Free Elevation Data for New Zealand
New Zealand publishes one of the best national elevation datasets in the world and gives it away under an open licence. Here is where it lives, what you are allowed to do with it, and where the real cost actually sits.
What New Zealand gives away
Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand publishes the country's elevation data under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. No fee, no account, no restriction on commercial use, no per-seat licensing. Attribution is the only condition.
This is worth pausing on, because it is not the norm. In much of the world national LiDAR is either paid, restricted to government and academia, or released at a resolution too coarse to be useful. New Zealand released the lot.
| Dataset | Resolution | What it is good for |
|---|---|---|
| National LiDAR DEM | 1 m | Bare-earth ground surface. Contours below 5 m, slope, drainage, earthworks, building platforms — anything where half a metre matters. |
| National LiDAR DSM | 1 m | Top of everything — canopy, roofs, powerlines. Shading, line of sight, canopy height. |
| National 8 m DEM | 8 m | Nationwide cover including areas never flown. Regional terrain picture and cartography — not terrain analysis. |
| Point clouds (LAZ) | varies | The raw LiDAR returns, before gridding. Custom classification and vegetation work. |
| Topo50 / Topo250 contours | 20 m interval | The official topographic map series contours, as vectors. |
| Hillshade and basemap tiles | n/a | Pre-rendered relief, topographic and aerial tiles for dropping straight into a web map. |
Where to get it
All of it is the same underlying data, published four ways for four different needs. Picking the wrong one is the most common way to waste an afternoon.
- LINZ Data Service — browse and download a specific layer or survey, or stream it into QGIS or ArcGIS over WMTS and WFS. Start here if you want a named dataset as a file.
- Registry of Open Data on AWS — the whole national collection as Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs with STAC metadata in the
nz-elevationbucket, no AWS account required. Best for bulk and for anything programmatic; it is what this site reads. - LINZ Basemaps — rendered tiles rather than data. Use it when you want terrain behind a web map and are not measuring anything.
- github.com/linz/elevation — LINZ's own documentation of how the open collections are structured. Read this before writing anything that walks the catalogue.
International mirrors carry New Zealand data too: OpenTopography hosts several NZ point-cloud datasets, and Open Topo Data exposes the 8 m national DEM through a free public elevation API.
Check what exists over your area first
Coverage and capture year vary by region — 1 m LiDAR in one valley and 8 m interpolation in the next. Search any address before you commit to a download.
Check LiDAR coverage →What the licence actually allows
CC BY 4.0 is genuinely permissive, and people routinely assume it is more restrictive than it is. Under it you may:
- use the data commercially, including in paid client work;
- redistribute it, in whole or in part;
- create and sell derived works — contour plans, maps, models, reports;
- modify, reproject, resample and combine it with other data.
The condition is attribution, and it is more specific than most people realise. LINZ's attribution requirements ask for:
Sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed by (the licensor) for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
The licensor is usually not LINZ. This is the part that trips people up. LINZ hosts and processes the national elevation dataset, but copyright in each individual survey belongs to whoever paid for the flight — Auckland Council, Environment Canterbury, BOPLASS, Waikato Regional Council, Nelson City Council, NIWA, Waka Kotahi and around thirty others. LINZ publishes a table naming the licensor for every layer and asks that the right one be credited. Attributing a Christchurch survey to LINZ rather than Environment Canterbury is a licence breach, however well-intentioned.
For web applications a short form is permitted — “Sourced from LINZ. CC BY 4.0” with a link back to the attribution page, which is what the footer of this site uses. For anything downloadable the full statement applies, which is why every file exported from here carries it with the licensors for that area named: the GeoJSON has it as a member, the DXF as header comments, the KML in its description, and the data bundle in its README.
You can look any survey's licensor up yourself on the coverage page, which lists all 104 of them with the licensor for each.
Free data is not the same as a free answer
This is the part worth being straight about. The data costs nothing. Turning it into something you can act on costs time, and that is true whichever route you take.
Say you want contour lines at 0.5 m over one rural property. Working from the raw data, that is: find which tiles cover the property, download them, mosaic them, reproject from NZTM2000 if your other data is in WGS84, clip to the title boundary, generate contours at your chosen interval, tidy the artefacts around water and nodata, and export to DXF for whoever asked. QGIS does all of it and QGIS is free. It is still an afternoon the first time.
Every tool built on this data — including this one — exists to remove that afternoon. It is worth knowing that is what you are choosing between, rather than assuming a paid tool has better data. In New Zealand it almost certainly does not: there is one national elevation dataset and everybody is reading the same one.
Skip the GeoTIFFs
Same open LINZ data, no download, no GIS install. Pick an area or click a property boundary and get the output rather than the input.
Doing it yourself in QGIS
If you would rather own the workflow, the honest short version:
- Install QGIS. It is free, open source and the standard tool for this.
- Find your tiles on the LINZ Data Service, or point QGIS at the STAC catalogue in the
nz-elevationbucket to stream Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs without downloading whole files. - Mind the projection. The national elevation data is NZTM2000 (EPSG:2193), not WGS84 — mixing them silently is the most common source of a result that looks almost right.
- Clip to your area of interest before processing, not after. Contouring a whole survey to keep one paddock is how an afternoon becomes a day.
- Use Raster → Extraction → Contour for contours, and the GDAL DEM tools for slope, aspect and hillshade.
Our guide to downloading DEM data goes through this in more detail, including what DEM, DSM and DTM actually mean and which one you want.
Data sources and further reading
Everything described on this page comes from these sources. All of them are free, openly licensed and maintained by LINZ or an official mirror.
Primary sources
- LINZ — Elevation data — The programme itself: what has been captured, the specifications it was captured to, and how the national coverage was funded.
- LINZ Data Service — Browse and download individual survey layers, or stream them into GIS software over WMTS and WFS.
- Registry of Open Data on AWS — New Zealand Elevation — The whole national collection as Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs with STAC metadata in the nz-elevation S3 bucket, no AWS account required. This is what this site reads.
- github.com/linz/elevation — LINZ's own documentation of the open elevation data, including how the STAC collections are laid out.
- LINZ Basemaps — Pre-rendered elevation, hillshade and aerial tiles for putting terrain behind a web map without processing anything.
- LINZ — LiDAR data coverage — LINZ's own coverage overview for the national programme.
Mirrors, APIs and related datasets
- OpenTopography — Hosts several New Zealand LiDAR point-cloud datasets alongside global topography, with processing tools for raw returns.
- Open Topo Data — NZ DEM — Serves the 8 m national DEM through a free public elevation API, and documents its provenance and projection clearly.
- NZ 8 m Digital Elevation Model — The contour-interpolated national DEM that fills the gaps outside LiDAR coverage — useful context for what the fallback actually is.
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — The licence every dataset above is published under. Commercial use is fine; attribution to LINZ is required.
Related guides
- LiDAR coverage in New Zealand — check resolution and capture year for any address.
- Download DEM data for New Zealand — DEM, DSM and DTM explained, and how to get the raw files.
- LiDAR data for New Zealand — what LiDAR is and how the national programme came about.
- Contour lines for New Zealand — generating and exporting contours in every format.
- Custom topographic maps — how these differ from the official Topo50 sheets.
Frequently asked questions
Is elevation data free in New Zealand?
Yes. Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand publishes the national elevation dataset — 104 LiDAR surveys flown between 2008 and 2026, plus a national 8 m DEM — under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. There is no charge, no licence fee and no restriction on commercial use. The only condition is attribution. New Zealand is unusual in this; in many countries the equivalent data is either paid or restricted.
Can I use free LINZ elevation data commercially?
Yes. CC BY 4.0 explicitly permits commercial use, redistribution and the creation of derived works. You can put LINZ-derived contours in a client deliverable, sell a product built on the data, or publish maps from it. What you must do is attribute it correctly, and that is more specific than most people assume — LINZ asks for "Sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed by (the licensor) for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence", naming the body that commissioned the survey rather than LINZ itself.
Who exactly do I credit for LINZ elevation data?
Not LINZ, in most cases. LINZ hosts and processes the national elevation dataset, but copyright in each LiDAR survey belongs to whoever commissioned it — Auckland Council, Environment Canterbury, BOPLASS, Waikato Regional Council, NIWA, Waka Kotahi and around thirty others. LINZ publishes a table naming the licensor for every layer, and asks that the correct one be named in the attribution. A short form, "Sourced from LINZ. CC BY 4.0" with a link to the attribution page, is permitted for web applications. Every file this site exports names the licensors whose surveys cover the area, so you do not have to look them up.
What is the catch with free elevation data?
The data is genuinely free and genuinely good. The cost is in using it. A single 1 m LiDAR tile is a large GeoTIFF in NZTM2000, and turning a stack of them into a contour map means downloading the right tiles, mosaicking, reprojecting, clipping to your area, generating contours at an interval you choose, and exporting to a format your software reads. That is an afternoon in QGIS the first time and a competent half hour after that. Every tool that sits on top of this data is charging for that work, not for the data.
Where can I download free DEM data for New Zealand?
Three official places, each suited to a different need. The LINZ Data Service is best for grabbing a specific survey or layer as a file. The Registry of Open Data on AWS carries the whole national collection as Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs with STAC metadata and needs no AWS account — best for bulk or programmatic access. LINZ Basemaps serves pre-rendered elevation, hillshade and topographic tiles for use straight in a web map.
How accurate is the free data?
Where 1 m LiDAR exists, vertical accuracy is typically in the tens of centimetres, inherited from the survey specification for that region. Outside LiDAR coverage the fallback is the national 8 m DEM, interpolated from 20 m contour lines, which LINZ describes as suitable for cartographic visualisation only and not for terrain analysis. The distinction matters more than the price does — check coverage for your area before you rely on it.
Do I need GIS software to use free elevation data?
To work with the raw files, yes — QGIS is free and capable, and it is the standard route. To get a result rather than a file, no. This site reads the same open data and returns contours, slope, drainage, profiles and terrain reports directly in the browser, which is the difference between having the data and having the answer.