Your ACC levy went up about 4.5%. The payment plan attached to it stopped being free

Yes, it went up. The average ACC Work levy rose from $0.66 to $0.69 for every $100 of liable payroll on 1 April 2026, which is about 4.5 percent, and it is already set to reach $0.72 the year after. On a $250,000 payroll that is roughly $75 more a year. That is not the reason to read this. The reason is the other change on the same invoice: the instalment plan you have been using to spread the payment stopped being free, and if you do nothing about it, it renews itself at the new price.

The rate, because that is what you came for

The Work levy is what an employer pays ACC to cover injuries at work. It is charged per $100 of your liable payroll, at a rate set by your classification unit, which is the risk group ACC puts you in based on the industry code you gave Inland Revenue when you registered.

The Government set three years of average rates in one decision in March 2025 and published them in the New Zealand Gazette:

• $0.63 per $100, the rate before the changes
• $0.66 for 2025/26
• $0.69 for 2026/27
• $0.72 for 2027/28

Those are averages across every industry. Your own rate sits above or below depending on how risky ACC judges your work to be, so use the figure printed on your invoice, not the average.

On a $250,000 payroll, the average rate takes the levy from about $1,650 to about $1,725. Seventy five dollars. Worth knowing. Not worth a meeting.

The change that is not in the rate

ACC used to lend you the money for nothing. Until 1 April 2026, a three month or a six month instalment plan carried no interest at all, and only the ten month plan was charged, at 2.73 percent of the invoice. Go back before 2025 and ACC did not charge instalment interest on anything.

That is over. From 1 April 2026 ACC charges interest on every instalment plan, and its own payment page puts it in six words that matter more than any of the rates: instalment interest applies to all instalment plans, including rolled over plans.

The price is set by formula in the Accident Compensation (Interest Rates for Payment of Levies) Amendment Regulations 2026, made on 23 February 2026 and in force from 1 April. The formula takes the Reserve Bank's monthly floating first mortgage rate for new customers, adds 2.5 percentage points, and that is your annualised rate. For the year starting 1 April 2026 the base rate is 5.81 percent, so the annualised rate is 8.31 percent, and it is fixed on the day ACC approves your plan and stays there for the whole plan.

Because you are paying the levy down across the term rather than holding all of it, the regulations halve the monthly rate when working out the charge. That produces ACC's published numbers:

• three months: 1.04 percent of the invoice
• six months: 2.08 percent of the invoice
• ten months: 3.46 percent of the invoice

The same invoice, four ways

Take that $1,725 invoice.

• Pay it in full inside the 30 days you get from the issue date: nothing.
• Spread it over three months: $17.94.
• Over six months: $35.88.
• Over ten months: $59.69.

So the ten month plan costs about $60, against a levy rise of $75. The change nobody wrote about is nearly as big as the change everybody wrote about. Last year the same plan on a $1,650 invoice would have cost about $45, and three or six months would have cost you nothing.

The rollover is the part that catches people

Two lines from ACC's own payment page, read one after the other. First: "Instalment plans roll over each year. We'll send you an updated payment schedule with your new invoice." Then: "To cancel your rolled over instalment plan, follow the instructions on your invoice."

Put those next to the rule that interest now applies to rolled over plans and you have it. If you set up a plan years ago and have not thought about it since, it renewed this year with a price on it. Nobody phoned. The instructions for getting out are printed on the invoice you have not opened yet.

That is not a scandal. It is just how a default works. Defaults are where owner-operated businesses lose money quietly, because no single one of them is big enough to notice.

Being late is a completely different price

Late payment interest is not the same animal. The same regulations set it at the annualised rate divided by twelve, plus one percentage point, charged monthly. For this year that is 1.69 percent a month. ACC says it accrues daily and compounds monthly, so left to run for a year that is a little over 22 percent.

Last year the late rate was a flat 1 percent a month, which compounds to about 12.7 percent a year. The cost of being late has roughly doubled while nobody was looking.

Two more things sit behind it. Once an invoice is more than 60 days overdue, or has gone to a collection agency, you can no longer set up an instalment plan yourself in MyACC for Business. And ACC says an account referred to a debt collection agency "may result in a credit default and could affect your company's credit rating", which is the kind of thing that surfaces two years later when you are trying to refinance or sell.

Now the other direction, for contrast. If your provisional levies come in $1,000 or more above your final levy, ACC pays you credit interest, currently 1.53 percent for the year. Self-employed people and private domestic workers do not pay provisional levies, so they get nothing. One and a half percent a year when they hold your money. One and seven tenths percent a month when you hold theirs.

Two other lines on the same invoice moved

The No Claims Discount is ending. It adjusted your Work levy up or down according to your claims history. ACC says the data showed health and safety outcomes did not improve because of it, and that businesses outside the programme were paying for the discounts given inside it. From the 2027 levy year your Work levy is worked out on your classification unit alone. Employers and shareholder-employees see that on the provisional invoice they receive in 2026, which is the one in front of you. Self-employed people see it on the invoice they receive in 2027. ACC's own position is that most small businesses and self-employed people end up with lower base levies than they would have had under the old system.

Experience Rating, the version for larger employers, is becoming self-funding. Businesses inside it will pay an additional Experience Rating programme rate, currently 7.2 percent, on top of their Work Account levy, shown as a single Work Levy (ER) rate on the 2026 provisional invoice and separate from any discount or loading. The minimum threshold for medical and treatment costs counted in that programme also rose from $500 to $750 from the 2026 levy year, which quietly keeps a lot of small claims out of your rating.

If you are self-employed in the sport sector, ACC has renamed its classification units and re-set them to current risk. The wording on your invoice will read differently and your rate may have moved either way.

What a rolled over payment plan says about a business

None of this is large money. For most owners the whole page is worth a few hundred dollars a year. So why spend ten minutes on it.

Because of what the answer tells you. An owner who can say, without looking, whether they are on an ACC instalment plan and why, is an owner whose working capital is a decision. An owner who learns from this page that they have been on a rolling plan for years is running a business that its defaults are running for it.

A buyer will never ask about your ACC plan. They will ask for three years of bank statements, and the pattern turns up anyway: whether payments land before the deadline or after it, whether statutory bills get used as an overdraft, whether anything went to collections. Government bills are the cleanest signal there is of how a business handles cash, because every business gets the same bill on the same terms. Clean books and a readable cash flow pattern are worth more in a sale conversation than the levy is worth in a year.

There is a real money version of this too. Free credit from New Zealand's statutory bodies is being withdrawn. Interest-free ACC instalments have gone, the late rate has roughly doubled, and the levy path to $0.72 is already published three years out. If any part of your cash cycle has been funded by paying government bills slowly, that line is closing. Replace it on purpose, before it gets replaced for you.