New Zealand car hire — the gravel clause in every contract

Read this first

Three completely different rules, sold as the same product

Every supplier below rents you a car in the same country. What they permit you to do with it on an unsealed road differs so widely that the cheapest quote can be the one that leaves you carrying a five-figure loss. We read all ten sets of terms.

Supplier	Unsealed roads	What the terms actually say
JUCY	No unsealed roads	Damage cover is excluded where the vehicle is used “in any off-road conditions, including on any unsealed road”. The single exception is access roads to recognised commercial campgrounds under 12 kilometres. This is an exclusion from cover, not a driving ban — the rental agreement itself carries no gravel clause. The practical effect is the same: drive a gravel road and you carry the whole loss yourself.
Europcar	Severely conditioned	Gravel is permitted only when four conditions hold at once: the road is graded and well maintained, the distance is under 500 metres, the speed is 40km/h or less, and the sole purpose is reaching accommodation, camping or a tourist attraction. An SUV of class CFAR or above may exceed the 500-metre limit — the other three conditions still apply. Europcar also prohibits taking the vehicle between the North and South Islands in either direction, which no other supplier here does.
Ezi	Prohibition only	Prohibits driving “anywhere that is not officially designated as a road” and names specific excluded roads — but nowhere states that formed gravel is permitted. Earlier research put Ezi in the formed-gravel group. Re-reading the terms, that was wrong: the clause is a prohibition with no matching permission. Treat gravel as unresolved and ask.
Snap	Nothing published	No gravel or unsealed-road clause anywhere in the terms. A safety tip on Snap’s driving page advises slowing down on gravel, but that is advice, not a contract term. Silence is not permission — get it in writing.
Omega	Nothing published	No gravel or unsealed-road clause in the published terms.
Apex	Formed gravel OK	Permits a “sealed, metalled or gravel road”, with named roads excluded.
GO Rentals	Formed gravel OK	The plainest wording in the category: if it is “a legal and named gravel road, then you’re okay to drive it”, with named roads excluded.
Avis	Formed gravel OK	Permits a “sealed, metalled or gravel road”. The list of roads you cannot drive sits in an annexure that the published terms document references but does not contain. We could not obtain it, so we do not know which roads Avis excludes.
Budget	Formed gravel OK	Permits a “sealed, metalled or gravel road”. Same missing annexure as Avis — the excluded-roads list is referenced but not published in the terms we could retrieve.
Hertz	Formed gravel OK	Excludes roads “other than tar seal or metal” — metalled being the New Zealand term for a formed gravel road, so formed gravel is inside the permitted set.

Terms read by hand · 7 September 2026

What this means when you are standing at the counter

If your itinerary has any gravel on it — and Aoraki, Glenorchy, the Catlins and most trailheads do — JUCY and Europcar are the two to think hardest about. JUCY excludes cover on any unsealed road outright. Europcar permits gravel only under four conditions at once, one of which is a 500-metre distance limit.

Silence is not permission. Snap and Omega publish no gravel policy at all. That is not the same as allowing it — it means the question is unresolved and will be resolved by whoever holds the contract after you have already damaged the car. Ask, and get the answer in writing on the rental agreement, not in a phone call.

Ezi is the one we got wrong first time. We had Ezi filed as permitting formed gravel. Re-reading the terms before publishing, there is no such permission — only a prohibition on undesignated roads and a list of named exclusions. We corrected it rather than shipping it.

The roads that are named

Even suppliers that permit formed gravel exclude specific roads by name. Drive one and you are uninsured on it, whatever cover you bought. This is every road we found named in a supplier’s own terms, and who names it.

Road	Where	Named by
Skippers Canyon	Queenstown	Europcar, Hertz, GO Rentals, Ezi, Apex
The road to Macetown	Arrowtown	Europcar, Hertz, GO Rentals, Ezi, Apex
Ninety Mile Beach	Northland	Europcar, Hertz, GO Rentals, Ezi
Ball Hut Road / Tasman Valley Road	Aoraki / Mt Cook	Europcar, Hertz, GO Rentals, Ezi
Te Paki Stream bed	Northland	GO Rentals, Ezi
Glenorchy–Paradise Road	Head of Lake Wakatipu	Ezi, Apex
Matukituki Road	Wanaka	Apex
Deer Park Heights	Queenstown	Ezi
North of Colville	Coromandel	Europcar
Tapu–Coroglen inland road	Coromandel	Europcar, Ezi

The Crown Range is not on this list, and that is deliberate. It gets described as a rental-car exclusion all over the internet. We checked the full terms of all ten suppliers here plus Sixt and Thrifty: not one of them names it. New Zealand’s highest sealed road is steep and it closes in snow, but no supplier we read forbids it.

Two lists are missing and we will not pretend otherwise. Avis and Budget both reference an annexure titled “where you cannot drive the vehicle”, and neither annexure is present in the terms document they publish. So we can tell you Avis and Budget permit formed gravel, and we cannot tell you which roads they carve out. Ask them directly before you commit to a route.

What you are on the hook for

The standard excess is the amount you pay before any cover starts. Half the suppliers here do not publish it in advance at all.

Supplier	Standard excess before any reduction (NZD)
JUCY	Up to $7,500 JUCY no longer publishes one flat figure. Its terms cap the maximum excess liability at $7,500 per event, with the actual amount shown at booking. An older 2022 document quoting $3,000 is superseded — we removed that number before publishing it.
Europcar	Not published Refers to the figure printed on your rental agreement. Nothing published in advance.
Ezi	$5,999 to $7,000 Ezi publishes a range rather than per-class figures, “depending on the category”.
Snap	$3,000 The default Limited Cover excess, alongside a $2,000 bond.
Omega	$3,500 A single flat figure — the lowest standard excess we found in New Zealand.
Apex	Not published No standard excess published. The figure appears on the rental document.
GO Rentals	Not published No standard excess published in advance.
Avis	$5,900 / $6,900 / $7,500 By vehicle group; $7,500 applies to the Signature Series.
Budget	$5,900 / $6,900 By vehicle group: smaller cars at the lower figure.
Hertz	$5,500 / $6,001 / $7,200 By vehicle class. Read off an FAQ document on Hertz’s own server that carries no effective date, so we cannot date these figures — confirm at the counter.

What the excess actually is, and why the hold on your card is a separate number →

Where this site earns, and what it doesn’t tell you

Everything above compares what the ten suppliers permit in their contracts. It does not compare what they charge — New Zealand car hire is priced dynamically by date and depot, so any price we printed would be wrong within a day.

For the booking itself, QEEQ is an aggregator that carries New Zealand inventory, and it is the one link in this section we earn a commission from. That is the whole of our commercial interest in car hire — we have no relationship with any supplier named on this page, which is why we can say JUCY voids your cover on gravel without it costing us anything.

Whoever you book through, the contract you sign is the supplier’s, not the booking site’s. The gravel clause above is the one to check before you pay.

Check New Zealand prices on QEEQ →

Two fees that change the total

An extra driver and a one-way drop are the two additions most New Zealand itineraries need. The spread is wider than it looks.

Supplier	Additional driver	One-way fee
Apex	No charge	Nil
Snap	$3 per day	Not published
Ezi	$5 per day	Not published
Hertz	$5.50	Not published
GO Rentals	$15 per rental	$100 to $1,000
Omega	Not published	Nil between Omega depots

Two corrections worth stating, because we nearly published both wrong. Hertz charges $5.50 for an additional driver with no per-day qualifier anywhere in its wording. GO Rentals charges $15 per additional driver per rental, not per day — on a two-week hire, publishing that as a daily rate would have overstated it by $195.

Apex charges for neither, which on a two-driver one-way South Island loop is a real difference rather than a rounding one.

Your Australian licence

You do not need an International Driving Permit. New Zealand requires a translation only where the licence is not in English, and an IDP is simply one accepted form of translation. An Australian licence is already in English.

On how long you may drive on it, the official position is changing. The transport agency’s current factsheet says you can drive on an overseas car licence for up to 18 months from your last date of entry, and that from 1 November 2026 this reduces to 12 months. Motorcycle and heavy-vehicle licences are already at 12. If you are reading this after 1 November 2026, assume 12 and check the factsheet linked below.

How we checked this

Every clause on this page came from the supplier’s own terms document or rental agreement. No blogs, no aggregators, no comparison sites — the wording matters too much to take secondhand. Where a supplier publishes nothing, the table says so instead of filling the gap.

Six claims did not survive that check and were corrected before this page went up: JUCY’s excess, Ezi’s gravel position, the Hertz and GO Rentals driver fees, the licence duration, and a Crown Range restriction that turned out not to exist. We mention it because a page like this is only worth reading if the errors get caught before you do.