Next high tide at Wellington Harbour: 01:00 GMT+12, 0.61 m

Tide curve — next 24 hours

Predictions: Open-Meteo Marine (MeteoFrance SMOC, 0.08° grid) — heights relative to MSL (not chart datum / LAT). Model-derived.

Model-derived from a global ocean grid. Useful indication; expect about ±45 minutes on average vs. a local harmonic gauge, individual stations vary widely. See /methodology for per-region detail. Not for navigation.

Best windows Tue 28 Apr

Suggested time slots at Wellington Harbour, derived from the tide, sun, moon, and conditions data on this page. Rough guidance, not a forecast.

• Tidepooling
  Around 20:00, lowest tide today
  Tide drops to -0.28 m for about an hour either side
  Confidence: high
  7-day tidepooling strip →
• Photography
  Around 07:04, sunrise on a low tide
  Golden hour lands within 56 min of low water
  Confidence: medium
  7-day photography strip →

Spring & neap tides at Wellington Harbour

Last spring tide on Mon 27 Apr (range 0.9m). Next neap on Fri 01 May.

Spring tides cluster around new and full moons (biggest swings). Neap tides land on quarter moons (smallest swings). See the spring tide and neap tide glossary entries for the why.

About tides at Wellington Harbour

Wellington sits on the southern tip of the North Island of New Zealand, on a deep harbour ringed by Mount Victoria, the central business district at Lambton Quay, the Te Papa museum precinct on the waterfront, and the Eastbourne suburbs across the harbour on the eastern shore. The harbour opens south through the entrance at Pencarrow Head into Cook Strait — the 22-kilometre channel separating the North and South Islands and one of the most challenging stretches of water in the South Pacific. The tide here is a moderate semidiurnal signal — two highs and two lows of comparable size each day, twelve and a half hours apart — with a mean range at the harbour reference gauge of about 1.0 metre, climbing past 1.4 metres on spring tides and dropping near 0.6 on neaps. The pattern is small in absolute terms because the city sits close to the amphidromic node of the New Zealand tidal regime, where the propagating tide partially cancels itself out by phase opposition. What matters more on a day-to-day basis is Cook Strait current, which runs hard between the two islands at the change of tide — the Interislander and Bluebridge ferries between Wellington and Picton on the South Island time their passages around the slack, and the strait can produce four-metre confused seas when the tide opposes a southerly gale. The Wellington fault runs directly under the harbour and the city's seawalls were rebuilt and reinforced after the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, which uplifted the South Island coast across the strait by up to six metres in places and changed the rocky intertidal at Kaikōura wholesale. Oriental Bay's beach, the rocky intertidal at Lyall Bay and Houghton Bay south of the airport, the working container port at Aotea Quay, the Te Atatū side of Eastbourne and Days Bay across the harbour, and the windswept south coast at Red Rocks where the wave-cut platform reveals fur-seal haul-out colonies in winter all read the table for different windows. Open-Meteo Marine drives the gridded predictions on this page; for authoritative New Zealand tide data, Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) publishes the official tide tables and operates the Wellington Harbour reference gauge.

Common questions about tides at Wellington Harbour