Australia's costliest workplace injury has no bodily location
What the 2026 Key Work Health and Safety Statistics tell us about psychological injury — and why frequency rates keep missing it.
Dr Anna Kiaos | Mind Culture Life Australia | October 2026
Safe Work Australia released Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2026 this month, and the headline will be the fatality figure: 222 workers died from traumatic injuries sustained at work in 2025, the highest annual count since 2012 and well above the five-year average of 197 (Safe Work Australia, 2026, p. 2). That number deserves every bit of the attention it will get.
However, the more consequential story for most Australian organisations is further into the report, in the workers' compensation data. There were approximately 147,200 serious claims in 2024-25 — more than 400 every working day (p. 8). Importantly, within that total, one category has moved in a way nothing else has.
The decade's defining shift
Serious claims for mental health conditions have increased by 11,300 since 2014-15. That is a rise of 169.4%, and Safe Work Australia names it plainly: the largest change of any nature of injury major group over the decade (p. 14). Mental health conditions now account for 17,900 serious claims, or 12.2% of the national total.
Set that against the overall trend and the significance becomes clearer. Across all serious claims, the count rose 38.1% over the same decade, and once hours worked are accounted for, the frequency rate rose only 14.9% (p. 8). The growth in Australian workplace harm is not evenly distributed. It is disproportionately psychological.
The report is careful, and so should we be: mental health condition claims actually fell slightly over the most recent year, down 580 claims or 3.2% (p. 14). One year is not a trend. A decade is.
The same shift shows up in the broader classification. Diseases and conditions have grown from roughly one in four serious claims (26.1%) in 2014-15 to one in three (33.4%) today (p. 13). The Australian injury profile is moving away from the acute and visible, and toward the chronic and the hidden.
What a psychological injury actually costs
The volume figures understate the problem, because psychological injury behaves differently from physical injury once a claim is open. The median time lost on a mental health condition claim is 34.8 working weeks. The median across all other serious claims is 7.0 weeks (p. 14). A worker with a psychological injury is away for close to five times as long.
The median compensation paid on a mental health condition claim is $68,600, against $16,100 for all other serious claims — more than four times the cost (p. 14). Looked at by mechanism rather than nature, the figures are near identical: mental stress claims run to a median 35.0 weeks and $69,400 (p. 15).
There is a detail in the bodily location table worth pausing on. Safe Work Australia classifies these claims under 'non-physical locations', and at 34.8 weeks and $68,600 they carry the longest duration and the highest cost of any bodily location in the dataset (p. 16). The most expensive injury in Australian workplaces is not, in any conventional sense, located in the body at all.
Three causes, and all of them are cultural
If the cost is in psychological injury, the obvious question is what produces it. The report answers this directly. Of the 17,000 serious mental stress claims in 2024-25, three mechanisms account for more than three-quarters (p. 15):
· Work-related harassment and/or workplace bullying — 5,400 claims (31.6%)
· Work pressure — 4,500 claims (26.5%)
· Exposure to violence and harassment — 3,000 claims (17.7%)
These are not hazards in the way a trench or an unguarded blade is a hazard. None of them can be isolated, substituted, guarded or engineered away. Each one is produced by how work is organised, how performance is demanded, who is protected when they speak, and what a workplace has quietly agreed to tolerate. They are properties of a culture, and they are generated continuously rather than occurring as events (Kiaos, 2024).
This is precisely the gap that conventional WHS systems were never built to close. An incident-reporting system records the moment something happened. It has no instrument for the conditions that made it likely.
The industry that looks safest has the longest claims
The clearest evidence that our standard measures are the wrong instrument sits in the industry tables, and I suspect it will be widely overlooked.
Financial and insurance services records the lowest serious claims frequency rate of any industry in Australia: 0.9 claims per million hours worked, against a national average of 6.7. By the measure most safety dashboards lead with, it is the safest industry in the country.
It also records the longest median time lost of any industry — 19.8 weeks, more than double the national median — and the highest median compensation of any industry at $46,700 (p. 17).
The same pattern repeats by occupation. Managers have a frequency rate of 2.4 but lose a median 12.8 weeks per claim at $34,800. Clerical and administrative workers: a frequency rate of 2.1, 12.9 weeks, $30,600 (p. 18). Rare claims, long claims, expensive claims.
Low frequency and high severity is the signature of psychological injury. These workplaces are not safe. They are places where harm accumulates slowly, surfaces late, and costs a great deal when it finally does. An organisation watching its frequency rate will see nothing at all until someone does not come back.
The harm does not end when the claim does
Two findings in this year's report should change how we think about the value of prevention.
The first comes from new analysis of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (Department of Social Services, 2025, as analysed in Safe Work Australia, 2026, p. 9). Following a work-related injury involving a month or more away from work, general health declines by around 8% and mental health by around 7%. Five years later, both remain below the pre-injury baseline. The damage does not resolve. It settles.
The second is that return to work is getting worse, not better. The proportion of claimants back at work within 52 weeks has fallen from 92.8% in 2014 to 87.0% in 2024, and only 44.2% return within four weeks (p. 12). Given that psychological injury claims already run to 34.8 weeks at the median, the compounding effect is not hard to anticipate.
What this asks of duty holders
The regulatory position has already moved. Psychosocial hazards now sit squarely within the primary duty of care, with dedicated instruments in place in Victoria under the Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 (Vic), which commenced on 1 December 2025, and in New South Wales under section 26A of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW), which commenced on 1 July 2026. The question is no longer whether these hazards must be managed. It is whether an organisation can demonstrate that it identified them.
That is harder than it sounds, because the dominant instrument — the annual engagement or culture survey — is poorly suited to the task. A survey produces a static reading, filtered through what people are willing to put in writing about their own workplace, usually at the moment they have least confidence that it is anonymous (Kiaos, 2024). It will tell you that scores have fallen in a division. It will not tell you what is happening in that division, or why, or which team it started in.
Three of the top causes of psychological injury claims in this country are bullying and harassment, work pressure, and exposure to violence. Each of those is visible well before it becomes a claim — in how work is allocated, in who is deferred to, in what gets laughed off, in the language people use about their own managers. It is visible to anyone looking at the right level, with the right method, at the right time.
The data in this report describes the end of that process: the claim, the weeks lost, the compensation paid. The work worth doing sits at the start of it.
A closing note
Australia is getting measurably better at preventing the injuries we can see. The fatality rate has fallen 15% since 2015 (Safe Work Australia, 2026, p. 3). Physical hazard control, for all its remaining failures, is a mature discipline with mature tools.
We are not getting better at the injuries we cannot see. On the only decade-long measure available, we are getting substantially worse — and those injuries now cost four times more and keep people away five times longer than everything else on the list.
The instruments we use to find them have not caught up. That, rather than the claim numbers, is the finding I would take from this year's report.
References
Department of Social Services. (2025). Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey [Data set]. Australian Government Department of Social Services. https://doi.org/10.26193/6M1BMR
Kiaos, T. A. (2024). Cultural blind spots: Identifying hidden psychosocial hazards in the workplace. Health Promotion Journal of Australia. https://doi.org/10.1002/hpja.900
Kiaos, T. A. (2026). Customer-centric ideology and symptoms of burnout: A case study in the NSW public sector. Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/15555240.2026.2654061
Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 (Vic).
Safe Work Australia. (2025). National Return to Work Survey 2025. Safe Work Australia.
Safe Work Australia. (2026). Key work health and safety statistics Australia 2026. Safe Work Australia. https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au
Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW) s 26A.
Note on the data. Workers' compensation figures are for 2024-25 and are preliminary, denoted 'p' in the source report and subject to revision. Median time lost and median compensation paid are reported for 2023-24, the most recent non-preliminary period, because a high proportion of 2024-25 claims remain open. Fatality figures are for the 2025 calendar year. All page references are to Safe Work Australia (2026).
About the author
Dr Anna Kiaos is an organisational ethnographer, organisational culture researcher and psychosocial risk expert with more than twenty years of leadership experience across research, clinical, academic and commercial settings. She is affiliated with the Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health, School of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health, at UNSW Sydney, and the Founder and Director of Mind Culture Life Australia Pty Ltd, a specialist consultancy in organisational culture, psychosocial risk and mental health.
Her research programme centres on the cultural production of workplace psychological injury.
Her work and commentary have been cited in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, SBS, OHS Alert, HR Leader, Human Resources Director, Government News and The Times.
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