Workers' compensation data

The workers’ compensation dataset provides detailed statistics about workers’ compensation claims that were lodged in Australia from the 2000-01 financial year. It includes information on the nature and mechanism of work-related injuries and illnesses and characteristics of compensation claims such as median time lost and compensation paid. 

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The statistics in this dataset show accepted serious workers’ compensation claims in Australia lodged from the 2000-01 financial year. Preliminary data are available for 2021-22 and trend analysis to 2020-21. This dataset enables the production of national and nationally comparable workers’ compensation-based data, based on workers’ compensation collections administered by state, territory and Australian government agencies.

Note: The interactive dashboards employ suppression techniques for small values in the interest of confidentiality concerns. This may cause some data to not be published in the charts.

Note: In September 2023, Safe Work Australia implemented improvements to the estimates of the working population used to calculate injury rates from the National Dataset for Compensation-based Statistics (NDS). As a result of these changes, a break in series occurs for work-related injury frequency and incidence rates using NDS from 2021-22 onwards, reflecting as a dotted line. Safe Work Australia advises caution when interpreting time series changes for rates calculated from the NDS spanning the period before and after this change.

Other metadata

FieldInput
Temporal coverage fromJuly 2000
Data last updated18 September 2024
Update frequencyAnnual
Data limitations

This dataset does not cover all work-related injuries and diseases that occurred during this period. This is because not all workers in Australia are eligible, or will necessarily make a claim, for workers’ compensation.

National data may differ from jurisdictional data due to adjustment factors being applied to aid comparability. This has been done due to the use of different definitions and workers’ compensation scheme rules across jurisdictions.

The following claims are excluded from this dataset:

  • claims made and withdrawn by the claimant, and
  • claims disallowed due to being out of scope of the scheme.

See the data dictionary and explanatory notes for further information.

Publicly available data?

Public data can be freely used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Partial – see ‘Resources’ for available data otherwise request data
AuthorSafe Work Australia