Injury claim statistics
We collect data on all claims we receive. This includes how many claims we accept, where the injury happened, and how quickly we accept a claim for an injury.
We accept claims for injuries that happen anywhere in New Zealand – in the home, at work, on the road, or when playing sport.
Our no-fault scheme covers everyone. No matter what you were doing when you were injured or who was at fault. We’ll support you if the injury falls within our legislation.
We can help pay for medical bills, treatment, support at home and work, and help cover your income if you can’t work.
We collect data on all of this. We do this to improve the support we give you and better inform what levies we need to collect.
Category and timeliness of the claims we accept
We classify claims as 'non-complicated' and 'complicated'.
Non-complicated claims
These claims fit within the rules of the Accident Compensation Act 2001. This means we can assess them quicker, with 97% of them decided within one week in the 2018/19 financial year.
We accepted
Of these new claims,
Of new claims,
Complicated claims
These claims also fit within the rules of the Act but need thorough investigation before we can accept them. On average, a complicated claim cover decision takes 57 days. Complicated claims make up 2.3% of all new claims in the 2018/19 financial year.
Complicated claims include:
- treatment injuries
- sensitive claims eg sexual violence
- work-related hearing loss
- work-related injury that happens over time
- work-related mental injury
- claims where there are more than 12 months between the injury and lodging a claim.
Find out more about how we assess claims:
How we support New Zealanders
Between 1 July 2018 and 30 June 2019, new claims cost us around $2 billion. Ongoing claims from previous years cost a further $2.9 billion.
Most claims are for straight-forward injuries where we only pay for treatment. These kinds of injuries currently make up 94% of our claims.
Here's some of the treatment we fund that makes up the $2 billion cost of new injury claims:
We paid
We paid
We paid
If you're recovering from a more significant injury, we want you to have access to the right level of support, at the right time. This can include weekly financial support if you can't work due to your injury. We call this weekly compensation.
We provided 126,077 people with weekly compensation because they couldn't work due to their injuries.
We paid $1.3 billion to financially support New Zealanders when they couldn't work.
When you ask for more support, we must first work out if we can pay for it. Sometimes we can't pay for more support, even when we've accepted a claim.
There are several reasons for declining support. We made 111,085 decline decisions between 1 July 2018 and 30 June 2019. This includes declining cover or requests for support on claims.