Welcome to Experience Rating
Your business is part of our Experience Rating programme. Experience Rating aims to make the levy you pay fairer, by reflecting a business's health and safety performance in its ACC Work levy.
We want all workplaces in New Zealand to be as safe as possible. At ACC we see that healthy and safe workplaces are likely to have fewer claims and employee days off.
To better understand your health and safety performance we take a look at your business's claims history. We then calculate an Experience Rating adjustment and add that to your Work levy. You can see this adjustment on the second page of your 2021/22 Work levy invoice.
How Experience Rating works
Once your business has been running for more than three years, we'll have a good picture of what your claims history looks like.
If your business Work levy is $10,000 or more for three years in a row, you'll be part of the Experience Rating programme. If it's less than $10,000 your business will be in our No Claims Discount programme.
Understanding the Experience Rating programme
Through the Experience Rating programme, you could get a discount of up to 50% off your Work levy, or have up to 100% added to your work levy.
We look at your claims history for work-related injuries over the three year period. By comparing this against something called your levy risk group, we then work out if you’ll get a discount or a loading, and by how much.
We look at:
- the number of weekly compensation days your employees have
- the number of claims for your employees with medical costs of over $500
- any accidental death claims.
Older claims carry less weighting, putting more emphasis on your more recent claims experience.
We use the final adjustment to calculate your Work levy. Your levy can stay the same, have a discount, or have a loading added.
This means you have the ability to reduce your Work levy by preventing injuries at work and helping your injured employees recover and get back to work sooner. And in doing so, you'll be creating a more productive work environment.
It's worth remembering that your Experience Rating adjustment is one of three components used to calculate your Work levy. We also consider your classification unit (CU) and liable payroll information. These are all outlined on the second page of your 2021/22 Work levy invoice.
If you own more than one business
If you're the majority shareholder of more than one business, we may group these businesses together.
If the group collectively pays a work levy of $10,000 or more for three years in a row, it'll get an Experience Rating adjustment reflecting the performance of the entire group. Each member will still receive its individual invoice based on their CU and liable payroll, with the group's adjustment applied to the Work levy.
Keeping track of your claims history and its impact on your levy
Experience Rating considers three years of claims history. So it's important to keep an eye on how you're tracking and take steps to improve as early as possible.
This is important, as it may take a while for improvements to have an impact on your claims performance. Making changes today could mean you see an improvement in your Experience Rating adjustment within two years.
We publish quarterly claims reports that help you track your claims performance.
When you're sent your levy invoice, we also publish an information sheet that gives you more detail on how we calculate your Experience Rating adjustment. Both of these are only available on MyACC for Business so it's important you're registered for this and can access them.
We're here to support you. This can include:
- explaining in more detail your ER adjustment (and invoice) and how it was calculated
- having a conversation about your claims performance and how you might go about improving it.
To get in touch, contact our Business team:
Phone 0800 222 776
Email business@acc.co.nz
What do I get from the levies I pay?
The Work levy you pay protects and insures your most valuable asset – you and your people.
If you or an employee has an accident, we help pay for and support their recovery. This includes treatment, health, rehabilitation and support services, support returning to work, and temporary cover for loss of income.
It also goes towards helping prevent these accidents from happening in the first place.
You can better understand who pays levies and how they support New Zealand in the levies section of our website.