LiDAR Coverage in New Zealand

Whether there is 1 m LiDAR over your place, what year it was flown, and what you get where there isn't any. 104 LINZ surveys across 16 regions, 2008–2026.

Coverage is a question with three parts

“Is there LiDAR here?” sounds like a yes or no, but the answer that actually helps has three parts, and most coverage maps only give you the first.

1. Is the area flown at all? Most of populated New Zealand is. The gaps are in remote alpine and back-country terrain.
2. When was it flown? This is the part that decides whether you can trust the data for a decision. A digital elevation model records the ground on the day of the flight, and the ground moves — earthworks, subdivision, forestry, slips, river migration.
3. Which product exists? Bare-earth DEM, surface DSM, or both. They answer different questions and are not interchangeable.

The checker above answers all three for a specific point, and the index further down lets you browse every survey by region.

How the coverage check works

There are two ways to answer “is this point covered”, and they disagree more often than you would expect.

The quick way is to test the point against a survey's published extent. That is what a survey index gives you, and it is what most coverage maps show. The problem is that an extent is a rectangle drawn around an irregular flight footprint. A property near the edge of a survey can sit comfortably inside the rectangle while the actual flight lines stopped at the ridge behind it.

The reliable way is to read the elevation data. The checker above samples the real 1 m LiDAR raster around your point and reports what proportion came back from LiDAR versus the 8 m fallback. Zero fallback means genuine LiDAR; a mix means you are on a survey boundary. Once the data confirms something is there, the survey catalogue supplies the name, the capture years and who commissioned the flight.

What you get where there is no LiDAR

Elevation does not simply stop outside a survey. It falls back to the national 8 m DEM, which LINZ produced in 2011 by interpolating the 20 m contour lines from the 1:50,000 topographic map series. LINZ's own description of it is unusually direct: suitable for cartographic visualisation purposes only. Not suitable for terrain analysis.

That distinction has practical consequences:

• Contour intervals below about 5 m are meaningless on 8 m data — the source contours were 20 m apart, so anything finer is invented by the interpolation.
• Slope and aspect on gentle ground are unreliable. On a 3° paddock the 8 m DEM's own noise is larger than the signal.
• Building platforms, drainage and cut-and-fill need LiDAR. Half a metre matters, and the 8 m DEM cannot see half a metre.

It remains genuinely useful for the shape of a catchment, a regional terrain picture, or a hillshade backdrop. Every result this site produces states what proportion came from the fallback, so a mixed answer is never passed off as LiDAR.

DEM or DSM — which one you want

This site's tools read the DEM, because the questions it answers — contours, slope, viewshed, drainage, terrain reports — are all ground questions. Both products are published for most surveys and both are free.

Every LiDAR survey in New Zealand, by region

104 surveys across 16 regions, 12,584 tiles in total, taken straight from the LINZ STAC catalogue on the Registry of Open Data on AWS. Last refreshed 2026-08-16.

Where the data lives

All of it is the same underlying survey data, published four ways for four different needs.

• LINZ Data Service — browse and download individual layers, or stream them into GIS software over WMTS and WFS. This is where you go for a specific survey as a file.
• Registry of Open Data on AWS — the whole national collection as Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs with STAC metadata in the nz-elevation S3 bucket, no AWS account needed. Best for bulk and for programmatic access; it is what this site reads.
• github.com/linz/elevation — LINZ's own documentation of the open elevation data, including how the collections are structured.
• LINZ Basemaps — pre-rendered elevation and hillshade tiles for putting terrain behind a web map without processing anything.

International mirrors carry it too: OpenTopography hosts several New Zealand point-cloud datasets, and Open Topo Data serves the 8 m national DEM through a public elevation API.

Working with coverage in this tool

Every result on this site reads the national 1 m mosaic — the union of all 104 surveys — and drops to the 8 m DEM only where it has to. Because the two get mixed at survey edges, every contour set, profile and terrain report states what proportion of the area came from the fallback, so you always know which data a number rests on.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• LiDAR data for New Zealand — what LiDAR is, how the National Elevation Programme was funded and what the data can do.
• Download DEM data for New Zealand — DEM, DSM and DTM explained, and how to get the raw files.
• Slope maps for building consent — why capture year and resolution matter when a council is reading your plans.
• Contour maps for a property — generate contours over a legal title boundary.
• Contour lines for New Zealand — every export format and how to pick an interval.