Dog bite related
Find statistics related to dog bite injuries on this page.
Data covers the date range, 1 January 2026 to 30 June 2026.
- Dog bites are defined as claims where the injury is coded as “Dog bite” or the accident description contains words like “bite”, “bit”, “bitten”, “attack” or “maul” and also contains “dog” or “puppy”, allowing for some spelling variations.
- The accident description is a non-mandatory free-text field on the ACC45 form. The nature and quality of responses varies. These data should therefore be considered indicative, but not a definitive count of claims.
- Claims managed by Accredited Employers on behalf of ACC have been included. Due to limitations in the data provided to ACC, these claims are only identified where the injury is coded as “Dog bite”.
- New claims counts the number of new claims that were lodged with ACC in each period. This can be any time after an injury occurred.
- Active claims are counted where the claim received at least one payment within the specified period. A claim was not necessarily lodged or had the accident occur within this time period.
- A claim may be active in more than one calendar year and will be counted once in each relevant year in which at least one payment was made.
- Active Costs are the GST exclusive cost of payments made for claims that were active in the specified period.
- The cost of public hospital services during the acute stage of an injury is covered under the Public Health Acute Services (PHAS) regulations. These services are bulk-funded and not attributed to individual claims, so cannot be included in these data.
- The calendar year in which the service was paid may differ to the calendar year in which the service was provided.
- All included claims and injuries are accepted for cover
- Data are displayed in calendar years.
- Data were extracted on 7 July 2026 and may differ if rerun later.
New claims
7,453
in 2026 YTD
Active claims
7,270
in 2026 YTD
Active costs
$4,948,115
in 2026 YTD
Top 3 most prevalent primary diagnoses
Laceration / Puncture / Sting
6,527
in 2026 YTD
Soft tissue injury
227
in 2026 YTD
Fracture / Dislocation
46
in 2026 YTD