New Zealand mandated audit partner rotation regulations for New Zealand Exchange (NZX) entities in May 2004, since then audit partner rotation policies have been implemented for Financial Markets Conduct entities and entities overseen by the Office of the Auditor General. Time-on periods for engagement partners range from five to seven-year followed by a five-year cooling-off period. Rotation policies also apply to engagement quality control reviewers and other key audit partners. The multi-dimensional structure of rotation regulations that have been implemented aligns New Zealand with countries that have significantly larger populations and GDP’s. The purpose of audit partner rotation is to reduce the ‘familiarity threat’ and increase independence between the engagement partner and client. The incoming audit partner should also bring a ‘fresh perspective’ to the engagement to increase audit quality and efficiencies. Using semi-structured interviews to conduct a qualitative study, the purpose of which is to discover how audit partners perceive mandatory audit partner rotation and what the implications are from transposing audit partner rotation regulations from large-scale economies to a small-scale economy. Fifteen interviewees were selected consisting of Big Four and non-Big Four audit partners. The research design for this study was to replicate a study done by Braun and Clark (2006) using thematic analysis to analyse the qualitative data and to document the real-life experiences of audit partners following a change to their realities. The key findings and conclusions from this study are that regulators have chosen to align New Zealand audit partner rotation policies to large-scale economises rather than ‘right size’ them to New Zealand’s demographic environment. Audit partners perceive that mandatory audit partner rotation disproportionately disadvantage small to mid-sized audit firms due to limited audit partner resources. The implications of which has been that a number of small audit firms have left the registered audit firms market increasing market concentration. Extended cooling-off periods are the biggest challenge to audit firms.