Body stressing is still the way Australians get hurt at work: 51,800 serious claims in 2024-25

Updated 20 October 2026. We have now read the approved-code lists for South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, whose regulators’ sites had refused our requests, and all three carry the hazardous manual tasks code. SafeWork SA lists it among the approved codes for South Australia; WorkSafe Tasmania lists it as effective in Tasmania from 5 December 2018; and NT WorkSafe calls it an approved code of practice under section 274 of the Territory’s WHS Act. That makes eight of the nine jurisdictions, with Victoria outside the model scheme.

Updated 16 October 2026. The figures now come from Safe Work Australia’s Key WHS Statistics Australia 2026, released on 12 October, for 2024-25. Body stressing rose to 51,800 serious claims and is still the leading mechanism in every occupation group; community and personal service workers now lodge more serious claims than labourers.

Where serious claims actually come from

Cut the same data by what the injury is rather than what caused it and the musculoskeletal picture gets bigger, not smaller: traumatic joint, ligament, muscle and tendon injuries are the largest nature-of-injury category at 53,900 serious claims (36.6 per cent), and musculoskeletal and connective tissue diseases add another 24,000 (16.3 per cent). Together, over half of all serious claims in Australia are musculoskeletal damage of one kind or another. The disease half of that ledger runs long and expensive: median 12.8 weeks lost and $26,200 compensation (2023-24 reference), against 8.2 weeks and $19,000 across all serious claims.

Who is carrying it

Community and personal service workers, the occupation group that includes aged care and disability support, now lodge the most serious claims: 33,800, or 23.2 per cent, at a frequency of 15.7 claims per million hours worked. Labourers follow at 21.3 per cent, but their frequency of 20.2 is the highest of any group and three times the all-occupation rate of 6.7. The care workforce's share is one reason the healthcare and social assistance sector now has its own code with people-handling at its centre. Machinery operators and drivers come third on frequency, at 12.6 claims per million hours.

What the code actually asks

The model Code of Practice for hazardous manual tasks (March 2020) does not set weight limits. It defines a hazardous manual task by the presence of any of four risk factors: high force, repetitive movement, sustained or awkward posture, and exposure to vibration, each with worked examples (gripping small instruments with high force counts; so does any body part held in an unnatural position). That definition is the compliance test: a task with none of the four is not a hazardous manual task, and a task with one of them is, regardless of how light the load is. The duty that follows is the standard cycle, identify the hazardous tasks, assess them, eliminate or minimise the risk so far as reasonably practicable with the hierarchy of controls, and review. The code's emphasis is on redesigning the task and the workplace layout before reaching for training, because technique training alone does not remove any of the four factors.

Reading the trend honestly

Serious claims nationally are up 38.1 per cent in raw count over the decade to 2024-25p, but the frequency rate rose only 14.9 per cent once hours worked are accounted for. Manual handling injury is not exploding; it is persisting, at enormous scale, in the same occupations, while attention has shifted to faster-growing categories. For the cost mathematics of that persistence, including why long claims dominate compensation spending, see the true cost of workplace injury.

Does it bind you? In this case, almost certainly

A model code of practice has no legal force until a jurisdiction approves it under its own WHS Act, which is why we now check rather than assume. This one is long-standing, and it is approved everywhere we could read a list: NSW, the Commonwealth, the ACT, Western Australia and Queensland all carry a hazardous manual tasks code among their approved codes. That is five of the nine jurisdictions; the remaining regulators’ sites refuse our requests, so we have not established South Australia, Tasmania or the Northern Territory, and Victoria sits outside the model WHS scheme entirely. (We have since read those three lists, and all three carry it: see the note of 20 October.)

The practical reading: unlike the newer model codes, where approval is patchy, this one has had years to be adopted and we found no jurisdiction that has skipped it. Treat it as binding and check your own regulator’s approved-codes list if the point is contested.