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

Updated 16 October 2026. The fatality and claims figures now come from Safe Work Australia’s Key WHS Statistics Australia 2026, released on 12 October: 222 deaths in 2025, the most since 2012, and 147,200 serious claims in 2024-25. The mental health index now runs from 2014-15 and reaches 269. The long-tail chart and the ABS survey figure keep their 2025-edition sources, because the new edition does not repeat them.

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

• 222 workers died from traumatic injuries at work in 2025, a fatality rate of 1.5 per 100,000 workers and the highest annual count since 2012, above the five-year average of 197 deaths. The rate is down 15 per cent since 2015 but has been relatively steady in recent years (five-year average: 1.4 per 100,000).
• Vehicles are the thread through the fatality data: vehicle incidents were 41 per cent of deaths in 2025 (92 workers), and in 2024 at least one vehicle was directly involved in 66 per cent of all worker fatalities.
• 147,200 serious workers' compensation claims in 2024-25 (preliminary), meaning claims with at least a week off work. That is more than 400 a day, at an incidence of 10.7 per 1,000 jobs.
• The medians (2023-24 reference, because payments data lags): 8.2 weeks off work and $19,000 compensation per serious claim. For mental health condition claims the same medians are 34.8 weeks and $68,600, which is why the composition shift below matters more than the totals.

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

Serious claims overall are up 38.1 per cent in count over the decade, but the frequency rate, which adjusts for hours worked, rose only 14.9 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 6,600 claims in 2014-15 to 17,900 in 2024-25p, 12 per cent of everything, and each of those claims costs a median more than four times the money and almost five times the time of all other serious claims.

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.