it on, and is honest about the things the software deliberately does not do.
One of those things is worth naming here: GoCushy does not watch your rolling total and tell you when you have crossed NZ$60,000. Your sales history sits in the dashboard and flows into Xero, so the twelve-month number is easy to read off — but the decision to register belongs to you, your accountant and Inland Revenue. The checkout’s job is narrower: whichever state you are in, the paperwork coming out of it is right.
If you want to see what the invoices look like on both sides of the switch, the trial is the quickest way — set up a product, leave GST off, then turn it on and watch every figure move with it.
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