WHS prosecutions fell to 308 in 2025 while the average financial penalty reached a record $147,985

What Safe Work Australia published

The announcement of 1 September 2026 says that while the number of WHS prosecutions declined in 2025, the average financial penalty reached a record high. Its key findings for 2025, in its own words:

• Following 4 consecutive years of increases, the number of WHS prosecutions fell to 308, down from 321 in 2024.
• 99% of prosecutions resulted in a financial penalty, continuing an upward trend from 98% in 2024 and 97% in 2023.
• The average financial penalty per prosecution was $147,985, the highest annual average recorded and a 33% increase from 2024.
• The three most common industry divisions among defendants were construction (43 per cent of cases), manufacturing (20 per cent) and mining (6 per cent).

A fall of 13, or 4.0 per cent, on the year before. The release gives no total of penalties for 2025 and no median.

What a “prosecution” is in this count

The figures come from Safe Work Australia’s national prosecutions repository. Its data dictionary sets out three things that change how the numbers read.

• It counts defendants, not incidents. Each defendant is listed separately in the Repository. This means that a single incident may be listed more than once. Two companies convicted over one death are two prosecutions.
• It counts only cases that ended in guilt. The repository only records criminal prosecutions resulting in a finding of guilt (including pleas of guilty) whether or not a conviction is recorded. A charge that was dismissed is not in it.
• It is built from what regulators chose to publish. Safe Work Australia compiles it from the prosecution pages of each jurisdiction’s website, and the dictionary says the repository should not be relied on to count the number of worker deaths or injuries prosecuted each year as it is reliant on what information is made publicly available.

The financial penalty is the fine plus any other payment the court ordered, such as a contribution to a court fund, per defendant, after discounts and/or appeals, and it excludes court costs.

The first count is not the final count

Safe Work Australia has announced a new year’s figures annually since November 2023, and the announcements let a year be compared with itself. When the 2024 data came out in July 2025, it said 317 prosecutions were recorded for 2024 and that the average financial penalty was $116,979 compared to $138,724 in 2023. The September 2026 announcement puts 2024 at 321.

Figures as stated in each announcement, listed in the sources. The announcements for 2022 and 2023 do not say whether those counts were later revised, and the dashboard shows six-year totals rather than a count per year.

Two things follow from the arithmetic. The 2024 count rose by four between its first announcement and this one. And the 33 per cent increase cannot be measured from the $116,979 first announced: $147,985 is 26.5 per cent above that. A 33 per cent rise implies a 2024 average of about $111,000 ($147,985 divided by 1.33), so the 2024 average appears to have been revised down when four more cases were added. That last step is our inference from the two releases; Safe Work Australia has not published a revised 2024 average.

Where the fall came from

The dashboard’s chart of prosecutions by year and industry, read on 7 October 2026, puts construction at 151 defendants in 2024 and 133 in 2025, a fall of 18. Every other industry taken together went from 170 to 175. On those figures the whole national fall, and more, is in construction, which still accounts for 43 per cent of 2025’s cases.

Mining went from 9 to 17, which is how it reached third place at 6 per cent. Manufacturing went from 67 to 61. These are small numbers in a count that moves after publication, so we read them as a change worth watching, not as a shift in enforcement.

Six years of cases, and what they were for

Across 2020 to 2025 the dashboard shows 1,699 prosecutions, $207.00 million in total financial penalties and an average financial penalty shown as $125.08K. By the highest level of injury involved:

Counts from the Safe Work Australia dashboard, read 7 October 2026. Shares are ours. Serious follows the data dictionary’s guide: for example, hospitalisation for more than a day, a fracture of a major bone or an amputation.

One prosecution in four involved no injury at all. The model law does not need one: its Category 2 offence, which accounts for most categorised cases, is described in the dictionary as a duty holder who fails to comply with a health and safety duty that exposes a person to risk of death or serious injury or illness. The dashboard puts 730 cases in Category 2, 52 in Category 3 and 39 in Category 1, the reckless or grossly negligent offence. Another 871 are recorded as not applicable, which the dictionary uses for jurisdictions which had not implemented the model WHS laws in the year of prosecution, and 7 are unknown. So Category 1 is 39 of the 821 cases that could be categorised, 4.8 per cent.

On pleas, 1,372 defendants (80.8 per cent) pleaded guilty and 292 (17.2 per cent) are recorded as unknown, which the dictionary uses where the plea is not stated on the website. That leaves 35, by our subtraction, who pleaded not guilty and were found guilty.

Our read

This is our view, built on the figures above. “Record” here means the highest of six years, in a series whose earlier years can still move, and an average is the figure most easily lifted by a handful of large penalties. Without a median, the 2025 average tells us penalties rose on average, not that the typical case got dearer. The fall of 13 in the count is real as published, and it is larger than the four-case revision the 2024 figure took afterwards. So late additions could narrow the fall without, on last year’s evidence, erasing it, and on the dashboard it sits entirely in construction.

For a duty holder the more useful numbers are the steadier ones. A finding of guilt now almost always brings a financial penalty: 99 per cent of 2025’s cases. And across six years a quarter of prosecutions involved nobody being hurt. That matches what WorkSafe Victoria said about its solar prosecutions, most of which followed an inspector seeing an unprotected worker rather than a fall. The exposure to risk is the offence; the injury is not a precondition.

The count also arrives late. Our NSW conviction-lag series found between 1,031 and 1,629 days between the incident and SafeWork NSW announcing the conviction in each of the ten cases it has measured, so a national annual figure describes enforcement decisions about incidents that mostly happened well before the year it is labelled with. The dashboard does not say whether a case’s year is the year of the incident or of the decision; the dictionary records both.