Report
Three of ACC's eight turnaround measures missed the mark in its best year in a decade
Source: ACC, Turnaround Plan Monthly Report, June 2026
ACC's own year-end scorecard stamps three of its eight turnaround measures Not Achieved. Read the printed numbers instead of the stamps and five of the eight ended 2025/26 short of the mark ACC set for them.
By Henry Smith · ACC · 2026-07-29
What this means for you The measures ACC missed cover people who have been off work on ACC's weekly payments for between ten weeks and nine months. That is the group ACC is pushing hardest to move off cover, and those payments can end on an assessment rather than a recovery. Most private income protection only starts paying once ACC stops, so its own rules decide what happens next.
Three of the eight measures on ACC's own turnaround scorecard ended 2025/26 stamped Not Achieved. They sit in the same three-page report that says ACC is recording "some of its best results in a decade across key rehabilitation performance areas" (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026).
Read the printed numbers rather than the stamps and it gets worse. Five of the eight finished short of the mark ACC set. New claims came in 3,802 over budget, the pool of people on long-term compensation ended 454 over its cap, and three of the four return-to-work rates printed below target (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026).
What did ACC publish?
ACC released the June 2026 edition of its Turnaround Plan Monthly Report on 28 July 2026. It holds provisional results for 2025/26, which means the numbers can still move. ACC has not finished costing every claim it accepted, and outside auditors have not signed the year off (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026).
The report tracks what it calls "eight key measures". Three terms help. Weekly compensation is ACC's wage-replacement payment, the money that stands in for most of your income while an injury keeps you off work. The long-term claims pool is ACC's count of people who have been on that payment for more than a year. A return-to-work rate is the share of that group back at work by a set point, like 28 days.
The eight measures, exactly as printed (all from the same document, retrieved 20 August 2026):
| Measure | 2025/26 actual | Printed benchmark | ACC's status |
|---|---|---|---|
| New claim registrations | 2,132,789 | 2,128,987 budgeted | No status printed |
| Return to work at 28 days | 36.6% | 37% target | Achieved |
| Return to work at ten weeks | 62.2% | 63% target | Not Achieved |
| Return to work at nine months | 89.7% | 91% target | Not Achieved |
| Return to work at one year | 92.2% | 92% target | Achieved |
| Long-term claims pool | 24,454 | No more than 24,000 | Not Achieved |
| Social rehabilitation savings | $122m | $82m target | Achieved |
| Elective surgery costs | $63m under budget | Under budget | Achieved |
Source: ACC, Turnaround Plan Monthly Report, June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026. The wording of each benchmark is ACC's.
The stamps say three misses, the printed numbers say five
The sums below are ours, built from ACC's own documents so you can redo them.
The one measure with no verdict is the one that came in over budget
New claim registrations is the only measure ACC leaves unstamped. It budgeted for 2,128,987 claims and registered 2,132,789. That is 3,802 over budget, or 0.18% (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026).
There is a fair reason not to stamp it. ACC's Annual Report 2025 says claim volumes are driven largely by things ACC cannot control, like the state of the economy (ACC, Annual Report 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026). Still, notice which measure got no verdict.
How does 36.6% beat a 37% target?
The 28-day return-to-work measure prints 36.6% against a target of 37%, and carries the stamp Achieved (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026). The report never explains how 36.6 clears 37. Rounding to the nearest whole point is the only arithmetic that closes the gap.
The pattern matters more than this one panel. The other Achieved stamp, at one year, cleared its 92% target by 0.2 points at 92.2% (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026). So both passes scraped over the bar, one on rounding and one by a fifth of a point. The two admitted misses were wider: 0.8 and 1.3 points.
The pool fell by 95 people, the target fell by 965
First, the genuine good news. The long-term claims pool ended 2024/25 at 24,549 people (ACC, Annual Report 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026) and ended 2025/26 at 24,454 (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026). That is a fall of 95 people, the first in the five-year series ACC publishes, after four straight years of growth (same Annual Report). Fair for ACC to celebrate.
Here is what the report does not say. Getting from 24,549 down to the 24,000 cap needed a fall of 549 people. ACC delivered 95, about a sixth of it.
The flip from last year's Achieved to this year's Not Achieved is mostly the target moving, not the pool:
| Year | The benchmark | What happened | Stamp |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024/25 | Growth capped at 10.5%, implying a pool of 24,965 | Grew 8.7%, 416 below the implied cap (ACC, Annual Report 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026) | Achieved |
| 2025/26 | Hard cap of 24,000 | Shrank by 95 to 24,454, still 454 over the cap (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026) | Not Achieved |
Between the two verdicts the pool improved by 95 people. The bar it had to clear moved by 965. Both readings are true at once: the run of growth stopped, and the year still ended 454 people above ACC's own cap (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026).
The celebrated savings come to $87 per registered claim
Two of the Achieved measures are savings. Both need translating:
| Savings measure | What it covers | 2025/26 result |
|---|---|---|
| Social rehabilitation | The support ACC funds around an injury, such as home help, care and equipment | $122m saved against an $82m target (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026) |
| Elective surgery | Planned, non-urgent operations ACC pays for | $63m under budget (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026) |
Together that is $185 million. Spread across the year's 2,132,789 registered claims, the savings come to $87 per claim, roughly a tank of petrol (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026).
The social rehabilitation saving is a real overshoot. ACC set out to cut that line by 5%. The $122 million it saved is about 7.4% of the roughly $1.64 billion the line spends, half as much again as planned (same document).
Elective surgery needs more care, because under budget is not the same as spending less. The same line ran $51 million over budget the year before: $671 million spent against a $620 million budget (ACC, Annual Report 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026).
The monthly report describes a 35% rise in elective costs over two years. It publishes neither this year's elective budget nor the actual spend. So the $63 million cannot be turned into a change in what ACC paid (ACC, retrieved 20 August 2026).
For scale: weekly compensation alone ran $208 million over budget in 2024/25, at $2,855 million against $2,647 million budgeted (ACC, Annual Report 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026). The year's celebrated savings are smaller than that one overrun.
The return-to-work misses are hundreds of people, not 17,000
ACC measures the return-to-work rates on one group only: people receiving weekly compensation. It does not say how many that was in 2025/26. The most recent published figure is from the year before, when more than 107,000 claims drew weekly compensation for the first time (ACC, Annual Report 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026).
On a group that size, the 0.8-point miss at ten weeks is roughly 860 people still on compensation who would have been back at work had ACC hit its target. The 1.3-point miss at nine months is roughly 1,390 (our arithmetic on the ACC, Annual Report 2025 figure, retrieved 20 August 2026).
A bigger number is tempting here, and it is wrong. Apply 0.8 points to all 2,132,789 registered claims and you get about 17,000. That figure should never be printed. Most ACC claims only ever pay for treatment and never involve weekly compensation. The honest scale is hundreds to low thousands per miss. For each of those people, weekly compensation is up to 80% of what they earned before the injury, capped by law (ACC, Annual Report 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026).
What does this mean for your cover?
Notice where the misses cluster: ten weeks and nine months. That middle stretch is where ACC's next plan pushes hardest. The new target cuts the long-term pool to between 23,000 and 23,500 people by June 2027 (ACC, Turnaround Plan 2026/27, retrieved 20 August 2026). If you are on weekly compensation somewhere between ten weeks and a year, that is where the pressure lands.
The pressure usually arrives as a vocational assessment. That is ACC deciding you are fit for some kind of work, even if it is not the job you had. Being assessed off cover is not the same as recovering.
So the question for your household is what stands behind that income if ACC stops paying. Most New Zealand income protection is built to sit behind ACC. While ACC pays weekly compensation, the private policy cuts its own payment to match, often to nothing. The policy earns its premium at the moment ACC exits you.
At that point the policy applies its own test of how unwell you must be before it pays. That test is not ACC's. The same goes for mortgage protection. The question worth asking is whether the policy pays when an ACC assessment goes against you, not only when you cannot work at all.
What we could not check
Every number here is provisional. ACC's Board signs off the final 2025/26 results in September 2026, and the audited figures could still move. The report prints no publication date, so we dated it 28 July 2026 from the PDF file's own properties. The document is titled June 2026 for the month it reports on.
Our headcounts for the ten-week and nine-month misses use the 2024/25 figure of more than 107,000 new weekly compensation claims, because ACC publishes no 2025/26 equivalent. The Annual Report 2025 expected "high growth" in those claims for 2025/26, so if anything our figures understate the misses. ACC also does not spell out which clients the return-to-work percentages are measured on. Treat 860 and 1,390 as rough scale, not headcounts.
We cannot reconcile the 28-day Achieved stamp with the printed 36.6% and 37% except by rounding, and ACC does not say how it rounds. The elective surgery measure publishes no dollar figures for 2025/26, so we cannot say whether elective spend fell, only that it finished under a budget we cannot see.
We read both ACC documents in full. Every figure here comes from ACC, none from a secondary outlet.
Sources
- Turnaround Plan Monthly Report, June 2026, ACC, 28 July 2026
- Annual Report 2025, ACC, 2025
- Turnaround Plan 2026/27, ACC, 29 July 2026
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