That $61.8 billion injury-cost figure is 13 years old. Here is what the current numbers actually say.

First, retire the dead number

The $61.8 billion figure, sometimes quoted as "4.1 per cent of GDP", is real. It is the headline of Safe Work Australia's Cost of work-related injury and illness report for the 2012-13 reference year. The previous edition put the cost at $34.3 billion for 2000-01. There has been no edition since 2012-13: the accounting series simply stopped. Quoting $61.8 billion in 2026 as a current national cost is quoting a measurement of an economy 13 years smaller, taken under a methodology nobody has repeated. The old version of this website did it; plenty of consultancy decks still do. This page exists so you do not have to.

The current whole-economy estimate answers a different question

The nearest current successor is Safer, healthier, wealthier (Deloitte Access Economics for Safe Work Australia, October 2022). It does not tally last year's costs. It models what the economy would have gained had work-related injury and illness been eliminated over 2008 to 2018: GDP larger by an average of $28.6 billion each year (about 1.6 per cent), around 185,500 additional full-time jobs a year (70 per cent of them in skilled roles), and average wages about 1.3 per cent higher across all occupations. If you need one defensible economy-scale number for a 2026 business case, it is that one, described as what it is: a modelled estimate for 2008 to 2018, not an observed annual bill.

The numbers that are genuinely current

• 188 workers died from traumatic injuries at work in 2024, a fatality rate of 1.3 per 100,000 workers. The rate is down 24 per cent since 2014 but has been roughly flat for five years (five-year average: 191 deaths, 1.4 per 100,000).
• Vehicles are the thread through the fatality data: vehicle incidents were 42 per cent of deaths (79 workers), and at least one vehicle was directly involved in 66 per cent of all worker fatalities in 2024.
• 146,700 serious workers' compensation claims in 2023-24 (preliminary), meaning claims with at least a week off work. That is roughly 400 a day, at an incidence of 10.9 per 1,000 workers.
• The medians (2022-23 reference, because payments data lags): 7.4 weeks off work and $16,300 compensation per serious claim. For mental health condition claims the same medians are 35.7 weeks and $67,400, which is why the composition shift below matters more than the totals.

The composition is the story: mental health claims tripled while everything else drifted

Serious claims overall are up 34.5 per cent in count over the decade, but the frequency rate, which adjusts for hours worked, rose only 12.6 per cent. Part of the rise is simply a bigger workforce. What is not an artefact is the mix: mental health conditions went from roughly 6,700 claims in 2013-14 to 17,600 in 2023-24p, 12 per cent of everything, and each of those claims costs a median four times the money and nearly five times the time of the average claim.

A fifth of claims drive three quarters of the money

This is the strongest early-intervention argument in the national data. The cheap claims are already cheap. The economics of a safety budget live almost entirely in preventing, and shortening, the small share of claims that run long: which, per the chart above this one, increasingly means psychological injury and serious musculoskeletal damage. Those two categories have their own pages on this masthead: psychosocial hazards and manual handling and musculoskeletal injuries.

And the denominator problem under all of it

Compensation data is not injury data. The ABS work-related injuries survey (published February 2023, for 2021-22, funded by Safe Work Australia) found 3.5 per cent of workers experienced a work-related injury or illness in the year, and only 30.5 per cent of them received workers' compensation. Most injured workers never enter the claims statistics at all, usually because the injury was judged minor. Whatever the true national cost of work-related harm is, every number on this page understates it.