The State of Workers Compensation in NSW
A data-driven review of FY 2023-24 — the year NSW workers compensation payouts hit $5.3 billion, psychological claims surged 161% over the decade, and falls from height fatalities climbed 71%.
2026 Annual Report
Published April 2026 · WorkCover Hub editorial team
Safe Work Australia data is used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. NSW agency data (SIRA, icare, NSW Government) is NSW Crown copyright, used with attribution.
Please cite this report as: WorkCover Hub, “The 2026 State of Workers Compensation in NSW”, April 2026, workcoverhub.com.au/state-of-workers-compensation-nsw-2026.
Six numbers that define the NSW scheme in FY 2023-24
NSW runs Australia's largest defined-benefit workers compensation scheme. In FY 2023-24 it crossed a threshold most observers did not expect to see this decade — $5.3 billion in claim costs paid, up 20.5% on the prior year. The system's centre of gravity has shifted.
Total NSW workers compensation claim costs paid
$5.3 billion total workers compensation claim costs (icare) in FY 2023-24. Up from $4.4 billion in FY 2022-23 a year earlier (+20.5% YoY).
Source:icare NSW· FY 2023-24
NSW workers supported with income replacement and medical payments
SIRA figure covers all NSW scheme workers (Nominal Insurer + self-insurers + specialised insurers).
Source:SIRA NSW· FY 2023-24
Serious workers compensation claims nationally
Claims involving at least one week of working time lost. That is more than 400 new serious claims every single day across Australia.
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2023-24p
Australian workers fatally injured at work in 2024
Down from 200 in 2023. Fatality rate: 1.3 per 100,000 workers.
Source:Safe Work Australia· CY 2024
Growth in serious mental health claims over 10 years
The largest change of any nature-of-injury group over the decade. From 6,700 claims in FY 2013-14 to 17,600 in FY 2023-24p.
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2013-14 → FY 2023-24p
Year-on-year growth in NSW claim costs paid
NSW claim costs rose by $900 million in a single year — a structural shift, not a one-off.
Source:icare NSW· FY 2022-23 → FY 2023-24
FY 2023-24 is the year the numbers stopped being incremental. Scheme costs grew five times faster than the NSW wage price index. Psychological injury became the fastest-moving category in every serious national statistic that tracks it. And the most recent Nominal Insurer funding ratio published by the NSW Treasurer sits at 85 cents in the dollar. What follows is the underlying data, section by section, with every figure linked to its primary source.
NSW is now running a $5.3 billion scheme
The NSW workers compensation scheme is the largest of its kind in Australia. In FY 2023-24 it insured 4.9 million jobs, supported 125,474 workers through income replacement and medical payments, and paid $5.3 billion in claim costs — up from $4.4 billion twelve months earlier.
What $5.3 billion actually buys
NSW's Nominal Insurer — operated by icare and covering private-sector employers — is responsible for roughly 3.6 million workers across about 326,000 policies. Add self-insurers and specialised insurers regulated by SIRA and the scheme's footprint rises to 4.9 million jobs in FY 2023-24. No other Australian jurisdiction operates at this scale.
The $5.3 billion paid in FY 2023-24 represents a 20.5% year-on-year lift — a $900 million swing in twelve months. icare's own reporting attributes the shift to growth in claim volumes, longer claim durations, and a significant rise in the average cost of psychological injury claims. The NSW Treasurer's March 2025 ministerial statement noted that the Nominal Insurer held only 85 cents in assets for every dollar needed for injured workers at that date.
SIRA — the NSW regulator — reports that 125,474 workers received scheme-funded income replacement or medical payments during FY 2023-24. icare separately reports that 92,000-plus of those workers were under active case management through the Nominal Insurer during the year.
“Claim costs of $5.3 billion, up from $4.4 billion in 2022-23.”— icare NSW, 2024 annual report announcement
Source:icare NSW· FY 2023-24•SIRA NSW· FY 2023-24· CC BY 4.0•icare NSW· Current•NSW Government· Mar 2025· CC BY 4.0
Jobs insured under the SIRA-regulated NSW scheme
Largest defined-benefit workers compensation scheme in Australia.
Source:SIRA NSW· FY 2023-24
Workers with injuries supported by icare
icare — the NSW Nominal Insurer — actively case-managed more than 92,000 injured workers during FY 2023-24.
Source:icare NSW· FY 2023-24
Workers under the icare Nominal Insurer (private sector)
Across approximately 326,000 employer policies — the largest single workers compensation insurer in Australia.
Source:icare NSW· Current
What actually hurts NSW workers
Four mechanisms account for 84% of all serious workers compensation claims across Australia: body stressing, falls/slips/trips, being hit by moving objects, and mental stress. A fifth — vehicle incidents — sits outside the top four for serious claims but dominates workplace fatalities.
Top mechanisms of serious work injury, Australia FY 2023-24p
| Mechanism | Serious claims (count) | Share of serious claims |
|---|---|---|
| Body stressing | 50,326 | 34.5% |
| Falls, slips and trips | 32,000 | 21.8% |
| Being hit by moving objects | 23,400 | 16% |
| Mental stress | 17,600 | 12% |
| Vehicle incidents (fatalities only shown — see note) | 79 deaths | 42% |
Counts and percentages for top four mechanisms are from SWA Key WHS Statistics Australia 2025. 'Being hit by moving objects' and 'Falls/slips/trips' rounded counts vary between SWA presentations - body stressing 50,326 is the exact figure cited in SWA text; other mechanisms cited as rounded figures (~32,000, ~23,400, ~16,800). Vehicle-incident counts are shown as fatalities only — Safe Work Australia does not publish vehicle incidents in the top five serious non-fatal claim mechanisms, but they are the single largest cause of Australian workplace deaths.
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2023-24p· CC BY 4.0
Body stressing — #1 mechanism
Body stressing (most common mechanism. It accounts for roughly one in three serious claims across every major occupation group.
Falls, slips, trips — 21.8%
Within this category, 68.3% are falls on the same level and 24.4% are falls from height — the single most dangerous sub-mechanism and one of the only fatality categories moving upwards.
Vehicle incidents — the asymmetry
Vehicle incidents are the leading cause of workplace fatalities at 42% (79 deaths in 2024) but are not among the top five mechanisms for serious non-fatal claims. SWA explicitly flags this contrast in the 2025 release.
Psychological injury claims climbed 161% in a decade
Mental health is the single largest shift in the Australian workers compensation dataset since 2013-14. In 2013-14, serious psychological claims were a tail category. By FY 2023-24p they are the third largest mechanism by count, and by every recovery and compensation measure they dwarf the all-injury median.
Serious mental-health condition claims accepted per year, Australia
| Financial Year | Serious Mental Health Claims |
|---|---|
| 2023-24 | 17,600 |
| 2022-23 | 15,300 |
| 2013-14 | 6,700 |
Three data points confirmed from Safe Work Australia's Key WHS Statistics 2025 release: the FY 2023-24p count (17,600), the FY 2022-23 count (15,300, derived from the +14.7% YoY figure SWA publishes), and the FY 2013-14 baseline (6,700, derived from the 10,900 absolute increase SWA reports over the decade). The line between these points is interpolated; actual intermediate years are published in the SWA Australian Workers' Compensation Statistics detailed series.
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2013-14 → FY 2023-24p· CC BY 4.0
Why this shift matters more than any other line in the data
Three things are true of psychological injury claims that are not true of almost any other mechanism. They are growing faster than any other category — +161.1% over the decade, and +14.7% in the latest year alone. They take roughly five times as long to close: the Safe Work Australia median for a mental health condition claim is 35.7 weeks off work against 7.4 weeks for the all-injury median. And they are substantially more expensive: the median compensation paid on a mental health claim is $67,400 compared with $16,300 on all-injury — a ratio of roughly four to one.
The NSW-specific cost trajectory is even sharper. According to the NSW Treasurer's March 2025 ministerial statement, the average cost of a psychological injury claim in NSW rose from $146,000 in FY 2019-20 to $288,542 in FY 2024-25 — a 97.6% increase in five years. Psychological injuries now account for 12% of NSW claim volume but 38% of total NSW claim costs. That asymmetry is the single most important financial fact about the current scheme.
The cause mix behind these claims has also shifted. Safe Work Australia's 2025 release records harassment and workplace bullying at 33.2% of serious mental stress claims — up from 27.5% in the February 2024 data cut. Work pressure accounts for 24.2% (down from 25.2%) and exposure to workplace violence for 15.7%. Over a single data release, harassment and bullying has moved from parity with work pressure to being the dominant category by almost a third.
The distribution across workers is not symmetric. Mental health conditions represent 17.2% of serious claims lodged by women against 8.2% for men, as a share of each group's total serious claims — a ratio of roughly two to one. The three industries most affected are healthcare and social assistance, public administration and safety, and education and training. These are sectors where the workforce is predominantly women and where the hazard mechanism is fundamentally different from the body-stressing risks that dominate construction, transport, and manufacturing.
For policymakers, the recovery side of these claims is the unresolved problem. The NSW Treasurer's March 2025 statement cites a 40% one-year return-to-work rate for psychological claims against 88% for physical injuries within 13 weeks. A later May 2025 release puts the one-year psychological return at 50%. Even at the more optimistic figure, psychological claims return at roughly half the rate of physical ones over similar timeframes.
This is the single clearest story in the FY 2023-24 data: an injury category that was peripheral a decade ago is now structurally central — and the scheme is still adjusting to what that means for recovery, cost, and the design of rehabilitation.
Median working weeks lost
All-injury median
FY 2023-24p all-claims
Mental health median
FY 2022-23 SWA published
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2022-23 / 2023-24p
Median compensation paid (AUD)
All-injury median
SWA KWHS 2025
Mental health median
SWA KWHS 2025
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2022-23
Serious mental health condition claims, Australia FY 2023-24p
12% of all serious claims. Up 14.7% year-on-year from 15,300 claims in FY 2022-23.
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2023-24p
Ten-year growth in serious mental health claims
An absolute increase of 10,900 serious claims per year — the largest change of any nature-of-injury major group over the decade.
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2013-14 → FY 2023-24p
33.2%
Bullying and harassment is now the #1 cause of mental stress claims
Harassment and workplace bullying accounts for 33.2% of serious mental stress claims in FY 2023-24p, up from 27.5% in the February 2024 SWA data cut. Work pressure is the second largest cause at 24.2%; exposure to workplace violence and harassment third at 15.7%.
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2023-24p
Who lodges mental health claims
Mental health conditions = 17.2% of female workers' serious claims vs 8.2% of male workers' claims (FY 2023-24p)
| Group | Share of group's serious claims | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Women — share of women's serious claims that are psychological | 17.2% | 17.2% |
| Men — share of men's serious claims that are psychological | 8.2% | 8.2% |
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2023-24p· CC BY 4.0
Six industries. Three-quarters of workplace deaths.
80% of Australian workplace fatalities in 2024 occurred in six industries: agriculture/forestry/fishing, public administration and safety, transport/postal/warehousing, manufacturing, healthcare and social assistance, and construction. 61% of all serious claims occur in the same six.
Share of workplace fatalities by industry, Australia (top 3 shown)
| Industry | Fatalities | Share of workplace deaths |
|---|---|---|
| Transport, postal and warehousing | 51 deaths | 26% |
| Construction | 45 deaths | 23% |
| Agriculture, forestry and fishing | 27 deaths | 14% |
Top-three fatality shares are calendar year 2023 from SWA KWHS 2024 (the last release to break down fatality share by industry at this granularity). The 2024 total of 188 workplace deaths published in KWHS 2025 remains concentrated in the same six industries.
Source:Safe Work Australia· CY 2023· CC BY 4.0•Safe Work Australia· CY 2024· CC BY 4.0
23%
Construction accounts for 23% of workplace fatalities
45 construction workers were fatally injured in 2023 — nearly a quarter of all Australian workplace deaths. Construction also accounts for a disproportionate share of falls-from-height fatalities, which are moving in the wrong direction.
Source:Safe Work Australia· CY 2023
+71%
Falls-from-height fatalities climbed 71% in two years
Falls from a height caused 24 workplace deaths in 2024 — 13% of all fatalities — up sharply from 17 in 2022. It is one of the only fatality mechanisms that has moved in the wrong direction during a period when the overall fatality count is flat or falling.
Source:Safe Work Australia· 2022 → 2024
Why industry risk concentrates
Three dynamics explain the concentration. First, hazard type: vehicle incidents, falls from height, and being hit by moving objects are the three largest fatality mechanisms, and they cluster in transport, construction, and agriculture. Second, workforce composition: older workers and workers in physically demanding or solo-operator roles are over-represented in the high-risk industries. Third, claim frequency per million hours worked is not symmetric — agriculture, forestry and fishing runs at 10.0 serious claims per million hours, against an all-industries average of 6.8, a 46.9% excess on SWA's standard measure.
The practical takeaway for regulators and for injured workers is that industry selection is the single largest exposure variable in the Australian workers compensation dataset. A worker in agriculture faces roughly 1.5× the serious-claim frequency of a worker in finance, and the mechanisms they face are harder to prevent than body-stressing injuries in office-based work. This is why SafeWork NSW's inspection and reform agenda continues to concentrate on these six sectors.
Return-to-work rates are quietly under-performing
Most NSW conversations focus on premium rates and claim costs. The quieter problem is that psychological injury return-to-work (RTW) rates have not kept up with physical injury RTW rates, and the gap has not closed under any of the reforms tried in the last decade.
Median working weeks lost per claim
Typical claim
All-injury median
Psychological injury
Mental health median
Source:Safe Work Australia· FY 2022-23 / 2023-24p
40%
One-year RTW for psychological claims in NSW
The NSW Treasurer's March 2025 ministerial statement puts the one-year return-to-work rate for psychological injury claims at 40%. A later May 2025 release cites 50%. For context, 88% of physical injury claimants return within 13 weeks. We report the more conservative 40% figure, consistent with press guidance in the dossier.
Source:NSW Government· Mar 2025
The structural reason psych RTW lags
Psychological injury claims differ from physical ones in three ways that matter for recovery. Diagnosis is slower and more contested — a knee MRI produces a decisive image; a psychological injury assessment is a clinical judgment across multiple consultations. Treatment is less standardised — there is no direct psych equivalent of the arthroscopic procedure. And return-to-work plans depend heavily on workplace factors (the relationship with the manager, changes to duties, the availability of flexible hours) that the scheme cannot unilaterally engineer. The gap between physical and psychological RTW is not a failure of effort; it is a product of what each injury type requires to recover.
NSW's 2025 reforms — discussed in the next section — are the most ambitious attempt in more than a decade to close this gap, through expedited bullying/harassment assessment, a new Return to Work Intensive program, and a $344 million workplace mental health package. Whether the reforms move the RTW number is the question the FY 2025-26 data will settle.
Source:NSW Government· Mar 2025· CC BY 4.0•SIRA NSW· 2022•SIRA NSW· Live
What NSW did in 2024-2025
Four substantive policy moves define the NSW scheme's 2024-2025. A ministerial flag in March 2025. A $344 million reform package announced in May 2025. A primary Act through Parliament in November 2025. A companion modernisation Act in early 2026. Collectively they represent the largest policy intervention in NSW workers compensation since the 2012 reforms.
NSW Treasurer flags need for psychological injury reform
In the March 2025 ministerial statement, the Treasurer identified a 97.6% rise in the average cost of NSW psychological injury claims over five years, a projected 36% premium lift by FY 2027-28 without reform, and a Nominal Insurer funding ratio of 85 cents per dollar owed to injured workers.
Read the statement'Protecting Workers Compensation for Future Generations' (May 2025)
The NSW Government announced the Workers Compensation Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 and a $344 million Workplace Mental Health package. Key provisions: excessive work demands and vicarious trauma made compensable, 8-week expedited assessment for bullying/harassment claims, a new Return to Work Intensive program, and 50+ new SafeWork psychological-injury inspectors.
Read the announcementWorkers Compensation Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 passes
On 18 November 2025 NSW Parliament passed the primary reform Bill. Whole-Person-Impairment thresholds for weekly lifetime payments rose to 25% from October 2025, with a further move to >30% scheduled for 1 July 2026. Commutations become available for WPI up to 30%.
SIRA announcementSIRA regulatory cadence — Standard 33 and the RTW Roadmap
SIRA's regulatory framework continues to mandate Standard 33 on managing psychological injury claims (in force since March 2021), with supporting resources including the Recovery at Work Insider (Dec 2024) and a Roadmap to improve return-to-work for injured workers. The Workers Compensation Assist Service — trialled in 2023 — has been permanently established.
SIRA annual report 2023-24The May 2025 package also included icare's projection that 80,000 additional injured workers would enter the NSW scheme over the next five years if current trends continued. That projection — more than any single cost figure — is what makes the 2025 reforms structurally important rather than incremental.
What we counted, and what we couldn't
We made five choices in this report that are worth calling out, and we omitted five figures that should have been here. Transparency on both is the point of publishing at all.
Period.The headline figures in this report are FY 2023-24. Safe Work Australia marks its national numbers as “2023-24p” — provisional — in the KWHS 2025 release. NSW scheme figures from SIRA and icare are final FY 2023-24. Fatality counts are published on the calendar year and the 2024 figure of 188 is the most recent available. This page will be re-reviewed when SWA publishes KWHS 2026 (expected late 2026) and when SIRA tables its FY 2024-25 annual report.
Where we used SIRA versus icare versus SWA. SIRA data is used for scheme-wide NSW coverage (the 4.9 million jobs, the 125,474 workers supported). icare data is used for claim costs paid ($5.3 billion) and for Nominal Insurer workforce figures, because icare is the Nominal Insurer. Safe Work Australia data is used for all national figures — serious claim counts, injury mechanism mix, ten-year mental health growth, and fatality statistics — because NSW-only equivalents for some of these categories are not published on the same cadence and would create apples-to-oranges comparisons.
Five honest gaps
- NSW-specific FY 2023-24 psychological injury claim count. The most-cited NSW figure (~11,464 psych claims for 2023-24) circulates in secondary sources but could not be verified on a SIRA primary URL during this research pass. We have omitted it and used the national 17,600 figure for all mental health volume context. NSW-specific counts should be pulled from the SIRA Open Data tool at publication.
- Casual versus full-time workforce split.Not published in SWA KWHS 2025. Available in the detailed SWA Australian Workers' Compensation Statistics annual, which typically releases roughly six months after the Key WHS release. We have omitted the breakdown rather than estimate.
- National annual economic cost. The latest whole-of-economy costing from Safe Work Australia is FY 2012-13 ($61.8 billion, 4.1% of GDP). This is too dated to present as a current-year figure. We have used the NSW scheme-level $5.3 billion as the current-year cost anchor.
- Return-to-work rates.SIRA publishes live 4-week, 13-week, 26-week, 52-week and 104-week RTW rates on its Open Data dashboard; those figures change monthly. We have used the 40% NSW psychological one-year RTW figure from the NSW Treasurer's March 2025 ministerial statement, noting the May 2025 release cites a more optimistic 50%. Readers pulling live numbers should use the SIRA dashboard directly.
- Claim frequency methodology.Safe Work Australia no longer publishes “claims per 1,000 workers” as a headline measure. The standard measure is now “claims per million hours worked”, which controls for part-time and variable-hours employment. Older headline stats that quote per-1,000 are not directly comparable to current SWA numbers.
Published Published April 2026. Compiled 16 April 2026. Dossier: The 2026 State of Workers Compensation in NSW. Most figures are FY 2023-24 (marked '2023-24p' preliminary by SWA). Some legacy SWA median-time/compensation figures remain from FY 2022-23 because SWA publishes those lagged by one year; these are flagged explicitly.
Behind every number is a worker who needed help
The data in this report describes a scheme under pressure. It also describes a scheme that paid $5.3 billion last year to injured workers. If you are the injured worker behind one of those numbers, four things from this report should change what you do next.
If you're hesitating to claim
125,474 NSW workers were supported by the scheme last year. The hardest part of most claims is the first step. Our eight-reason walkthrough addresses the reasons people hesitate — retaliation fears, the sense of being a bother, confusion about who pays — and the truth about each.
Should I claim WorkCover?If you're worried about your mental health
Psychological injury is now 12% of NSW claim volume and 38% of claim cost — the scheme takes these claims seriously. Our psychologists are WorkCover-funded, experienced in claim-side reporting, and work from a shared plan with your treating doctor.
See our psychologistsIf you want to see your likely entitlements
Our payment calculator runs the standard NSW weekly benefits formula — including the first-13-weeks versus weeks-14-plus step-down — so you can see an estimate of your likely weekly entitlement in under a minute.
Run the calculatorIf you want the week-by-week roadmap
Our NSW workers compensation guide walks through what happens in each of the first twelve weeks of a claim — from day-one notification through medical certificate renewal, the 21-day insurer decision window, and the move to weeks-14-plus payments.
Read the guideQuestions about this report
Published April 2026. If you spot an error in a figure or a citation, email us and we'll fix it in the next review.
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Read moreFor media enquiries, reach our editorial team
WorkCover Hub's editorial team is available for comment on NSW workers compensation data, scheme reform, and injury trends. Charts and data from this report may be republished with attribution to the primary source.
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