Workers' compensation data

Safe Work Australia’s primary source of information on work-related injuries and diseases. 

About the claims data

Safe Work Australia compiles national workers’ compensation statistics using data obtained from each of the workers’ compensation regulatory authorities in Australia. These data are collated into the National Data Set for Compensation-based Statistics (NDS), which is Safe Work Australia’s primary source of information on work-related injuries and diseases. 

The NDS contains detailed data for claims lodged across Australian workers’ compensation schemes from the 2008-09 financial year onwards. 

The workers’ compensation data in the NDS includes:

  • Claim process details such as Claims status, Date of lodgement and Return to work.
  • Work status, including Occupation and Industry of employment.
  • Demographic information about the worker including Sex and Age.
  • Details of the most serious work-related injury or illness, including the Nature, Mechanism, Agency and Bodily location (see the Type of Occurrence Classification System catalogue page for more information)
  • Outcome of occurrence, including Time lost and Compensation payments.
FieldInput
Temporal coverage fromJuly 2008
Data last updated9 February 2026 - minor update
Implemented as part of the adoption of version 3.2 of the NDS data specification, this has resulted in very small changes to reported results in limited instances. For example, the 2020-21 total serious claims count has been revised from 131,639 to 131,640. The revised data are available in the interactive data dashboards, however reports and publications have not been updated to reflect this change.

10 October 2025 - annual release
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.

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  • claims made and withdrawn by the claimant, and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

Data downloads

Technical information

Metadata
FieldInput
Temporal coverage fromJuly 2008
Data last updated9 February 2026 - minor update
Implemented as part of the adoption of version 3.2 of the NDS data specification, this has resulted in very small changes to reported results in limited instances. For example, the 2020-21 total serious claims count has been revised from 131,639 to 131,640. The revised data are available in the interactive data dashboards, however reports and publications have not been updated to reflect this change.

10 October 2025 - annual release
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.

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