What changed between 2020 and 2024 that made New Zealand's oldest workers so much safer? The answer might surprise you: probably nothing about safety itself.

Fatal and serious workplace injuries among people aged 90 and over dropped from 28,491 in 2020 to just 12,225 in 2024. That's a 57% decline in four years. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

Before you assume this is a workplace safety triumph, consider what these numbers actually measure. They're not rates per worker. They're raw injury counts. Which means the drop tells us something else entirely: fewer people over 90 are in situations where ACC captures their injuries as work-related.

The fall happened almost entirely between 2021 and 2022. In that single year, the figure collapsed from 29,499 to 12,597. It's stayed flat since, hovering around 12,500 for three consecutive years. That pattern doesn't look like a safety intervention. It looks like a definitional shift, a data collection change, or a genuine exodus from work.

New Zealand's superannuation starts at 65. By 90, anyone still working is doing it by choice or necessity, not obligation. These aren't office workers clocking in for KiwiSaver. They're farmers still on the land, business owners who never stopped, volunteers whose injuries get coded as work-related.

The data raises uncomfortable questions. Did COVID change how we classify injuries for the very elderly? Did it push thousands out of roles where ACC would have once recorded their falls, their strains, their accidents? Or are we simply looking at a cohort effect: fewer people born in the 1930s who are both alive and active enough to injure themselves at work?

What we do know: the 2024 figure of 12,225 is now the norm, not an anomaly. It's lower than anything recorded since 2005, when the methodology might have been entirely different. The old baseline, the one that hovered near 28,000, appears to be gone for good.

This isn't a story about safer workplaces. It's a story about who counts as a worker when you're 90, and how that definition just shifted beneath our feet without anyone noticing.