For an entire decade, New Zealand held the line on serious injuries. From 2010 to 2019, the number sat remarkably steady: between 355,000 and 365,000 people a year ended up with injuries serious enough to need ACC claims. Not improving much, but not getting worse either.

Then 2020 arrived. And in just four years, that number climbed to 400,836.

That's an 11% jump in serious non-fatal injuries since the start of the decade. To put it plainly: an extra 38,000 New Zealanders are getting seriously hurt every year compared to 2020. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

Here's the contrast that matters: we spent ten years keeping this number stable, despite population growth, despite more people working, despite more cars on the road. Then something shifted, and we lost that stability fast.

The trajectory tells the story. 2020: 362,685 injuries. 2021: 369,654. 2022: 391,428. That's where the real jump happened: nearly 22,000 more injuries in a single year. 2023 and 2024 both stayed above 390,000.

What changed? Population growth explains some of it. New Zealand added about 400,000 people between 2020 and 2024. But the math doesn't work out cleanly: injuries grew faster than population. We're not just seeing more injuries because there are more people. We're seeing more injuries per capita.

Every one of these numbers represents someone's parent, child, or coworker who couldn't go to work, couldn't play sport, couldn't pick up their kid. Someone dealing with pain, rehab appointments, income loss. At 400,836 injuries a year, that's 1,098 people every single day.

The data doesn't tell us what's causing the increase. It doesn't break down by injury type, by workplace versus home, by age or region. But it does tell us this: whatever we were doing between 2010 and 2019 that kept injuries stable, we stopped doing it. Or it stopped working.

The flatline decade proves it's possible to hold this number steady even as the country grows. We did it for ten years straight. The question now is whether 400,000 injuries a year is the new normal, or whether we're going to figure out how to get back to what worked before.