This comes up constantly. The school gala wants to raffle off a hamper. The rugby club wants to raffle a signed jersey. Someone in the office wants to run a Melbourne Cup sweep. Almost always, the honest answer is: yes, you can, and you probably don't need to ask anyone's permission first. But there's a real size limit where that stops being true, and it's worth knowing exactly where it sits before you print the tickets.
The short version: it comes down to how much the prizes are worth, not how big the event feels.
New Zealand's gambling law sorts small-scale raffles and lotteries into classes based on prize value and turnover, and the rules are genuinely different at each level.
Class 1 — the smallest tier. If the total prize value and total turnover are both $500 or less, an individual person can run it, not just a club or society. No licence, no paperwork. This covers almost every genuinely small workplace sweep or office raffle. One real condition applies here: if an individual runs it, all the money (minus reasonable costs) has to go to the winners. There's no keeping a cut.
Class 2 — the school gala tier. Once prizes are worth more than $500, or turnover climbs above $500 (up to $25,000), you've moved into Class 2. This is where most school fairs, club raffles and community fundraisers actually sit. Still no licence needed, but there's a real restriction: only a society can run it, not an individual. A society here basically means an incorporated group, not one person acting alone. So a school PTA, a sports club, or an incorporated community group is fine. One person deciding to run a $2,000 raffle off their own initiative technically isn't, even for a good cause.
Class 3 — when you need an actual licence. Once prize value goes over $5,000, you need a Class 3 licence from DIA before you sell a single ticket. This is a real process, not a formality: you need to be a society with a genuine authorised purpose, and DIA reviews the application before granting a licence.
These thresholds come straight from DIA's own Classes of Gambling guidance, and the conditions attached to each — who's allowed to run it, what happens to the money — are set out in DIA's Rules for Running a Gambling Activity.
Where people actually get caught out.
It's rarely the ticket price that trips people up. It's the total prize value or the total turnover creeping past a threshold without anyone noticing, especially once a raffle grows year over year, or a few sponsors donate prizes that push the total value higher than expected. If your school raffle's prize table quietly grew from a $300 hamper last year to a $2,000 TV and a weekend away this year, it's worth actually adding up the total value before you assume last year's rules still apply.
Prizes worth $500 or less, turnover $500 or less: anyone can run it, no licence.
Prizes or turnover above that, up to $25,000, run by a club, school or incorporated group: still no licence, but it has to be the organisation running it, not an individual.
Prizes worth more than $5,000: stop, and get a Class 3 licence before you sell tickets.
If you're anywhere near that $5,000 line, it's worth working out your actual numbers properly before you commit to a prize table, rather than finding out afterward that you needed a licence you don't have. We've written a full breakdown of all four gambling classes if you want the complete picture, including what a Class 3 licence actually involves once you're past this stage.