This beach is the overall winner in our 2026 competition. Find out where it is, and the five category winners, in this story. Photo / Ewan McDonald
The Herald’s annual search for New Zealand’s Best Beach has seen readers voting in their thousands and we’re excited to now reveal the winners.
It’s two years in a row for our overall winner, and as with our 2025 results, former favourite Ōhope failed to gain a number one spot this year. One South Island beach was a category winner, and our Best Surf Beach is about to gain international attention.
This story comes slightly later than planned. Out of respect for the lives lost in the Mount Maunganui and Pāpāmoa landslides and the Northland floods, we delayed the winners announcement.
The Mount remains a firm favourite summer destination for many of our voters – it was a finalist in all four of the categories it was eligible for and was a big winner in one.
Ewan McDonald has sorted through the voting data to reveal who came out top in each of the five categories, plus the overall winner.
Shame on me.
Travel writer for decades (we don’t need to be specific), from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Cape Rēinga to deepest Fiordland.
Contributor to this campaign that celebrates all that’s great about the Kiwi summer through most of the past nine years.
But it wasn’t until we tallied our readers’ votes for this year’s Best Beaches campaign that I realised: gosh, it’s been a while since I set foot upon the sand of some of these much-loved places.
That called for a long-overdue road trip to some of your much-loved spots. Easy, because many of them were not too far as the crow – or, in my case, a trusty Swift – flies. There would be L&P. There would be Tip Top Trumpets. There might even be Sir Dave Dobbyn. Okay, maybe not that.
I headed north on a typical summer’s morning for Auckland, 2026: drizzle turning to monsoon, sky sullen as a teenager who’s just realised school goes back next week. The downpour eased when I landed on the North Shore.
A few clicks on, the Johnstone’s Hill Tunnels became a portal to a better place, the Fairly Winterless Almost Far North, now all clear blue sky and sunshine.
Turned off SH1 just shy of Whangārei for the first surprise: Waipū, remembered as a dusty one-petrol pump and one fish’n chip shop town a few years back, is now a delightfully reinvented and curated modern village with cafes, boutiques, a first-class local museum and a fine line in honouring its Scottish settler side – streets named The Braigh, Caber Lane. If ever there was a town that’s comfortable in its own kilt, it’s here.
Just 8km east along the coast, on a well-kept, winding road, basks Waipū Cove. It’s your favourite camping beach, your second-best surfing and family beach, and we’re quite happy to award it our readers’ all-round best beach for 2026 – yes, just like last year.
Parking and walking along the dunes, it’s so easy to see why. Golden sand for kilometres. Rolling waves. Rockpools for the youngsters to explore and a knee or slightly deeper stream to wade across at one end of the beach.
Lifesavers – and we should take a moment here to thank them for their service, from one end of the motu to the other.
The pitch-perfect Camp Waipū Cove is on the beach side of the road, sheltered beneath the dunes, a toddle to the sand and surf. It’s beautifully appointed and professionally maintained; there are several other first-class accommodation options as well as Airbnbs and Bookabaches.
Just past Anniversary weekend, there weren’t too many folks on the beach but it was easy to imagine the holiday crowds. There was only one surfer but he’s the lucky one.
There’s another jewel that sets this apart from many other classic Kiwi beaches: a top-class eatery. The Cove Café, tucked under the hill across the main – okay, only – road, absolutely humming even though it’s an almost out-of-season midweek lunchtime.
Lloyd Rooney, a former United Kingdom lawyer, interior designer and restaurateur, and Mike Fraser, a Kiwi farmer, moved to Aotearoa to set up a successful 2200ha beef and lamb farm in Wairamarama.
When the small cafe was up for sale, they bought it and transformed it into The Cove, serving beef and lamb from their farm. It proved such a success that they sold the farm and moved here; they now have three other restaurants in nearby Mangawhai and Whangārei.
Leaving Waipū Cove, the road twists and turns and climbs inland through native forest for a few minutes to another jawdrop: your favourite hidden gem, Langs Beach.
Now, some might suggest that it can’t be a truly secret spot if it’s so close to our champion, but ... hey, any beach with this lengthy curve of golden sand, gentle waves, scorching sun and – trust me, I counted – just one sunbathing couple and one dog-walking couple counts in my book.
On the slopes surrounding this gorgeous spot are baches: some old-timey, some that my parents would have called “flash” – but if there’s a store, I didn’t find it. And I was in need of that drink that’s world-famous in New Zealand by this time, and that iconic ice cream that you can’t beat, so kicked on to Mangawhai to find another sometime sleepy seaside village rapidly becoming a new city, and the highway south.
As I hit the inevitable traffic jam before the harbour bridge, the rain returned. I turned on the car radio for the first time that day. They were playing Dave Dobbyn.
It wasn’t the first time I’d tiki-toured some of your favourite hot spots this summer. A couple of weeks earlier, after we named your top 50 finalists, the Coromandel and Bay of Plenty called.
That roadie reminded me that Kiwis are great world travellers but sometimes we can overlook the taonga on our own doorstep: Hāhei, Tairua, Ōpoutere, Waihī Beach.
Whangamatā. Perhaps it’s the least Coromandelly of all Coromandel towns now; it’s grown up into quite ... well, if not Surfers Paradise then certainly a mini-Burleigh Heads. But you only have to go one street back from the fast-food places, the upmarket swimwear boutiques and the craft beer bars to find its soul: that wonderful crescent packed with grandparents, parents, teens and kids delighting in the Great New Zealand Summer.
At Waihī Beach, it was decision time. Home or deeper into the Bay of Plenty, to the Mount and that mainstay of our Best Beaches over the decade, Ōhope?
“You know those so well,” I told myself, “and they never really change, which is why people love them. There’s always another day”.
And there will be, for Mount Maunganui, your favourite city beach. It will take time, and tears, and most of all, aroha.
That’s my story about the Best Beaches of 2026. You can see which of the finalists our readers voted as the top three in each of our five categories in the list below.
The World Surf League agreed with you about the best surf beach, adding Manu Bay, Raglan, to its 2026 Championship Tour for the first time. From May 15–25, the top 36 men and 24 women will compete at the world-famous left-hand point break at the optimal time of year for New Zealand’s most famous wave.
Yago Dora of Brazil, the 2025 WSL world champion, is rapt, or whatever surfers say these days.
“I’ve never been to New Zealand, and I’m very happy that I will get the chance to go there for the first time and experience what seems to be a very beautiful part of the world. The place looks amazing so I’m truly excited to go there for the first time and compete at Raglan.”
Good luck, Yago, but he’ll soon find out there are 12-year-old kids in Whāingaroa Raglan who have been surfing Manu Bay since they could climb on a board, so he may be in for a shock.
Impossibly beautiful Kaiteriteri continues to fly the flag for the Mainland, once again voted the favourite family beach. The gateway – or water-taxi jetty - to Abel Tasman National Park west of Nelson, its vast campground, its sands, its gentle waves and water playground have lured southern families for decades. Now the word is getting out to northerners.
As the TripAdvisors say, there are two sides to the bay, accurately if unimaginatively named Big and Little Kaiteriteri Beach, and each has its charms.
“Both has their own unique experiences and great to explore. Big Kaiteriteri has a sheltered cove area, great for sunbathing and shallow waters for the kids to explore but watch out for strong rips. Little Kaiteriteri is a lot more private and quiet. Blue penguins can be seen. Lots of rockpools to explore and surf fishing on the south end.”
Your favourite beach
Waipū Cove, Northland
Best Camping Beach
Best Family Beach
Best Surf Beach
Best Hidden Gem
Best City Beach
Thank you for all your votes and nominations in this year’s Best Beach competition. Have a safe and happy rest of your summer.