Picture the person who was carried out of that Christchurch business this week. A hazardous, unidentified substance, an evacuation, and one person taken to hospital in a moderate condition, as reported by RNZ. If they can't get back to work for a while, something quiet happens in the background: their income stops coming from an employer and starts coming from ACC.

That switch is invisible in the news. It is very visible in the tax data.

In 2024, the most recent year available, 138,636 people in New Zealand declared taxable income from accident compensation (Source: Stats NZ, taxable-income-sources). That's not claims lodged or forms filled in. That's people who were hurt badly enough that a chunk of their annual income arrived as weekly compensation instead of wages.

Now the bit that should stop you. In 2000, that figure was 68,427. It has almost exactly doubled in a quarter of a century.

And it hasn't crept up smoothly. There's a proper collapse in the middle of the series. The number peaked at 95,286 in 2009, then fell for four straight years to 72,969 in 2013, a drop of nearly a quarter. Whatever combination of policy, claim management and a flat post-GFC labour market caused that, it reversed hard. Every single year since 2013 has been higher than the one before. Eleven consecutive increases, and 65,667 more people on compensation income than at that 2013 low.

The recent pace is the part I'd watch. In 2019, the count was 104,802. Five years later it's up by 33,834 people, roughly a third more. The jump between 2023 and 2024 alone was 9,426, one of the biggest single-year rises in the whole 24-year record.

Here's why that matters to your household and not just to a Wellington spreadsheet. Weekly compensation is not your wage. It's a proportion of it, capped, and it arrives while your mortgage, rates and grocery bill stay exactly the same size. Every one of those 138,636 people spent part of a year on a reduced income through no fault of their own. Some for a fortnight. Some for the entire twelve months.

Multiply that across a suburb and you get a very ordinary kind of financial shock: the ute driver who can't lift, the nurse with a back injury, the hospo worker with a scald. None of them make the six o'clock news. All of them show up in this table.

Yes, the workforce has grown over 24 years. It has not grown by 90 percent since 2013. Something else is going on, and it is either that more of us are getting hurt, or that injuries are keeping us off work longer, or both. Neither is a good answer.

We talk endlessly about wage growth and the cost of living. We rarely talk about the fastest-moving reason a Kiwi household's income suddenly drops. It's not redundancy. It's a moment like the one in Christchurch this week, and by 2024 it was happening to more New Zealanders than ever recorded.