ACC's Turnaround Plan report for July looks, at first glance, like a set of good results. Acting chief executive Stewart McRobie says the results are among the best the corporation has produced in ten years of rehabilitation work.
The 28-day return-to-work rate landed at 36.7% in July, against a 2027 target of 38.1% to 39.1%. The ten-week figure came in at 62.4%, short of a 64.4% to 65.4% goal.
Nine months out, 89.8% of clients had returned to work or independence, against a target of 91.0% to 92.0%. The one-year rate rose to 92.4% in July, up from 92.2% in June, but still trails the 93.2% to 94.2% band ACC wants to reach.
McRobie attributes the movement to how ACC is handling clients with less serious injuries. "Progress reflects the work underway across ACC to better support people with less serious injuries to recover, return to work and regain independence sooner," he said.
This is where the Accredited Employer Programme becomes relevant. Under AEP, an employer takes over ACC's role in assessing and managing its own staff's work injury claims, in exchange for a discount of up to 90% on its Work levy.
Revised AEP rules that took effect from April 1, 2025 brought in a new performance monitoring model and updated health and safety assessment requirements, giving employers the option of ISO 45001 certification as an alternative to ACC's own audit process.
Roughly 459 employers currently sit in the programme, covering 21% of the national workforce. For a client weighing AEP against staying in the standard scheme, ACC's own claims-management performance is a genuine input into that decision: if the corporation is still missing its return-to-work targets, the relative case for an employer managing its own claims gets stronger, not weaker.
The other side of the ledger is Sensitive Claims, and this one sits well outside any employer's control. The long-term claims pool — clients on weekly compensation for more than a year — fell 0.7% over the 12 months to July, to 24,446, against a target of 23,000 to 23,500. Strip out Sensitive Claims and the pool drops 4.0%, to 21,730, against a target of 20,350 to 20,850.
McRobie is blunt about what's driving the gap between those two figures. "At the same time, we continue to see strong growth in Sensitive Claims, which remains an area of ongoing focus and risk for the Scheme," he said.
The scale of that pressure is worth putting in context. Sensitive Claims added $541m to ACC's outstanding claims liability strain in 2024/25 alone, largely through backdated weekly compensation payments tied to a December 2023 Court of Appeal ruling that widened eligibility.
That liability now stands at $63.6 billion overall, against an investment fund of $51.1 billion. A legislative response, the Accident Compensation (Scheme Boundaries and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, has been with ministers for consultation according to Treasury papers, as one route to containing court-driven liability growth.
Until it progresses further, this cost category keeps growing regardless of anything an individual employer or its broker can do.
Comparing months makes the direction clearer than any single figure. The pool stood at 24,647 in May, down 68 claims that month for a growth rate of -0.1%. July's total of 24,446 continues that fall, even though the 12-month figure only shows a 0.7% drop.
A decade ago, around 5% of clients were still on weekly compensation a year after their injury; that's now closer to 9%, with the long-term claimant count up from about 12,300 to roughly 24,500 over the same period.
None of this stays contained to ACC's own scorecard. The scheme is funded through levies on employers, earners and motor vehicle owners rather than general taxation, and the current three-year levy round, covering 2025/26 to 2027/28, was locked in by Cabinet back in December 2024.
The following round will have to price in however these targets land. The earner's levy has already moved this year, rising to 1.75% from 1 April 2026, capped at $156,641 of earnings.
Social rehabilitation costs sit at $129 million year-to-date, against a 2027 budget of $1.6 billion, covering everything from home modifications to childcare and transport support for clients who can't live independently.
Elective surgery costs are running at $58 million year-to-date, against a $631 million annual budget, a figure ACC tracks closely because a number of clients who go through elective procedures go on to draw weekly compensation.
ACC's Turnaround Plan launched in the 2025/26 financial year and carries four stated priorities: care that leads to lasting recovery, timely return to work and independence, an efficient and sustainable scheme, and a capable, enabled workforce. Progress reports go up on ACC's resources page on the last working day of every month.
