Two in three worker deaths in 2024 involved a vehicle. In law, the driver's seat is a workplace.

The vehicle is a workplace, so the duty rides along

The legal foundation is a definition, not a special driving rule. Section 8 of the model WHS Act says a workplace "is a place where work is carried out for a business or undertaking and includes any place where a worker goes, or is likely to be, while at work", and then puts the matter beyond argument: a place "includes a vehicle, vessel, aircraft or other mobile structure". A courier's van, a sales representative's car and a linehaul cab are workplaces the moment work is being done in them, which means the section 19 primary duty, the consultation duties and the risk-management framework all apply to driving for work exactly as they apply to a bench or a warehouse floor. What does not exist is a dedicated instrument: there is no model code of practice for work-related driving. The duty is assembled from the Act, the general risk-management provisions, Safe Work Australia's transport guidance, and, since September 2025, a fatigue code with driving written through it. Road rules and licensing sit alongside all of this as separate law; complying with them is necessary, and it is not the same thing as discharging the WHS duty.

What the deaths data says

The 2024 fatality figures make driving the beat's heaviest number. Vehicle incidents, defined in the report as incidents where an occupant of a vehicle is killed following a collision with another vehicle or a stationary object, killed 79 workers, 42 per cent of the 188 worker fatalities. The report's vehicle spotlight goes wider than the mechanism count: at least one vehicle was directly involved in 66 per cent of worker fatalities, 124 deaths, and of those vehicle-involved deaths 72 per cent came from single-vehicle incidents rather than collisions between vehicles. Half of the fatalities involving a vehicle, 62, involved at least one truck. The youngest workers carry the heaviest share: 83 per cent of fatalities among workers under 25 involved at least one vehicle, the highest proportion of any age group. By industry, Transport, postal and warehousing recorded 54 deaths, 29 per cent of the national total, at a fatality rate of 7.4 per 100,000 workers against 1.3 for all industries.

Deaths concentrated, claims not

The claims side of the ledger looks nothing like the fatality side, and the gap is the point. The mechanism group "Vehicle incidents and other" produced 6,700 serious workers' compensation claims in 2023-24, 4.5 per cent of the national 146,700, with a median 8.0 weeks lost and $18,800 in compensation. A hazard that accounts for 42 per cent of deaths and under 5 per cent of serious claims is a hazard whose incidents skew catastrophic: the crash that would have been a near-miss or a bruise on a factory floor is a fatality at highway speed. Two definitional seams matter when reading the numbers together. Workers on foot who are struck by vehicles are counted in the separate "being hit by moving objects" group, the workplace-traffic exposure covered on the warehouse and forklift page, so neither figure on this page includes them. And the fatality and claims collections are different systems entirely; the methodology note below sets out the split. The cost dimension of long-tail claims belongs to the true-cost page.

Managing the risk: what the guidance actually lists

Safe Work Australia's transport page applies the standard four-step risk-management process to road work and names the hazards it expects a PCBU to work through: "time pressures", "shift work, fatigue and physical fitness", "poor vehicle design", "manual handling of heavy weights", "working at height" and "exposure to gases and fumes". The list is guidance, not regulation, but it maps the duty onto decisions a business actually controls: scheduling that does not reward speeding, vehicle selection and maintenance, load and delivery-window design, and who is asked to drive how far after what kind of shift. The model WHS Regulations add binding duties around the vehicle as plant, and the powered mobile plant rules govern the on-site half of the picture covered on the plant page. The reader's practical test is the same one the transport page implies: if the only road-safety control a business can point to is "drivers hold licences", the risk assessment has not started.

Fatigue is the sharpest instrument on the shelf

The strongest driving-specific material now sits in the model Code of Practice: Managing the risk of fatigue at work, September 2025, the guide-turned-code covered on the fatigue page. Its opening science is framed in driving terms: "being awake for 17 hours has similar effect on cognitive and motor performance as having a blood alcohol content of 0.05% and being awake for 24 hours is similar to having a blood alcohol content of 0.10%". Its control chapters return to the wheel repeatedly: where work involves driving long distances it points to in-vehicle fatigue monitoring, and it lists vehicle-based systems that monitor driver behaviour patterns among the available controls. The code's commuting box extends the thinking past the job itself: the PCBU's duty to workers applies while the worker is at work, but the duty to other persons "may also mean the PCBU has a duty where workers become fatigued at work and put other road users at risk driving home". For a business whose people drive, the fatigue code is the closest thing to a driving code the model framework currently offers.

The truck carries a second law

Heavy vehicles run under a parallel statute that is not WHS law but reads like it. The Heavy Vehicle National Law applies to vehicles over 4.5 tonnes gross vehicle mass and commenced on 10 February 2014 in the ACT, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria; the NHVR notes it has not commenced in Western Australia or the Northern Territory, though it applies to vehicles from those jurisdictions once they cross into a participating state. Its chain of responsibility "makes parties other than drivers responsible for the safety of heavy vehicles on the road": consignors, receivers, schedulers and operators all carry the primary duty "to ensure so far as is reasonably practicable the safety of your transport activities", executives owe a due diligence duty, and parties are prohibited from anything, including contract terms and financial rewards, that could influence a driver to speed or breach the law. The NHVR's own guidance says the primary duty "is very similar to the obligations that your business has under work health and safety laws". The two regimes apply concurrently: a freight operator discharges both, and a customer whose delivery windows squeeze drivers is inside the chain whether or not it owns a truck.

The newest work-related road users

The duty also reaches the delivery rider on a bicycle or scooter. Safe Work Australia's food-delivery fact sheet, December 2021, tells riders plainly that under the model WHS laws they are workers because they "carry out work for" the platform whose app offers the deliveries and/or the food outlet whose food they carry, and that those PCBUs "must make sure they do everything they are able to do" for the rider's health and safety on the road. The same sheet is careful about its edges: riders must separately comply with road rules and licensing, and the guidance does not apply in Victoria, which is not harmonised with the model laws. How the worker definition stretches across platforms and labour hire, and the workers' compensation gap that still sits under it, is covered on the gig economy and labour hire page. The through-line of this whole page is the section 8 definition: whether the vehicle is a B-double, a company ute or a pushbike with a thermal bag, the law already calls it a workplace.