Nau mai, haere mai ki Te Papaioea. Palmerston North is the flat, green, unpretentious city at the crossroads of the lower North Island — a university town with a base hospital, among the cheapest housing in the North Island, and mountains on the horizon from almost every street.
The city people underestimate
Palmerston North sits in the middle of the Manawatū plain, an hour and a half or so north of Wellington, with the Tararua and Ruahine ranges rising to the east and thirty kilometres of dune coast to the west. It is a city of around ninety thousand people built almost entirely on the flat, which makes it the easiest place in New Zealand to cycle and one of the easiest to park.
Two things shape it. The first is Massey University, whose main campus sits just south of the river and gives the city a young, international, research-driven character that a place this size would not otherwise have. The second is the hospital — the base hospital for the wider region, and one of a small number of centres in the country delivering radiation oncology.
What the city buys you is straightforward: a clinical salary that goes further here than almost anywhere else in the North Island, a ten-minute commute, and the ranges at the weekend. What it costs you is glamour. Nobody moves to Palmerston North for the skyline. People move here, and then find they do not want to leave.
- Ethicare is a healthcare recruitment company. This guide is free to read, asks nothing of you, and does not give visa advice.
- Palmerston North is the city we most often have to persuade people to look at, and the one they most often thank us for afterwards. Where we think it’s the wrong answer, we say so.
The city, in nine numbers
Six things you only learn once you’re here
- Te Papaioea is the city’s name in te reo Māori, and this is the rohe of Rangitāne o Manawatū. The central square is Te Marae o Hine, the courtyard of the daughter of peace — a name given as a commitment that all peoples would live here together peacefully.
- You’re not expected to arrive fluent. You are expected to try. Te ao Māori at work covers pronunciation and the words you’ll hear on the ward.
How to read this guide
Nine chapters, all of them about Palmerston North specifically. Anything true of New Zealand generally — visas, registration, tax, renting law, driving licences, schools — lives once in Moving to New Zealand.
If you read nothing else, read Why Palmerston North for the full case — and what we’d ask you to weigh, and Healthcare here, because the clinical offer in this city is more interesting than its size suggests.