One in five workers killed on the job in 2024 was in construction. The rulebook answers with 18 activities and a $250,000 line.

The numbers the rulebook answers

Safe Work Australia's Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025 counts 37 construction workers killed at work in 2024, 20 per cent of the national total of 188 and the third-highest industry count behind transport, postal and warehousing (54, or 29 per cent) and agriculture, forestry and fishing (44, or 23 per cent). Construction's fatality rate was 2.8 per 100,000 workers against 1.3 for all workers. On the injury side, the industry recorded 17,600 serious workers' compensation claims in 2023-24p, 12.0 per cent of the country's claims and the second-largest industry share, with a frequency rate of 9.3 serious claims per million hours worked against the all-industries 6.8, a median 8.4 working weeks lost and median compensation of $20,000 per claim. Where the money side of numbers like these leads is covered in our cost-of-injury story; this page is about the instruments that exist to move them.

Eighteen activities, one precondition: the SWMS

The 18 high risk construction work activities, as regulation 291 of the model WHS Regulations defines them (paraphrased headings; the regulation's full wording governs). Any one of them triggers the safe work method statement duty.

Regulation 299 requires a PCBU, before high risk construction work commences, to ensure a safe work method statement is prepared or has already been prepared by another person. The statement must identify the high risk work, specify its hazards and risks, describe the control measures, and describe how those controls will be implemented, monitored and reviewed, all taking into account the circumstances of the actual workplace and expressed so the people using it can understand it. The code is pointed about quality: a statement like "use appropriate personal protective equipment" does not detail a control measure, and a generic SWMS reused across jobs must be reviewed against each specific site. Regulation 300 supplies the teeth: work not carried out in accordance with the SWMS must be stopped immediately or as soon as it is safe to do so, and resumed only in accordance with the statement. The SWMS is kept until the work is completed, or for at least two years if a notifiable incident occurs in connection with it.

The $250,000 line: projects, principal contractors and the plan

Regulation 292 draws the line: a construction project is any project involving construction work costing $250,000 or more. Every construction project must have exactly one principal contractor at any one time (regulation 293). By default that is the PCBU who commissions the project, unless it engages another PCBU and authorises it to have management or control of the workplace; for an individual homeowner commissioning residential work, the builder engaged with management or control is the principal contractor. The role carries its own duty set: display signage showing the principal contractor's name and contact numbers, prepare a written WHS management plan for the workplace before work on the project commences (regulation 309), ensure everyone carrying out construction work is made aware of its contents before they start (regulation 310), keep it reviewed and current (regulation 311), and take all reasonable steps to obtain a copy of each SWMS before the high risk work it covers begins (regulation 312).

The plan is short, but its required contents are the coordination problems that shared sites actually have: who at the workplace holds which health and safety responsibility by name and position; the consultation, cooperation and coordination arrangements between the PCBUs on site; the arrangements for managing incidents; the site-specific safety rules and how people are told about them; and the arrangements for collecting, assessing, monitoring and reviewing SWMS. That last item is the two documents locking together: the project-level plan is the index, the task-level SWMS is the content. The overlapping-duties logic behind all of it, that multiple PCBUs can hold the same duty at once and none can contract out of it, is the same machinery explained in our shared-duties story and mapped in the WHS laws explainer.

Everyone on site, and what changed in the 2024 code

Below the project threshold, the baseline duties still run. Anyone carrying out construction work must hold general construction induction training, the white card, and keep the card (or, while an application is pending, the training certification) available for inspection. Subcontractors wear two hats at once, holding the duties of a PCBU and of a worker; a self-employed contractor is a worker of their own business. And officers of construction PCBUs carry the personal due diligence duty, including its verification step, that our management systems story walks through.

The current edition of the Construction Work code is dated November 2024, replacing the May 2018 edition, and one addition is worth naming: the code now explicitly tells construction PCBUs to manage psychosocial hazards in accordance with the WHS Regulations, listing examples such as sustained high job demands alongside the physical hazards, and pointing to the psychosocial code covered in our psychosocial story. Like every model code, it is not itself law but is admissible in court proceedings as evidence of what is known about a hazard and what is reasonably practicable, per Safe Work Australia's model laws hub, and it binds in the form each jurisdiction adopts.