Claims statistics usually get reported as bad news, because the reporting is aimed at the industry rather than at the people it insures. From where a household sits, the same numbers read differently.
New Zealand insurers pay out well over three billion dollars a year in life and health claims, in a country of five and a bit million people. One insurer reported paying more than 180,000 claims in the year to June 2025, an increase of better than half on the year before, with average daily payments rising from around $394,000 to around $612,000.
That is money arriving in households in the year their circumstances changed. Worth holding on to when the renewal notice turns up.
Why claims are climbing
Three forces, roughly in order of weight.
Detection has improved. Conditions are found earlier and more often, which triggers claims that a decade ago would have come later or not at all, and which produces better outcomes. That is the entire point of finding things early.
Treatment has improved and costs more. Each advance in oncology, cardiology and orthopaedics tends to be dearer than what it replaced.
And the book is ageing. Policies written in the 1990s and 2000s are attached to people now entering the years when claims naturally occur.
None of those is a failure. All of them are expensive.
The question this should prompt
Not "will they pay?" The aggregate answer is clearly yes, at considerable scale. The better question is narrower: would my policy pay, for my likely claim?
Which resolves into specifics.
- Does my trauma cover use current medical definitions, or the definitions in force when the policy was issued? Older wordings frequently fail to recognise conditions and staging that modern medicine treats as significant.
- Does my income protection pay on inability to perform my own occupation, or any occupation I am reasonably suited to? The gap between those two phrases is the largest single source of disappointment in this product.
- Is my medical cover subject to exclusions applied at underwriting that I have not looked at since?
- Has anything material changed, a new mortgage, a company, a child, a diagnosis, that the policy has not been told about?
Where declines actually come from
In my experience they cluster around three causes, none of them insurer bad faith.
Non-disclosure at application, usually innocent. A definition mismatch, where the event happened but not in the form the policy defines. And a policy that was correct when written and was never revisited as the life around it changed.
All three can be addressed in advance. None can be addressed afterwards. That asymmetry is the whole argument for reviewing cover on a schedule rather than in an emergency.
Arrange a time to talk. We meet in person, in Hamilton or wherever suits you.
Claims volumes and daily payment figures as reported by Insurance Business New Zealand from insurer disclosures, 2025 and 2026. Sector claims totals per Financial Services Council industry data.