Report
ACC road claims cost $14,500 each, sport about $810, and home injuries take more compensated days than work and road combined
Source: ACC, Injuries in New Zealand report acts as call to action
ACC's 2025 injury report never says what each kind of injury costs per claim. Its own numbers put a road claim at $14,500 and a sport claim near $810, a gap of 18 times. Injuries at home took more paid time off work than work and road injuries combined.
By Henry Smith · ACC · 2026-06-17
What this means for you Most of the paid time off work in ACC's data comes from injuries at home and in sport, not on the job. For those injuries ACC pays nothing for the first week off, then at most 80 per cent of earnings. Across an absence of a month to six months, a household leaning on ACC alone gets back 60 to 77 per cent of its normal pay.
A road injury costs ACC $14,500 a claim on average. A sport injury works out near $810 once you divide ACC's own published totals. So one road claim costs ACC about what 18 sport claims cost, and that gap appears nowhere in the report the numbers come from (ACC, 17 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026).
The number that matters more to most households is the one about home. Injuries at home produced 6.4 million days of weekly compensation in 2025, ACC's name for the money it pays people too injured to work. Work injuries produced 4.7 million days, road injuries 1.3 million. Home beats the two put together (same source).
What did ACC publish?
ACC put out its annual report, Injuries in New Zealand: Insights from 2025, on 17 June 2026 as a newsroom story. It "accepted more than two million injury claims last year". Injuries caused over 20 million days away from work in 2025 (ACC, 17 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026).
The story then splits the year up by where people got hurt. Home gets one sentence, quoted in full here because the wording matters later: "Last year, 37,000 home injuries resulted in 6.4 million days of weekly compensation and $2.7 billion in lost productivity, costing the scheme $934 million."
Here is that sentence and its three siblings as one table (same source). Two columns hold different kinds of money. Cost to ACC is what ACC pays out. Lost productivity is its estimate of the work that does not get done while people are hurt, a cost to the country rather than a bill ACC receives.
| Environment | Claims, 2025 | Days of weekly compensation | Cost to ACC | Lost productivity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 37,000, but see below | 6.4 million | $934m | $2.7b |
| Work | not published | 4.7 million | $815m | ~$2b a year, estimated |
| Sport and recreation | over 480,000 | 2.5 million | $389m | $1b |
| Road | less than 2% of claims | 1.3 million | $201m | $549m |
All figures from ACC's newsroom story, 17 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026.
Road is the one ACC singles out for severity: "less than two per cent of injury claims, but 11 per cent of total costs". The average road claim costs $14,500, "nearly ten times higher than sports injuries and three times that of workplace injuries" (same source).
What the story never does is line the four up side by side, cost per claim. So here it is.
What does one claim actually cost?
One sum works cleanly. Sport injuries cost ACC $389 million in 2025, spread across "over 480,000 claims". That is at most $810 a claim (ACC, 17 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026; division ours).
Road's published average is $14,500. That is 17.9 times as much per claim. Call it 18 (same source; division ours).
ACC's own comparison fills in a third row. It says a road claim costs "three times that of workplace injuries", which puts the average work claim near $4,833 (same source; arithmetic ours).
One more sum gives the number of road claims. Divide road's $201 million by $14,500 and you get roughly 13,900. That is 0.7 per cent of the two million claims ACC accepted, inside its "less than two per cent" (same source; arithmetic ours).
| Environment | Cost to ACC, 2025 | Claims, 2025 | Cost to ACC per claim |
|---|---|---|---|
| Road | $201m | ~13,900, implied | $14,500, published |
| Home | $934m | not published | not computable |
| Work | $815m | not published | ~$4,833, implied |
| Sport and recreation | $389m | over 480,000 | ~$810, our division |
Published figures from ACC's newsroom story, 17 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026. Implied rows are our arithmetic from that $14,500 average and ACC's stated ratios; the sport figure is $389 million over 480,000 claims.
Two sentences in the story do not match the totals on the same page.
| What the story says | What its own figures give |
|---|---|
| A road claim is "nearly ten times higher than sports injuries", so a sport claim near $1,450 | $389m across "over 480,000" claims is about $810 a claim |
| Road is "11 per cent of total costs", so everything ACC spent came to $1.83 billion | The four environments above add up to $2.34 billion, which makes road 8.6 per cent |
Quotes from ACC's newsroom story, 17 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026. The right column is our arithmetic on figures from the same page.
The likeliest explanation is that the average and the ratios measure something different from the annual totals. They may cover the lifetime cost of a claim, everything ACC will ever pay on it, rather than one year's spending. The report does not say. Either way the shape holds: road is the dearest per claim, sport the most common, ten to eighteen times apart.
How big are home injuries, and who pays?
On days of paid compensation, home beats work and road combined. Home takes 6.4 million days, the other two 6.0 million between them (ACC, 17 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026; addition ours).
Lost productivity tells the same story. Home's $2.7 billion tops work's $2 billion plus road's $549 million (same source; addition ours).
One measure goes the other way. Home's $934 million cost to ACC beats work's $815 million alone, but not work plus road at $1.02 billion (same source; additions ours).
Chart: ACC published totals from the 17 June 2026 newsroom story, retrieved 20 August 2026. The dashed line is our addition of the work and road figures.
A caution on the 37,000. ACC's sentence reads most naturally as 37,000 home injuries that drew weekly compensation, not 37,000 in total. Read that way, 6.4 million days over 37,000 claims is 173 days each (ACC, 17 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026; division ours).
That is about 25 weeks of paid compensation on the average home claim, close to half a year, and about $25,200 of cost to ACC each (same source; division ours). It measures something different from the road average, so do not rank the two against each other.
Now, who pays for it. Everyone on a salary, at one flat rate. The earners' levy is the ACC charge taken out of every pay packet. It funds the Earners' Account, which covers "injuries that happen during everyday activities, eg on the sports field or at home doing DIY" (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026).
It "is a flat rate, currently $1.52 per $100 (excluding GST) of your liable income", meaning the pay your levy is charged on. The Work levy businesses pay works the other way, priced on "the risk of injury at work" and "your claims history" (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026).
Put the two facts together. Home and sport injuries cost ACC $1.32 billion in 2025. That is 62 per cent more than work injuries cost at $815 million, and only the work side is priced by risk (ACC, 17 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026; addition ours).
A scaffolding firm's levy is priced to scaffolding. Nobody's earners' levy is priced to their ladder, their trampoline or their Saturday touch game. That is deliberate pooling. It also means the largest block of paid time off work is priced to nobody's actual risk.
What would ACC actually pay you?
Get hurt outside work and your first week off is unpaid. ACC's weekly compensation "is up to 80% of your average weekly earnings", and it usually starts "on day 8 after your injury" (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026).
Work injuries get better treatment: your employer "must pay you 80% of your usual pay, for the first week". For everything else, ACC's advice is to "talk to your employer about using sick or annual leave" (same source). Home and sport injuries are outside work by definition, and that is where most of the paid days sit.
Here is what arrives for a non-work injury once the sick leave has run out.
| Time off work | Share of normal pay replaced |
|---|---|
| 1 week | nothing |
| 4 weeks | 60 per cent |
| 13 weeks | 73.8 per cent |
| 25 weeks, the average compensated home claim | 76.8 per cent |
Arithmetic ours, from ACC's weekly compensation rules, retrieved 20 August 2026: nothing for the first week, then up to 80 per cent.
The longer you are off, the closer you creep to 80 per cent of your pay, and you never get there. The 80 itself only applies to earnings under ACC's cap, so higher earners get back less than that.
That leaves three gaps ACC never fills. The unpaid first week on every non-work injury. The 20 per cent it never replaces. And anything that is not an accident: ACC is accident compensation, so an income that stops because of illness sits outside every number in this report.
Income protection is priced against exactly those gaps. Mortgage protection covers keeping the repayments going. Trauma cover pays a lump sum on diagnosis rather than replacing income week by week. Whether any of them earns a place in your budget comes down to your fixed costs and your sick-leave balance, not fear of trampolines.
What we could not check
Everything above comes from ACC's newsroom story, read on 20 August 2026. We did not read the full report behind it.
The 37,000 home figure is the weakest link. It reads most naturally as home injuries that led to weekly compensation, and it cannot be every home claim when sport alone tops 480,000. But the story never defines it. If it means something else, our 173-day and $25,200 figures move with it.
ACC's ratios do not match its own totals, as shown above. Claim counts for home and work are not published, so those rows in our table are implied or blank, and the lost-productivity figures come with no stated method. ACC caps the earnings it covers, but we could not find the current cap, so we say only that higher earners get back less than 80 per cent. The $1.52 levy rate is quoted from ACC's business levies page as it stood on 20 August 2026; that page does not say which levy year it covers.
Sources
- Injuries in New Zealand report acts as call to action, ACC, 17 June 2026
- Weekly compensation for employees, ACC
- What your levies pay for, ACC
- Understanding levies if you work or own a business, ACC
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