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 99% of them decided within one week in 2021.
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 70 days. Complicated claims made up 2.3% of all new claims in 2021.
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
In 2021 new claims cost us around $1.5 billion. Ongoing claims from previous years cost a further $3.0 billion.
Most claims are for straight-forward injuries where we only pay for treatment. These kinds of injuries currently make up 93% of our claims.
Here's some of the support we fund that makes up the $4.5 billion cost of active 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 133,805 people with weekly compensation because they couldn't work due to their injuries.
We paid $1.8 billion to financially support New Zealanders when they couldn't work.
There are several reasons for declining support and we made 42,115 decline decisions in 2021.
- Claims are included where the cover decision is accepted or declined. Held and duplicate claims have been excluded.
- Claims managed by an accredited employer have been excluded.
- On the road injuries are counted where the claim is funded from the motor vehicle account.
- At work injuries are counted where the claim is funded from the work account or the at work indicator is ‘Y’.
- Sport & Rec injuries are counted where the claim has a sport indicator.
- Falls at home and in the community are counted where the cause is ‘Slipping, skidding on foot’, ‘Loss of consciousness / sleep’, ‘Something giving way underfoot’, ‘Misjudgement on support’ or ‘Loss of balance / personal control’.
- Injuries at home and in the community are all remaining claims that are not counted in one of other categories
- Types of injuries are presented as mutually exclusive in the following priority: On the road, At work, Sport & Rec, Fall at home / community and Injuries at home / community where Injuries at home / community. Claims where more than one of the categories applies will be counted only in the highest priority relevant category. For example, a bus driver who is injured when crashing a bus will appear in On the road and not At work despite this being a work related injury.
- New claims are counted where ACC registered the claim between 1 January and 31 December 2021. A claim may be registered immediately following an accident or at any later stage.
- New claim costs are payments made between 1 January and 31 December 2021 for claims registered between 1 January and 31 December 2021.
- Active claims costs are all payments made between 1 January and 31 December 2021. This include payments to claims registered in a previous year.
- Costs are exclusive of GST.
- Costs do not include Public Health Acute Services (PHAS) payments. These costs are for treatment in a public hospital during the acute phase of an injury and are covered by bulk payments made by ACC to the Crown. As such, these payments cannot be attributed to individual claims.
- Data was extracted at a point in time and may differ if re-run later.