Fewer prosecutions, bigger penalties: reading the 2025 WHS data at the boardroom table

Dr Anna Kiaos · Founder & Director, Mind Culture Life Australia

Safe Work Australia has just released its 2025 WHS prosecutions data, and the headline is unusual: for the first time in five years, the number of prosecutions has fallen — from 321 in 2024 to 308 in 2025. On its own, that number reads as good news. Read alongside the penalties data, it tells a very different story.

The average financial penalty per prosecution in 2025 was $147,985 — the highest annual average ever recorded, and a 33 per cent increase on 2024. Ninety-nine per cent of prosecutions ended in a financial penalty, up from 98 per cent the year before. So while regulators are prosecuting slightly fewer matters, they are prosecuting the ones they take on more heavily, and they are almost never walking away without a penalty. The four-year upward trend in prosecution volume has broken — but the cost of being on the receiving end has never been higher.

That combination matters, and it matters especially now for organisations working through what the strengthened Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code means in practice.

What the data does say — and what it doesn't

The Safe Work Australia dashboard doesn't break out psychosocial versus physical-injury prosecutions. The dominant industries in the 2025 data — Construction (43 per cent), Manufacturing (20 per cent) and Mining (6 per cent) — are traditional sites of physical-injury enforcement. It would be a mistake to read this data as evidence that psychosocial enforcement is either surging or absent. What the data does tell us is more general, and more important: the direction of the enforcement environment is toward higher-cost outcomes per case, and the near-100 per cent conviction rate signals that regulators are becoming both more selective in the cases they run and more successful in the ones they take to court.

The relevance for psychosocial risk is contextual rather than statistical. Section 26A of the NSW Work Health and Safety Act has been enforceable since 1 July 2026. The Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code is now an approved benchmark. The People at Work survey — the free, government-backed platform that around 5,000 organisations and more than 160,000 workers used over the last five years — closes on 2 October.

Organisations are being asked to demonstrate how they identify, assess, control and review psychosocial hazards on an ongoing basis, while maintaining evidence of the actions they have taken. The 2025 prosecutions data doesn't cause that shift. It sits alongside it, and it puts a number — $147,985 on average, and rising — on the cost of missing it.

What boards and executives should take from this

Three things.

First, the penalty trend is a governance question, not an HR question. A $147,985 average penalty, with 33 per cent year-on-year growth, is the kind of number that belongs on a board's enterprise-risk dashboard. It is no longer defensible to treat WHS compliance as an operational matter delegated entirely to people and culture teams. Boards and audit committees should be able to answer three questions on demand: where does psychosocial risk sit in our organisation, what are we doing about it, and how would we demonstrate that to a regulator if asked.

Second, evidence is now the currency. The regulator's expectation is not just that psychosocial hazards are being managed, but that the organisation can show they are being managed. That means documented identification, documented controls, documented review, and a leadership team that can speak to all three without needing to make a phone call. The organisations most exposed are not those without good intentions. They are those with good intentions and no evidence trail.

Third, the retirement of the People at Work survey has changed what evidence looks like. For the last five years, many organisations relied on an all-of-organisation, engagement-style score as their psychosocial risk artefact. That artefact is going away, and the regulator's own guidance never treated a single organisation-wide score as sufficient in the first place. Cultural pressure doesn't distribute evenly — it accumulates in particular teams, under particular leaders, and in the gap between what an organisation says it values and what it actually rewards. An organisation-wide score won't reveal that. The next generation of psychosocial evidence has to be more granular, more structured and more auditable than the last one was.

Where to start

If your organisation is preparing for the post-People-at-Work environment, three questions can start the conversation at the executive table:

1. Can we name our psychosocial hazards at the level the regulator names them — high job demands, low job control, poor support, poor workplace relationships, low role clarity, poor change management, poor recognition and reward, hazardous physical environment, remote or isolated work, violence, aggression, bullying, harassment and discrimination?

2. Do we know where in the organisation each of those hazards is accumulating — at the subculture and team level, not just the organisation-wide average?

3. Could we, tomorrow morning, show a regulator a clean identification-and-control-and-review record for each?

If the answer to any of those is "not yet," that's the work. The 2025 prosecutions data is a reminder that the cost of not doing it is trending sharply in one direction.

The Culture Pressure Map™, the diagnostic developed out of my research into organisational culture and psychosocial risk, is built for exactly that gap. It examines shared culture, subcultures and microcultures separately, maps the findings to the regulator-listed psychosocial hazards, and produces the evidence trail leaders now need — both to prioritise action and to demonstrate to a regulator that the identification-and-control cycle has been followed.

That is where the next chapter starts.

Dr Anna Kiaos is the Founder and Director of Mind Culture Life Australia and an organisational culture researcher. She is affiliated with UNSW Sydney's Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health. She developed the Culture Pressure Map™, a three-level psychosocial risk diagnostic aligned to regulator-listed psychosocial hazards. Learn more at www.culturepressuremap.com.