Australia's return-to-work rate has fallen for a decade. The strongest lever in the national survey is a written plan.

Eleven schemes, one national instrument

Return to work lives in workers' compensation law, and workers' compensation was never harmonised the way WHS law was. Safe Work Australia's overview counts 11 main schemes, one for each state and territory plus three Commonwealth schemes, and is plain that Each one is governed by different laws and may vary in the way it operates. What exists nationally is a policy instrument: the National Return to Work Strategy 2020-2030, whose vision is to minimise the impact of work-related injury and illness and enable workers to have a timely, safe and durable return to work. The strategy is also a reminder to date-check everything in this field: its 2019 foreword still quotes the $61.8 billion national cost figure whose reference year was 2012-13, the stale statistic our cost-of-injury story unpicks. And the scheme map has a known hole: gig workers engaged as independent contractors generally sit outside workers' compensation entirely, the gap the October 2025 national policy approach covered in our gig economy story is trying to close.

What the 2025 survey found

Safe Work Australia's biennial National Return to Work Survey asks workers who are receiving or have received workers' compensation whether and how they got back to work. The 2025 edition, in the field from 31 March to 18 July 2025 and reported in November 2025, added an employer sample for the first time. The headline measures are all moving the wrong way.

Headline measures from the National Return to Work Survey, 2021 and 2025 editions, per cent. The returned to work rate counts workers who returned at any time since their injury or illness; the current rate additionally requires being in a paid job at interview.

Beneath the headline sit two divides. The first is by injury type: workers with physical injuries returned at 90.2 per cent in 2025, workers with psychological injuries at 76.5, and workers with a psychological injury were far less likely to have a return-to-work plan at all (40.9 per cent against 64.0). Given that mental health claims already run five times the median time lost of other claims, as our psychosocial story sets out, the group least likely to get the plan is the group the plan-gap costs most. The second divide is the plan itself: plan-holders returned to work at some point at 94.0 per cent and were still working at interview at 89.5 per cent, against 81.7 and 69.4 for workers without one. The survey cannot prove the plan causes the outcome, but employers appear to believe it: 78.7 per cent of surveyed employers said their injured worker had a plan, seventeen points above what workers themselves reported.

Early intervention is measurable

The strategy's employer chapter says workers have better outcomes when workplaces engage early and support them irrespective of whether the worker makes a claim, and names delay, in claim determination and treatment approvals, as a key barrier to timely return to work. The 2025 survey puts numbers around that. Under half of workers (48.3 per cent) said their employer helped them manage their injury or illness before the claim was lodged, down from 51.1 in 2021; workers who had returned to work were nearly twice as likely to have had that pre-claim help as workers who had not (51.0 against 27.2 per cent). Employers who provided it reported a 74.3 per cent return-to-work rate against 62.2 where they did not. The friction points are no mystery either: employers named finding suitable duties (30.7 per cent) and communication with healthcare providers (27.1) as their top barriers, and only 42.7 per cent of workers agreed their employer made an effort to find them suitable employment.

The duties: a program, a coordinator, a plan

The strategy states the common denominator: an individual return-to-work plan is a mandatory or encouraged requirement in all workers' compensation schemes, with employers or insurers responsible for ensuring one is in place. The scheme-level machinery around it is best seen in the two largest schemes. In New South Wales, SIRA requires every employer to establish a return-to-work program, the standing policy document for handling injury, within 12 months, developed in consultation with workers, aligned with the insurer's injury management program and reviewed at least every two years. Category 1 employers, those with a basic tariff premium over $50,000 a year, self-insurers, and specialised-insurer employers with more than 20 employees, must appoint a return-to-work coordinator. SIRA's specification of that role is the practical job description: compile the initial notification, identify suitable work, prepare and review the worker's recover-at-work plan in consultation with the parties, liaise with the worker's support team, support redeployment where pre-injury duties are out of reach, and keep confidential case records.

In Victoria, WorkSafe's employer obligations start the moment the employer receives the worker's certificate of capacity, claim form or agent notification: obtain information about capacity, consult directly with the worker and, with consent, their treating health practitioner, appoint a return-to-work coordinator who has an appropriate level of seniority and is competent, and provide suitable employment to a worker with an incapacity for a 52-week period, then pre-injury or equivalent employment on return to full capacity. Host employers must cooperate with a labour-hire provider's return-to-work efforts, the shared duty pattern our labour-hire story describes. Breaches carry financial penalties of up to 180 penalty units for an individual and 900 for a body corporate per offence. Other schemes build the same components with different thresholds and names; the duty holder's first stop is their own scheme's regulator, and Safe Work Australia's overview page lists all eleven.

How long before a plan must exist, by jurisdiction

The sentence above, that other schemes build the same components with different thresholds, is true but unhelpful if you are the one waiting. Safe Work Australia's biennial comparison report, the 30th edition, published on 30 June 2026 and current as at 31 December 2025, sets the deadlines out side by side. They are not close to each other.

Two things are worth drawing out. The fastest clocks are attached to the word "significant": three business days in the ACT and three working days in New South Wales, but only once an injury carries that label, which is itself a defined term rather than a description of how bad it feels. And four schemes have no prescribed period at all, including three of the Commonwealth schemes and New Zealand, where the obligation is real but the timing is not written down.

The practical reading, and it is ours rather than the report's: if you are injured in the Northern Territory, nothing in the legislation says when your plan must exist, only that within seven days of your employer realising you will be off for more than four weeks they must put a proposal to you in writing. That is a different experience of the same injury from the one three business days away in Canberra, and it is not a difference anyone chose when they chose where to work.

Only two jurisdictions prescribe the three-point contact, the step where somebody is required to ring the worker, the employer and the treating doctor. In New South Wales the insurer must initiate it within three working days. In Tasmania an injury management coordinator must make that contact as soon as practicable after a worker with a significant injury is assigned to them. Everywhere else it is a matter of scheme practice rather than a legislated step.