Report
ACC needs ten times last year's fall in people on long-term payments
Source: ACC, Turnaround Plan Monthly Report, June 2026
ACC's long-term claims pool fell by 95 people in 2025/26. To reach the target ACC has set for June 2027, it needs a fall of at least 954. On its own year-end scorecard three of eight measures were stamped Not Achieved, and the printed numbers say five.
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.
ACC needs between 954 and 1,454 fewer people on long-term weekly payments by June 2027. Last year the number fell by 95. That gap closes in one of two ways: fewer people ending up on long-term payments, or more people coming off them. And one of the ways people come off those payments is not recovery. It is a vocational assessment, meaning ACC decides you are fit for some kind of work, even if it is not the job you had.
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 the people who have been on that payment for more than a year. It ended June 2026 at 24,454 people (ACC, Turnaround Plan Monthly Report, June 2026). ACC's plan for the year we are in now aims to bring it to between 23,000 and 23,500 by June 2027 (ACC, Turnaround Plan 2026/27).
What does this mean if you are on ACC payments?
None of this changes anyone's entitlement. What it shows is where the pressure sits. The return-to-work measures ACC missed cover people between ten weeks and nine months off work, which is the same stretch its new target squeezes hardest. If you are in that window, expect ACC to be more active about assessing whether you can do some kind of work, not less. Being assessed off cover is not the same as being better, and for most households what decides the next few months is whatever private cover sits behind ACC.
The scorecard says three misses. The numbers say five.
ACC published the June 2026 edition of its Turnaround Plan Monthly Report on 28 July 2026, holding provisional results for 2025/26. It says ACC is recording "some of its best results in a decade across key rehabilitation performance areas". Here are the eight measures it tracks, exactly as printed:
| 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: the same June 2026 monthly report. The wording of each benchmark is ACC's.
Three of the eight carry the stamp Not Achieved. Read the printed numbers instead of the stamps and five of the eight ended short of the mark ACC set for them. New claim registrations came in 3,802 over budget, an overrun of 0.18%, and got no stamp at all. The 28-day return-to-work rate prints 36.6% against a 37% target and still carries the stamp Achieved, which only works if you round to the nearest whole point. The other pass in that set, at one year, cleared its bar by a fifth of a point. Both admitted misses were wider, at 0.8 and 1.3 points.
There is a fair reason not to stamp the claims count: ACC's Annual Report 2025 says volumes are driven largely by things ACC cannot control, such as the economy (ACC, Annual Report 2025). Still, notice which measure got no verdict.
The pool fell by 95. The bar fell by 965.
The genuine good news first. The long-term claims pool ended 2024/25 at 24,549 people (the same Annual Report) and 2025/26 at 24,454. That is a fall of 95, the first in the five-year series ACC publishes, after four straight years of growth. Fair for ACC to celebrate. What the report does not say is that getting to the 24,000 cap needed a fall of 549 people. ACC delivered about a sixth of that.
The flip from last year's Achieved to this year's Not Achieved is mostly the bar moving. The 2024/25 benchmark capped growth at 10.5%, implying a pool of 24,965, and ACC grew 8.7% to finish 416 under it (the same Annual Report). This year the benchmark was a hard cap of 24,000. Between the two verdicts the pool improved by 95 people while the bar moved by 965.
The celebrated savings come to $87 per claim
Two of the Achieved measures are savings, and both need translating. Social rehabilitation is the support ACC funds around an injury, such as home help, care and equipment. Together the two savings came to $185 million, which across the year's 2,132,789 registered claims is $87 per claim, roughly a tank of petrol (the same monthly report).
The social rehabilitation result is a real overshoot. ACC set out to cut that line by 5%, and the $122 million it saved is about 7.4% of the roughly $1.64 billion the line spends (same report).
Elective surgery needs more care, because under budget is not the same as spending less. That line ran $51 million over budget the year before, at $671 million against $620 million (the same Annual Report). For scale, weekly compensation alone ran $208 million over budget in 2024/25, at $2,855 million against $2,647 million budgeted. The year's celebrated savings are smaller than that single overrun.
The 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 publish how many that was in 2025/26. The most recent figure is from the year before, when more than 107,000 claims drew weekly compensation for the first time, a figure from the same Annual Report.
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, and the 1.3-point miss at nine months is roughly 1,390 (our arithmetic on that Annual Report figure).
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, because 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, as that Annual Report sets out.
So what is worth checking on your own cover?
The pressure lands on people between ten weeks and a year off work, so the practical question is what stands behind that income if ACC stops paying. Most New Zealand income protection is designed to sit behind ACC. While ACC pays weekly compensation, the private policy reduces its own payment to match, often to nothing. The policy earns its premium at the moment ACC stops.
At that moment the policy applies its own test of how unwell you have to be before it pays, and that test is not ACC's. The same goes for mortgage protection. So the question worth putting to whoever arranged the cover is whether it pays when an ACC assessment goes against you, or only when you cannot work at all. That is a wording question, and it can be answered long before anyone needs it.
What could we 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.
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, so if anything our figures understate the misses. ACC does not spell out which clients the return-to-work percentages are measured on, so 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 monthly report describes a 35% rise in elective costs over two years but publishes neither this year's elective budget nor the actual spend, so we cannot say whether elective spend fell, only that it finished under a budget we cannot see (the same monthly report).
We read both ACC documents in full. Every figure here comes from ACC, none from a secondary outlet.
What this means for your cover
ACC pays for accidents, not illness, and it stops at a published ceiling. Income protection is the cover that answers both. Income protection in New Zealand
Sources
Every source below was read and checked on 21 August 2026.
- 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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