Claims and insurer strength in New Zealand

QuoteHub Research — August 2026 edition

An insurance policy is a promise, and this report examines the two public measures of whether that promise gets kept: what each New Zealand insurer publishes about the claims it pays, and the financial strength rating behind each licensed insurer — including the insurers most New Zealanders have never heard of, because their policies are sold under better-known brand names. Every figure is transcribed from a named insurer, agency or regulator source with a link and a date; where an insurer publishes nothing, the gap is stated rather than estimated.

Published 18 August 2026 · claims sources re-checked 18 August 2026 · ratings verified against the RBNZ register 15 August 2026 · download the dataset (CSV)

Executive summary

QuoteHub’s evidence register covers 17 verified licensed NZ life and health insurers and the four direct-to-consumer brands they underwrite. Across that market, three findings stand out.

1. Five insurers publish claims-outcome percentages — on four different bases — and the two largest health insurers publish none. AIA reports 92% of all claims received (2024), Asteron Life 97% of trauma, life and income protection claims received (2023–24), Partners Life 95% of all assessed claims (2024–25), Fidelity Life 93% of all new claims (2024–25) and Chubb Life 96% of claims paid (2024) — but “received”, “assessed” and “new” claims are different denominators, the product scopes and twelve-month windows differ, and Chubb states no denominator at all. The league table these numbers invite cannot honestly be built — and Southern Cross, which itself states it pays over 71% of the value of all NZ health insurance claims, and nib publish no overall acceptance rate anywhere we could find.
2. Some of New Zealand’s most advertised insurance brands are not insurers — and the ratings behind them span the widest part of the market’s range. NZ Seniors and OneChoice policies are both issued by Pinnacle Life Limited, rated B+ (Good) by A.M. Best, affirmed 15 April 2026, and Momentum Life holds a B (Fair) from A.M. Best, affirmed 11 February 2026 — while every insurer on the main advised panels holds an A-band grade from its agency. The pattern is not “direct equals weak”: AA Life is underwritten by Asteron Life (A+ (Strong), Fitch) and Southern Cross Life Insurance by Chubb Life (A (Excellent), A.M. Best). The finding is that the advertising never tells you which case you are in — the underwriter’s name and grade sit in the fine print, and grades from different agencies sit on different scales.
3. The five insurers that publish dollar totals paid out more than $3.0 billion in claims in their most recent published years — and the real market total is higher. Southern Cross $1.498 billion (FY24), AIA $829.6 million (2024), Partners Life more than $325 million (2024–25), Fidelity Life $247.7 million (2024–25) and Asteron Life $112 million (2023–24) sum to $3.01 billion — but across five different twelve-month periods (ending June 2024, December 2024, March 2025 and June 2025, plus Southern Cross’s own FY24), so the figure is an indication of scale, not a market statistic. Chubb Life, nib and ten smaller licensed insurers publish no comparable totals on the pages captured, so the true annual figure is larger.

The honest counterweight: publishing any claims figure at all puts an insurer ahead of the market’s default silence. There is no standardised NZ disclosure format for claims outcomes — each insurer chooses its own measure, product scope and period — and every figure in this report is the insurer’s own published number, not an independent audit. A lower headline percentage on a wider denominator can reflect a more inclusive way of counting, not a less willing payer.

Who publishes claims outcomes — and what each number actually counts

New Zealand insurers are not required to publish claims acceptance statistics, so what exists is a patchwork of voluntary disclosures, each on its own terms. The table below is every claims-outcome statistic QuoteHub verified from a major NZ life or health insurer’s own published material for this edition, transcribed with its basis and period — plus the two major insurers whose absence from the list is itself the finding.

Every claims-outcome statistic published by a major NZ life or health insurer that QuoteHub verified for this edition, transcribed with its own basis and period. Each figure links to the insurer’s own source in its cell, with the retrieval date shown. The bases differ — these numbers must not be ranked against each other.

Why these numbers must not be ranked

Asteron’s 97% is the highest figure in the table; it is also the narrowest (three product categories) and the oldest (the year to June 2024). AIA’s 92% is the lowest of the life insurers’ percentages; it is also the widest — all claims received, across all products, on the largest claims book in the country. Partners counts assessed claims, which excludes claims withdrawn before assessment; Fidelity counts new claims in the year; Chubb publishes percentages without stating what they divide. Ordering those five numbers would assert a comparability the underlying measures do not have — which is why this report deliberately publishes no acceptance-rate chart or ranking, and why any article citing a single “best insurer for claims” from these figures is misreading them.

The other half of the finding is who is missing. Southern Cross — which states it pays over 71% of the value of all NZ health insurance claims (its own About page, based on Financial Services Council data including an estimate for nib, retrieved 18 August 2026) — publishes claims volume and a premiums-returned ratio, but no acceptance rate. nib publishes its claims process in detail but no overall percentage on the pages captured (nib claims page, retrieved 18 August 2026). Health claims differ structurally from life claims — they are far more frequent, smaller, and often pre-approved before treatment — so a health acceptance rate would not mean the same thing as a life insurer’s figure. But no NZ health insurer currently gives consumers even that number — and declined claims are a real enough experience that QuoteHub keeps a dedicated guide to

what to do when a claim is declined

The strength behind the promise: every verified rating

A claims statistic describes last year; a financial strength rating is an agency’s forward-looking opinion of an insurer’s ability to keep paying claims. New Zealand law requires licensed insurers to hold and disclose a rating from an approved agency (with limited exemptions), and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s register of licensed insurers records each insurer’s current grade. The table joins the two threads of this report: each verified licensed life and health insurer’s rating, and its published claims outcome where one exists.

Read the grades only against their own agency’s scale: A.M. Best, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch use different ladders, and the same letter can sit at different heights on each — on A.M. Best’s scale, for example, A and A- are “Excellent”, B++ and B+ are “Good”, and B is “Fair”. The

Financial Strength Explorer

Every verified licensed NZ life and health insurer, alphabetical by legal entity: financial strength rating (agency, linked source, effective date) joined with its published claims outcome where one exists. Ratings re-verified against the RBNZ register on

. Grades from different agencies use different scales and are not comparable; claims figures use different bases and are not comparable either.

The brand question: who actually underwrites the advertising

The RBNZ register lists legal entities, not brands — and some of the most heavily advertised names in NZ insurance are not on it, because they are marketing brands whose policies are issued by a different company. When a claim is paid, it is paid from the underwriter’s balance sheet; the brand’s rating, in every meaningful sense, is its underwriter’s rating. The table states each verified brand’s underwriter from the brand’s own legal disclosure.

Direct-to-consumer brands and the licensed insurer that issues their policies. A brand has no rating of its own — the rating that matters is its underwriter’s, shown here attributed to the underwriter by name with a linked source in each cell.

Laid against the advised market, the spread is the widest fact in this report. The seven insurers on QuoteHub’s advice panel each hold an A-band grade from their agency — from Fidelity Life’s A- (Excellent), A.M. Best, affirmed 5 March 2026 to AIA’s AA (Very Strong), Fitch Ratings. In the direct-only market, Pinnacle Life — the licensed insurer behind NZ Seniors and OneChoice as well as its own brand — holds B+ (Good) from A.M. Best, affirmed 15 April 2026, and Momentum Life holds B (Fair) from A.M. Best, affirmed 11 February 2026 after a downgrade from B++ in February 2025. On A.M. Best’s own scale those grades sit two and three notches below the A-band, in the “Good” and “Fair” categories respectively.

Stated carefully: a B+ or B rated insurer is licensed, supervised by the Reserve Bank, and has an agency opinion that it can meet its obligations — a rating is not a prediction of failure, and this report draws no conclusion about which policy anyone should hold. What the data does show is an information asymmetry: the direct brands advertise hardest to the consumers least likely to read an underwriting disclosure, their television and mail campaigns name neither the issuing insurer nor its grade, and two brands with near-identical marketing (AA Life and NZ Seniors, say) can sit on underwriters at opposite ends of the verified range. The underwriter’s identity and rating are exactly the facts a buyer cannot see in the ad — which is why this report and the explorer publish them plainly.

The scale of it: what published claims add up to

Summing only the published figures in the transparency table — Southern Cross’s $1.498 billion returned in claims in FY24, AIA’s $829.6 million in 2024, Partners Life’s more than $325 million in the year to March 2025, Fidelity Life’s $247.7 million in the year to June 2025 and Asteron Life’s $112 million in the year to June 2024 — gives $3.01 billion paid by five insurers. Three caveats keep that number honest. The five periods are different twelve-month windows — Asteron’s ends in June 2024, AIA’s in December 2024, Partners’ in March 2025, Fidelity’s in June 2025, and Southern Cross publishes its figure against its own FY24 — so this is not a single-year market total. AIA’s figure includes GST, maturities and surrenders, and Partners publishes a floor (“more than”), so the components are not measured identically. And the sum omits every insurer that publishes no total — including Chubb Life and nib — so as a statement about the whole market it can only be a lower bound.

The longer arcs are published too: Partners Life reports more than $1.6 billion paid since its 2011 launch, and Fidelity Life reports over $1.8 billion paid across its first 50 years (retrieved 15 August 2026). Set against the treatment-cost side of QuoteHub’s research —

private treatment costs and public waiting times

What this means for consumers

Three practical readings follow from the data. First, if published claims performance matters to you, the five insurers in the transparency table have put a number on the record and the others have not — but compare each number only with its own basis, and treat any single-figure league table as a red flag in whatever you are reading. Second, if you hold or are considering a policy from a direct brand, find out which licensed insurer issues it — the brand’s own disclosure page states it, and the tables above link each one — because that is whose rating and claims practice stand behind your cover. Third, neither a rating nor an acceptance percentage predicts your claim: individual outcomes turn on the policy wording, the disclosures made at application time, and the facts of the event, which is what the claims readiness checker helps you prepare for.

If this data raises questions about cover you already hold — who underwrites it, how its insurer’s strength compares, or how a claim would actually run — a licensed adviser can review it against the market: book a free review or start with our insurer comparison. Nothing on this page recommends, prices or applies for any product.

Methodology

This report uses public-source data only: no QuoteHub customer, enquiry or CRM data appears anywhere in it. This is the permanent URL for the report — future editions update this page in place, with each change recorded in the changelog below, so citations keep resolving.

Claims statistics

• Every claims figure is transcribed from the insurer’s own published claims page, media release or claims brochure, with the basis, product scope and period carried alongside the number — never derived, never averaged across insurers, and never taken from a third-party league table. The primary sources: AIA Claims Compass press release and AIA claims page (retrieved 18 August 2026), Asteron Life media release of 11 December 2024 (retrieved 18 August 2026), the “This is Partners Life 2025” claims brochure (retrieved 18 August 2026), Fidelity Life’s “Claims we’ve paid” page (retrieved 15 August 2026), Chubb Life’s 2024 claims statistics and life insurance page (retrieved 18 August 2026), and Southern Cross’s About page (retrieved 18 August 2026).
• Comparability: the published figures use four distinct denominators — all claims received (AIA), claims received in three product categories (Asteron), assessed claims (Partners), new claims (Fidelity) — plus percentages with no stated denominator (Chubb). Periods are five different twelve-month windows. This report therefore presents the figures side by side with their bases and never ranks, charts or averages them; the AIA CY2025 figure additionally carries a source-quality caveat (a claims-page figure attributed to AIA’s business Insights Team, not a published report).
• Gaps: an insurer with no published claims statistic is recorded as a gap, never estimated and never treated as a zero. That covers Southern Cross and nib (no overall acceptance rate on the pages captured) and the ten smaller licensed insurers for which QuoteHub’s register holds no published claims statistic.
• Update trigger: claims statistics refresh when each insurer publishes its next annual release; each refresh is a new edition of this page with a changelog entry.

Financial strength ratings

• Ratings render from QuoteHub’s evidence register, which records each grade with its agency, source URL and verification date, cross-checked against the RBNZ register of licensed insurers on 15 August 2026. The RBNZ register records current grades without effective dates, so effective dates come from agency press releases or the insurer’s own statutory disclosure page; where none is published the gap is stated in the cell.
• Ratings are a high-risk claim class: they sit on a 90-day review cycle (next scheduled review by 13 November 2026) and are re-checked against the register on the day any edition of this page is published. Agencies re-rate insurers between our reviews — always confirm a current grade against the register or the insurer’s own disclosure before relying on it.
• A rating belongs to the licensed entity, never to a marketing brand: brand rows resolve to their underwriter and the grade is attributed to the underwriter by name. Grades are shown only against their own agency’s scale — no composite score, no cross-agency ranking, no “best”.
• Exclusions: the RBNZ register lists 79 licensed insurers, most of them general insurers outside this report’s life-and-health scope. Within scope, insurers whose facts are not yet verified to publication standard are excluded and recorded as gaps in QuoteHub’s register — as of 15 August 2026 that includes UniMed (rating outlook and effective date awaiting confirmation), Booster Assurance and Tiaki Toa (business details unverified; no rating required per the register), and Hallmark Life and Beneficial Insurance (product status unverified). Exclusion is a verification state, not an editorial judgement about the insurer.
• Limitations: all claims figures are insurer-published and unaudited by QuoteHub; a rating is an agency opinion, not a guarantee; and no premium (insurance price) figures appear anywhere in this report or its dataset.

Download the dataset

The dataset behind this report is a single CSV — one row per verified licensed NZ life and health insurer (17 rows), public-source data only: qh-claims-strength-2026.csv.

Field definitions for qh-claims-strength-2026.csv.

Citing this report

This report may be cited freely with attribution. Suggested citation:

QuoteHub Claims & Insurer Strength Report, August 2026. QuoteHub, www.quotehub.co.nz/research/claims-insurer-strength.

Media enquiries are welcome via the QuoteHub contact page; a licensed financial adviser is available for comment on the data. Anyone reusing the claims figures should carry the basis and period with the number — the comparability caveats in the methodology are part of the finding, not fine print.

Changelog and corrections

• 18 August 2026 — first edition published (claims sources re-checked 18 August 2026; ratings verified against the RBNZ register 15 August 2026).

Material corrections are noted on this page rather than made silently, per

QuoteHub’s editorial and corrections policy

About this report

This report is general information, not personalised financial advice, and nothing in it predicts the outcome of any claim or recommends any insurer. QuoteHub’s advice panel — the insurers our advisers can place cover with — is listed on our disclosure page; every other insurer appears as market information only. Financial advice is provided by Craig Smith Business Services Limited, trading as Smiths Insurance & KiwiSaver, a licensed Financial Advice Provider (FSP712931). Claims sources re-checked 18 August 2026; ratings last verified 15 August 2026.

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Explore related pages: Life Insurance, Income Protection, Health Insurance, Trauma Insurance, How Were Paid.