This article sets out to demonstrate the considerable extent to which the New Zealand school system has become saturated by private interests, and to explain this development over time. It is the first such overview of the privatisation of schooling in the New Zealand context. The analysis illustrates that the rise of private actors has involved some long-term factors such as demographic and cultural features of New Zealand society as well as market and managerialist politics that have reduced state resources to schools and to the agencies that support them. More immediate enablers have been created by moments of crisis and the needs of particular policies. The article concludes by arguing that further attention needs to be paid to the complex histories of private sector involvement in education, especially when the conditions supporting private actors have often been piecemeal, uncertain, and serendipitous.