Workplace injury and illness is estimated to cost New Zealand around $5 billion annually, against 70 work-related fatalities and 2,770 reported instances of illness, injury and serious harm in 2025.
For an individual business, the useful question is what share of that you actually carry — because it is considerably more than the ACC levy suggests.
What an injury actually costs you
The visible cost is ACC. The costs that do not appear on an invoice:
- Lost productive time — the injured person, plus everyone who stops to help, plus the investigation.
- Replacement labour, frequently at a premium and with a productivity gap while they learn.
- Overtime for others covering the work.
- Damaged plant or product.
- Delay, and any contractual consequence of missing a date.
- Management time on investigation, reporting and any regulatory process.
- Recruitment and training if the person does not return.
- Morale and turnover among those who witnessed it.
Studies internationally consistently put indirect costs at a multiple of direct costs. Whatever the exact ratio, the ACC levy materially understates what an injury costs the business that had it.
ACC experience rating makes prevention pay
ACC operates experience rating for many employers, adjusting levies up or down based on the business’s own claims history relative to others in the same classification unit.
That is the mechanism by which genuine health and safety investment produces a measurable financial return — and it operates on a lag, so improvements show up in later levy years.
Worth checking alongside: your classification unit. Levy rates vary enormously by activity, and businesses are frequently on the wrong classification because the original description was imprecise or the business changed and the code did not. ACC can review it, and approaching them is straightforward.
Fines cannot be insured
Health and safety fines cannot be insured against, which is a deliberate design choice. Reparation orders to victims may be insurable, and defence costs may be covered under statutory liability cover — check what your policy actually responds to.
Officers can be prosecuted personally, and the officer due diligence duty cannot be delegated or insured.
Where prevention returns most
Spending should follow the critical risks — the small number of things that could kill someone — rather than being spread evenly across a large hazard register.
In most New Zealand businesses that list is short:
- Vehicles, including driving for work, which is the largest single source of work-related death.
- Falls from height, including from low heights.
- Machinery and moving plant.
- Electricity.
- Hazardous substances, including ordinary cleaning and workshop chemicals.
- Violence and aggression in customer-facing roles.
- Psychosocial risk — workload, bullying, isolation.
And occupational health, where a worker is roughly 15 times more likely to die from a work-related disease than from an accident. Prevention there is cheap relative to the harm — on-tool extraction, water suppression, quieter equipment specified at purchase.
Return to work is a financial lever
Active return-to-work management reduces claim cost, which feeds through to experience rating and future levies.
What works: staying in contact during absence, planning the return before it happens with the employee and their medical adviser, graduated return with modified duties, and being specific about what is modified and for how long with review points.
ACC can fund workplace assessments and modifications for work-related injuries.
Measuring the right things
Injury counts in a small business are too small to be meaningful, and a year with none may reflect luck. Leading indicators tell you more — near-miss reports, hazard close-out time, training currency, and the completion rate for corrective actions, which is where most systems quietly fail.
The comparison worth sitting with
New Zealand has twice as many workplace deaths per capita as Australia and four times as many as the United Kingdom — comparable economies with similar industrial mixes.
That gap is practice rather than circumstance, which means it is addressable.
WorkSafe publishes guidance and its data centre free at worksafe.govt.nz, and ACC publishes classification units, levy rates, experience rating information and work injury statistics at acc.co.nz.
Figures: WorkSafe New Zealand 2025 data and work-related health estimates. General information only, not financial advice.
