A scaffolder in Tauranga breaks his wrist on site. A Wellington office worker develops carpal tunnel from typing. A Canterbury farmer gets kicked by a cow. A Christchurch cyclist gets doored by a parked car. All different accidents. All the same result: an ACC payment landing in their bank account.

In 2024, 1.1 million New Zealanders received accident compensation. That's not hospital admissions or ACC claims filed. That's actual people who got paid because they were injured badly enough to need time off work or help with medical costs. (Source: Stats NZ, taxable-income-sources)

Put another way: one in every five working-age Kiwis now receives ACC income in any given year. Twenty years ago, it was one in seven.

The growth has been relentless. In 2000, 542,000 people got ACC payments. By 2010, it was 688,000. Then something shifted. The numbers started climbing faster. In just the four years from 2020 to 2024, ACC recipients jumped by 227,000. That's the population of Hamilton getting injured seriously enough to need compensation.

This isn't about ACC becoming more generous or eligibility rules loosening. The threshold for getting paid hasn't changed. What's changed is how many of us are getting hurt.

Some of this is predictable. We have more people, so we have more accidents. New Zealand's working-age population grew about 15% between 2000 and 2024. But ACC recipients grew by 105%. We're not just adding people. We're adding injured people at a rate that far outpaces population growth.

The data doesn't tell us where these injuries happen. It doesn't split workplace accidents from car crashes from sports injuries. But it does tell us this: the trend line points in only one direction, and it's been pointing that way for 24 years straight.

Every one of those 1.1 million payments represents someone who couldn't work, or couldn't work properly, because their body gave out or something went wrong. A tradie who can't lift. A nurse with a back injury. A driver who rear-ended someone on the way to work.

We talk about ACC like it's a safety net, which it is. But when one in five workers ends up needing it every year, maybe the question isn't whether the net works. Maybe it's why so many people keep falling.