Contact your insurer if you have found more damage
Contact your claims manager if you have any questions about your claim or have discovered more natural hazard damage. They’ll need to investigate the cause of the damage.
In some cases, you may need to contact NHC
Contact NHC Toka Tū Ake if:
- the damage occurred before 30 June 2021
- your insurer does not partner with us(external link)
- you are a Direct NHCover customer.
If you have not yet been assigned a claim manager, you can call us on 0800 DAMAGE. Please have your claim number and address ready.
Your privacy is important to us. Before discussing your claim information, we will ask you some questions to confirm that it’s you.
How we review requests to reopen claims
If you ask us to reopen your claim, we will consider the information provided, relevant legislation and our limitation policy.
You should always provide all relevant information about damage to your property when asking us to reopen your claim. We will consider each situation on its merits. However, there may be situations where we decide not to reopen your claim. If you are not satisfied with our decision on your claim, you can seek legal advice about your claim.
You can also contact the Ombudsman by phoning 0800 802 602 or you can email info@ombudsman.parliament.nz.
Limitation period for natural hazards cover
If you make a request to reopen an existing claim, we may consider limitation periods as part of our review. Our approach is set out in our limitation policy.
A limitation period is a legal time limit for taking action to challenge the settlement of a claim, and specifically to file legal proceedings.
We calculate a limitation period generally as six years, starting from the date we settled or declined your claim. It does not start from the date of the natural hazard event.
Read more about how we apply our limitation policy to reopening claims:
Limitation period factsheet [PDF, 47 KB]
Disclaimer: We (NHC) reserve the right to change our approach to how we determine limitation periods, but if we do so we will give public notice of that change. Any such changes will not be retrospective and will not be relied on by us until 6 months after the date we have published public notice of the changes on our website.
Updates to a Canterbury claim
If you’ve found new damage you think may have been caused by the earthquakes, you can ask for a review.
Find information on how we consider your request to reopen your claim and what you need to do, on our Getting your claim reviewed(external link) page.
