Irrigation restrictions

Use the table below to find out about irrigation restrictions for a specific area, which may relate to a consent you hold.

Only information from our irrigation restrictions table should be used for irrigation restriction purposes; information from our riverflow data page should not be used — nor should data published in newspapers. It is your responsibility to understand the minimum flow conditions imposed under your consent.

How the table works

Flow and restriction information for the following day will become available at 3pm for rivers that have flow calculated via a telemetered system and at 5pm for rivers that have flow gauged or assessed by staff in the field. Flow and restriction information in today's column will become Today's Flow and Today's Restrictions at midnight. A dash indicates flow data is not yet available. Any changes in flow and restrictions will update during this time and apply only from midnight. 

Site name
This is the site where the flow in the waterway is measured. Your consent will specify which site it is tied to.
Flow assessment

This is the current flow assessment for the relevant minimum flow site. This information is used to set restrictions on the abstractions of water, where required. It is obtained from telemetered river flow sites, manual river flow gaugings or calculated flows where the flow is estimated from a relationship to a nearby recorder. Please note the current flow assessment will not always match the flows on our riverflow data page because irrigation restrictions are based on a 24-hour average rather than an instantaneous measurement as is the case on the riverflow page.

Restriction group
Many waterways have consents with different restriction levels. Consents with the same restriction information are put into groups. To find out which group your consent comes under, click on the site name and a list of all the consents under each group will appear.
Trigger level
The trigger level is the flow at which a restriction will apply. For example, if a water take is required to cease when the river flow drops below 5.0 m³/s, the trigger level will be 5.0 m³/s. Where a consent requires the take to reduce in steps as the flow drops, the trigger level displayed will be the flow at which the next reduction will occur.
Restrictions applied

The flow assessment figure is used to determine what, if any, restriction on the taking of water is to be applied. This may be a percentage reduction in the rate or volume of the take, or a requirement to cease abstraction altogether. In situations where a Water User Group has been formed, users may go onto roster to share the available water.

Manual shut offs

If you have an irrigation device that requires a manual shut off, you no longer have to get up at midnight to turn off your irrigator. Instead, you can continue to irrigate until 9am even though technically your water take is on restriction from midnight. This enables you to safely get out and turn off the device anytime between midnight and 9am. When the irrigation restriction is removed, you cannot turn the device on at midnight if you did not cease at midnight. For example, if you turned your device off at 6am on a restriction day, you have to wait until 6am on a non-restriction day to turn it on.