Falls Among Older New Zealanders: The Statistics

How often older New Zealanders fall

ACC, New Zealand's accident-compensation scheme, is the primary source for how common falls are in later life here. Its falls-prevention guidance for over-65s states that about 30% of people aged 65 and over — roughly one in three — fall at least once a year, and that 10 to 20% of those falls need hospital treatment. That annual rate is a community figure: it describes people living in the general population, not residents of aged-care facilities, and the risk rises with age.

This is close to what falls research finds internationally — the same rough one-in-three annual rate appears in Australian and other national guidance — but the number above is the New Zealand-specific one, published by ACC, and it is the one to use for Aotearoa. We report it with ACC's own cautious phrasing ("about", "10 to 20%") rather than inventing a decimal it does not publish.

Fall hospitalisations and hip fractures — the HQSC Atlas

The most detailed public count of serious falls in New Zealand is the Health Quality & Safety Commission's (Te Tāhū Hauora) Atlas of Healthcare Variation. Its falls domain records roughly 27,000 people aged 50 and over hospitalised with a fall — a rate of about 17 per 1,000 — and roughly 3,750 hip fractures, at a rate of 2.4 per 1,000.

Two things to hold onto before quoting these. First, the age band is 50 and over, not 65 and over — a wider group than ACC's fall-rate figure above, so the two are not directly comparable. Second, these Atlas figures are 2016 vintage; they are the most recent nationally consolidated counts we could trace to a primary source, but they are several years old and the annual totals have very likely moved since. We flag the vintage rather than present 2016 numbers as if they were current.

What falls cost ACC

Falls are one of the larger lines in ACC's injury bill. ACC has reported around NZ$163 million a year (an older ~2015 baseline, shown here as indicative) in fall-related claims for people aged 65 and over, with falls making up roughly 40% of ACC claims at ages 65–69 and about 60% by age 85 and over — the share climbs steeply with age.

This cost figure traces to an ACC baseline from around 2015. We report it as ACC's published figure and flag that it is a baseline several years old; the real annual cost today is very likely higher, given both an ageing population and general cost growth. We are not adjusting it upward ourselves — that would manufacture a precision the source does not support.

Why living alone changes the stakes

A fall is more dangerous when there is no one in the house to notice it. And in New Zealand, a large share of older people live by themselves.

According to the Stats NZ 2023 Census, 25.3% of people aged 65 and over — 192,201 people, about one in four — live alone, and people 65+ are 16.6% of the population (828,600 people). Loneliness is a separate thing from living alone, and the national figure is more modest than headlines suggest: on the Stats NZ 2023 wellbeing data, about 11% of New Zealanders aged 65+ felt lonely at least some of the time. But the safety point does not depend on loneliness at all. It depends on the plain arithmetic that a quarter of older New Zealanders have no one at home who would immediately know if they fell. That gap between a fall happening and someone finding out is where the risk in the numbers above actually lives.

The long lie — what an undiscovered fall does

New Zealand does not publish its own data on how long people lie on the floor after a fall, so the evidence on the discovery gap comes from peer-reviewed studies done overseas. We include it as generalisable clinical research, clearly labelled as not New Zealand data, because it is the strongest evidence there is on why finding someone quickly matters.

Fleming and Brayne's 2008 study in the BMJ, following people over 90 in Cambridge, England, found that of falls where the person could not get up, 82% happened when they were alone, 80% of those who fell were unable to get up unaided, and about 30% lay on the floor for an hour or more — a "long lie". An earlier BMJ study by Wild, Nayak and Isaacs (1981) followed older people who fell at home and found that of the twenty who lay on the floor for more than an hour, about half died within six months. That mortality figure rests on a very small subgroup and the same paper's larger finding is the safer one to lean on: a fall at home in old age is a marker of serious underlying ill health, and the long lie sits on top of that. Both are English cohorts, decades old for the 1981 study, and neither is a New Zealand statistic — but the mechanism they describe is not country-specific.

Figures we don't publish

Some numbers that would fit neatly on a page like this do not exist in a form we can stand behind, so they are absent on purpose.

We do not publish a current-year New Zealand fall-death count broken down by living arrangement — that specific cross-tabulation is not something we could trace to a Stats NZ, ACC or HQSC publication. We do not present the HQSC 2016 hospitalisation counts or the ~2015 ACC cost baseline as current: both are reported with their vintage attached. And we do not apply the overseas long-lie percentages to New Zealand as if they were local figures — they are labelled as English cohorts every time they appear.

Where a figure appears above, its source, year and age band are stated. Where they could not be stated, the figure is not here.

Where a daily check-in fits — and where it doesn't

Nothing on this page is solved by an app. Preventing falls is a matter of strength and balance exercise, medication review, vision checks and home hazards — the interventions ACC's own falls programme is built around, and the ones with the real evidence behind them. A check-in app does none of that and we will not pretend it does.

What a daily check-in addresses is the one narrow thing the New Zealand numbers keep pointing back to: the gap between a fall happening and someone finding out, which is widest for the 192,201 older New Zealanders who live alone. I'm Alive is a daily check-in app — you confirm you're okay once a day, and if you don't, the contact you chose hears about it within hours rather than days. The daily check-in is free and works on iPhone and Android anywhere in New Zealand and worldwide, and even on the free plan a contact is alerted once a month if you go quiet. The paid Stay Protected plan (from US$29.99/year; NZ pricing shown in-store) adds full multi-stage escalation — push, email and SMS — to as many as ten contacts.

One honest limit, because this is a falls page. I'm Alive does have an optional phone fall-detection feature, but it is deliberately narrow: it is on iPhone only, it is off until you switch it on, and it can only run while the app is open on screen — an iOS limitation, not a setting, which means it cannot detect a fall while your phone is in your pocket or the app is closed. It alerts your own trusted contacts; it never calls 111 or emergency services, and it is best-effort, not a medical device. There is no Android fall detector. So the dependable safety mechanism here is the daily check-in, not fall detection — the check-in works whether or not you were holding your phone when something went wrong.