National work health and safety prosecutions data

The national work health and safety (WHS) prosecutions repository provides national information on criminal prosecutions for breaching work health and safety laws or regulations in Australia, from 1 January 2020. 

This data records prosecutions under work health and safety (WHS) laws and regulations in Australian jurisdictions (Commonwealth, states and territories) from 1 January 2020. It provides a national view of WHS prosecutions for improved WHS compliance policies and practices.

Safe Work Australia compiles the data from public reports of WHS prosecutions on available on jurisdictions’ websites.

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 This may cause some data to not be published in the charts.

Other metadata

FieldInput
Temporal coverage from1 January 2020
Data last updated31 July 2024
Update frequencyAnnual
Data limitations

Each defendant is recorded separately, which means there may be more than one record relating to a single WHS incident.
The data is compiled from jurisdictions’ websites and therefore is only accurate to Safe Work Australia’s interpretation of the available public information.

This repository specifically excludes cases relating to negligence or tort law, workers’ compensation legislation, employment legislation or other laws (such as criminal manslaughter provisions in criminal law).

See the data dictionary 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