If you lose an arm in New Zealand tomorrow, the most the Accident Compensation Corporation can pay you for the permanent loss is $183,030.60. That isn’t an average or a guideline. It is the statutory ceiling, and it applies whether the limb was taken by a bandsaw, a truck driver on the wrong side of the centre line, or a surgeon who made a mistake. You cannot go to court to argue for more, because a single clause of the Accident Compensation Act 2001 removed that option for everyone in the country.
Most New Zealanders know ACC as the thing that pays for the physio after a rugby injury. Far fewer know the terms of the deal, and almost nobody discovers them at a convenient moment. The scheme is genuinely remarkable: no-fault, universal, immediate, and indifferent to whose carelessness caused the damage. It is also capped, and the cap is a good deal lower than most people assume.
The Number That Caps Everything
ACC calls it Permanent Injury Compensation. It is assessed as a whole-person impairment percentage using American Medical Association guidelines, and it is paid as a lump sum once your condition has stabilised.
The scale runs from $4,575.78 at ten percent impairment to $183,030.60 at eighty percent and above. Those rates are current from 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027, having risen 3.08 percent in line with the March 2026 Consumer Price Index.
Two features of that scale deserve attention. The first is the threshold. Below ten percent whole-person impairment, the lump sum isn’t reduced, it’s simply not paid. An injury can be permanent, painful and career-altering and still sit under the line.
The second is what the ceiling represents. Eighty percent whole-person impairment is a catastrophic figure. A person assessed at that level and a person assessed well above it receive the same payment, because there is nothing above the top of the scale. The compensation stops climbing long before the injuries do.
Weekly compensation runs alongside it at 80 percent of pre-injury earnings, capped at $2,466.20 gross per week. For most people that is the part of ACC that actually keeps the household running, and it is calculated on what you earned before, which quietly means that two people with identical injuries are compensated differently according to their previous salaries.
What ACC pays at each level of permanent impairment
ACC publishes a separate figure for every whole-person impairment percentage. Move the slider to see the exact amount from the current schedule.
Permanent Injury Compensation lump sum
$22,042.38
That is 12.0% of the maximum the scheme can pay.
Figures are ACC’s published Permanent Injury Compensation schedule, valid 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027. Below 10% impairment no lump sum is payable. All impairments of 80% and above receive the same maximum. Weekly compensation and rehabilitation support are assessed separately.
How the Percentage Gets Decided
Everything above turns on a single number, which makes it worth understanding where that number comes from. Impairment is assessed against the American Medical Association guides, and the figure produced is a whole-person percentage rather than a description of the injured part. A hand is not rated as a proportion of a hand. It is rated as a proportion of an entire functioning person.
That distinction has consequences people find counterintuitive. Losing all function in one hand is unambiguously catastrophic for the person it happens to, and it still converts to a whole-person figure well below the levels where the scale pays out heavily. The assessment is not measuring how much your life changed. It is measuring anatomical and functional loss against a standardised reference.
Two further features matter. The assessment happens only once the condition is considered stable, which can be a year or more after the injury, so the payment arrives long after the costs began. And where somebody has multiple impairments, the percentages are combined using a formula rather than simply added together, which means two impairments of thirty percent do not produce sixty.
The practical upshot is that the assessed percentage, not the severity as the injured person experiences it, drives the entire outcome. It determines whether they clear the ten percent threshold at all, and it determines where they land on a curve that rises slowly at the bottom and steeply near the top. An assessment that moves by a few percentage points can move the payment by tens of thousands of dollars, which is why disputes over impairment assessments are among the most common ACC disagreements.
The Bargain Nobody Signed But Everyone Is Bound By
Section 317 of the Accident Compensation Act 2001 is short, and it’s the most consequential piece of injury law in the country. It provides that no person may bring proceedings independently of the Act for damages arising directly or indirectly out of a personal injury covered by the scheme.
In practice that abolishes the tort of negligence for personal injury. It does not matter how obvious the fault was, how many warnings were ignored, or how much more a court might have awarded. If ACC covers the injury, the courthouse door is closed.
One narrow exception survives. Exemplary damages, which punish outrageous conduct rather than compensate loss, can still be pursued. They are rare, hard to win, and by definition are not calculated by reference to what the injury cost you.
It is worth being clear about what section 317 does not touch. New Zealanders can and do go to court over financial loss, fraud and property. The bar applies specifically to damages for personal injury, which is why victims of investment fraud retain legal avenues that an amputee does not. The distinction isn’t about the seriousness of the harm. It’s about which category the harm falls into.
How the Same Injury Is Handled Where There Is No Ceiling
The clearest way to see the shape of the New Zealand scheme is to look at one built on the opposite assumption. In the United States there is no universal no-fault cover for injury, no statutory ceiling on what a permanent injury is worth, and no equivalent of section 317. What there is instead is litigation, and a claimant who must prove that somebody else was responsible.
The consequences run in both directions, and they are more instructive than a simple better-or-worse comparison suggests. Anyone who has looked at how amputation compensation claims work in the United States will recognise a system that can produce results far beyond anything ACC pays, and can equally produce nothing at all. Compensation there is broken into distinct categories that must each be proven and quantified, from medical costs and lost earning capacity through to the long-term cost of prosthetic devices and their replacement. Deadlines vary by state, and missing one ends the claim regardless of its merits. Lawyers typically work on contingency, taking a percentage of any recovery, which means access to the system does not depend on being able to pay upfront but does depend on a lawyer judging the case winnable.
That last point is the hinge. An American claimant with a strong case against a well-insured defendant may recover a multiple of New Zealand’s maximum. An American claimant with the same injury and no identifiable at-fault party, or one who cannot prove causation, may recover nothing whatsoever and still face the medical bills.
Neither column is obviously the better one to live under. New Zealand has traded the ceiling for certainty, and a scheme that pays every amputee something is defensible against one that pays some of them a great deal and others nothing. The honest criticism is not that the trade was made. It is that the ceiling has quietly become the whole story, and there is no mechanism by which an unusually severe case can ever be treated as unusual.
The Line That Decides More Than Fault Ever Did
Here is the part that surprises people. Having removed fault from the equation, the New Zealand system replaced it with a different dividing line, and that line turns out to matter enormously.
ACC covers injury. It does not cover disease. Lose a leg in a farm accident and you are an ACC client. Lose the same leg to diabetes or peripheral vascular disease and you are a patient of the health system, with a different funder, a different budget and a different level of support.
Briefing documents provided to the Minister for Social Development and Disability Issues by the New Zealand Artificial Limb Service put numbers on the gap. In 2016-17, artificial limb funding ran to $4,274 per ACC-funded patient against $1,998 per patient funded through district health boards. Two people, the same missing limb, more than double the funding for one of them, decided entirely by the cause.
This matters more every year, because the disease side is the side that is growing. Of the 411 new amputees who came to the Artificial Limb Service in the reported year, 52 percent had lost a limb to diabetes or vascular disease. The majority of new amputees in New Zealand are arriving through the door that receives less.
Who Is Actually Losing Limbs in New Zealand
Roughly 4,400 New Zealanders are living with limb loss, about one person in every thousand. It is a small enough population that it rarely drives policy and large enough that most people know someone affected without necessarily knowing it.
The trend line is the concerning part. Amputations among New Zealanders with diabetes rose 38 percent between 2016 and 2020, from 806 to 1,111. The increase was not evenly distributed. Rates rose 56 percent for Māori with diabetes and 59 percent for Pasifika over the same period.
Put those two findings together and the funding gap acquires a sharper edge. The fastest-growing group of amputees is the group funded through the health system rather than ACC, and within that group the fastest growth is among Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders. A distinction originally drawn on a technical basis, injury versus illness, now tracks something much less comfortable.
The surgery itself is not cheap either. A major amputation is estimated to cost around $40,000 per operation in New Zealand, before a single prosthetic component is fitted, and before any of the replacement and maintenance costs that follow a person for the rest of their life.
What the Ceiling Actually Has to Cover
A lump sum sounds like a large number until it is asked to do a lifetime of work. Permanent Injury Compensation is not a prosthetics budget, and it is not intended to be. It is a one-off acknowledgement of permanent impairment, paid once, on top of whatever rehabilitation and equipment funding a person qualifies for separately.
That separation is easy to miss, and it cuts both ways. It means the $183,030.60 figure is not the total of what ACC provides. It also means that a person doing the arithmetic on a forty-year horizon, with devices that need replacing, sockets that need refitting as a residual limb changes, and components that wear out, is looking at a lump sum that was never designed to absorb any of it.
The people who feel this most acutely are the ones on the wrong side of both lines: an impairment assessed below ten percent, or a limb lost to disease rather than accident. They are inside a system with universal coverage and still outside most of what it pays.
What Would Have to Change
Nothing about section 317 is likely to move. The bar on suing is the foundation the entire scheme rests on, and removing it would import exactly the uncertainty ACC was created to eliminate. Very few people who have looked closely at both systems come away arguing that New Zealand should adopt litigation.
The ceiling is a different question. It’s a number in a schedule, indexed annually to inflation, and it could be raised or tiered without disturbing the architecture around it. So could the ten percent threshold, which currently functions as an on-off switch rather than a sliding scale. Neither adjustment would require anyone to reopen the bargain struck in the early 1970s.
The funding gap between accident and disease is the most fixable of the three and attracts the least attention, because it isn’t a dispute about ACC at all. It is a question about whether the cause of a person’s limb loss should determine what their prosthetic care is worth. Stated that way, it is difficult to defend.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Question Underneath All of It
New Zealand made a decision in the early 1970s that most countries have never been willing to make. It removed fault from injury compensation entirely, accepted that some deserving claimants would receive less than a court might have given them, and in return guaranteed that nobody would be left with nothing because they could not identify who to blame.
That bargain has held for fifty years and it is still, on balance, a good one. But a bargain is only as good as the numbers inside it, and the numbers are set administratively, revised annually, and very rarely debated in public. The ceiling is a policy choice. So is the ten percent threshold. So is the decision that a limb lost to disease is worth less prosthetic funding than a limb lost to a machine.
None of those require reopening section 317. They only require someone to ask whether the figures still reflect what the country thought it was promising.