Queensland WorkCover's latest annual report contains a number that should stop every employer mid-scroll: mental injury claims have more than doubled in five years, from 1,974 in 2021–22 to 4,110 in the most recent financial year - a 108% increase. These claims cost the scheme $334 million, at an average of $25,138 per claim. And the human cost behind that figure is stark: workers with accepted mental injury claims return to work only 71.4% of the time, against 93.2% for physical injuries, and they're off work for an average of 123 days, compared with 47 days for a physical injury.
Those are not abstract numbers. They represent thousands of Queensland workers - disproportionately in frontline public-sector roles at Queensland Health, Education Queensland, the Queensland Police Service, Corrective Services, Youth Justice and Child Safety - whose psychological injuries are now taking two and a half times longer to resolve than a broken bone or a strained back, and resolving less often.
What's actually driving the increase
Workers' compensation lawyer Alison Barrett, who has acted in many of these claims, points to a familiar list: excessive workloads, occupational violence and aggression, bullying and harassment, and exposure to workplace trauma. She's careful to note that greater awareness of mental health is "a very small part" of the explanation —-this isn't simply better reporting of a static problem, it's a genuine increase in harm.
Mapped against the 17 recognised psychosocial hazards in the Comcare/Safe Work Australia model, this points squarely at four: Job demands (the workload side of the equation), Violence and aggression and Traumatic events or material (both named directly by Barrett and consistent with the frontline, public-facing roles driving the growth), and Bullying and harassment.
The policy fork in the road
An independent review of Queensland's WorkCover scheme is underway, due to report in the second half of 2026, examining whether the scheme remains financially sustainable given this trend. That framing - sustainability -is exactly what has unions and lawyers worried. Queensland Council of Unions general secretary Jacqueline King has warned that a response focused on tightening eligibility simply shifts the cost elsewhere: onto the welfare system, onto superannuation-linked income protection, or onto workers who stay in unsafe roles because they can't afford not to.
This is the same tension playing out federally. NSW has already moved to tighten workers' compensation thresholds for psychological injury from 1 July 2026 - stricter eligibility, clearer definitions of what counts as bullying or excessive workload, limits on benefit duration, and a reinforced "reasonable management action" defence for employers. Whatever Queensland's review recommends, the direction of travel across Australian jurisdictions is the same: regulators and insurers are under pressure to make psychological injury claims harder to bring, not easier.
For employers, that's not good news dressed up as good news. A tighter compensation scheme doesn't reduce psychosocial harm - it just reduces who gets compensated for it. The injuries, the extended time off work, and the lower return-to-work rates don't disappear; they become a problem an employer has to manage directly, with fewer workers compensation dollars cushioning the fall, and with WHS duties to manage psychosocial risk at the source unaffected by any change to the compensation system.
What this means in practice
The WHS duty to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risk so far as reasonably practicable exists independently of how generous or restrictive the compensation scheme is. Whichever way the Queensland review lands, that duty isn't going anywhere - and it's considerably cheaper to discharge than a $25,138 claim and 123 days of lost productivity.
A few starting points that map directly to the hazards behind this data:
Job demands. Don't wait for workload complaints to surface as a crisis. Regularly and anonymously check in on how manageable workloads actually feel at a team level, not just whether deadlines are being hit - workload that looks fine on a Gantt chart can still be unsustainable for the people doing the work.
Violence and aggression. If your people deal with the public - patients, students, clients, members of the public in distress - treat incident reporting as a leading indicator, not paperwork. A rising trend in near-misses or low-level aggression is the warning sign that precedes the claim, and it's visible well before anyone files one.
Bullying and harassment. Psychological safety has to be checked for, not assumed. Teams that look calm on the surface can be running on compliance rather than trust, and that gap tends to surface only once someone has already decided to leave or lodge a complaint.
The claims data is a lagging indicator - by the time someone's mental injury claim is accepted, the hazard has already done its damage for months, often years. The organisations that get ahead of Queensland's trend will be the ones treating psychosocial risk assessment as a genuine early-warning system, not a compliance box to tick once a year.
Sources: ABC News, "Mental health risks at work"; Law Society Journal, "Psychosocial safety at work not a 'soft issue'"; Sparke Helmore, "Queensland's new Code of Practice into psychosocial hazards in the workplace."
