Workers Compensation in Australia: How the State and Comcare Schemes Work

Australia runs workers compensation as 11 parallel schemes rather than one national law, so which set of rules covers an injured worker depends on where and for whom they work, not on a single Commonwealth statute.

Eleven schemes, not one law

Workers compensation is constitutionally a state and territory responsibility in Australia. Each of the 8 states and territories, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, runs its own Act and its own regulator or insurer.

Sitting alongside those 8 is Comcare, the Commonwealth's own scheme under the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1988 (Cth), covering Australian Government employees, Australian Government authorities and corporations, and private corporations licensed to self-insure under that Act.

Two further, narrower national pathways exist and are worth knowing about even though they cover small, specific groups. Seacare, under the Seafarers Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1992, covers defined seafaring employees. Separately, current and former Australian Defence Force members claim through the Department of Veterans' Affairs under military compensation legislation, not through Comcare or a state scheme.

Safe Work Australia's own "Comparison of workers' compensation arrangements" publication sets out this same structure, including Comcare's licensing history dating to 1992 and Seacare's separate Act (safeworkaustralia.gov.au).

Who regulates and who insures, jurisdiction by jurisdiction

The body a worker or employer deals with is not always the same body that enforces workplace safety law. Queensland and Western Australia both split the two functions into separate agencies; most other jurisdictions combine them.

Source: safeworkaustralia.gov.au, WHS regulators and workers compensation authorities contact information.

Safe Work Australia's actual role

A common misconception is that Safe Work Australia runs workers compensation nationally, or that its model work health and safety laws are the same thing as a workers compensation scheme. Both are wrong, and Safe Work Australia's own website corrects both directly:

"Safe Work Australia is a national policy body representing the interests of the Commonwealth, states and territories, as well as workers and employers. We work to achieve healthier, safer and more productive workplaces through improvements to work health and safety (WHS) and workers' compensation arrangements. As a national policy body, we don't regulate WHS laws or administer workers' compensation arrangements. The Commonwealth, states and territories regulate and enforce WHS laws and administer workers' compensation schemes in their jurisdictions." (safeworkaustralia.gov.au, Who we are and what we do)

Its actual statutory functions are national policy and strategy, developing and monitoring the model work health and safety laws that each state and territory separately enacts with local variations, developing proposals to improve workers compensation arrangements and promote national consistency, and collecting and publishing comparative data such as its Comparative Performance Monitoring reports. None of those functions include running a claim, paying a benefit, or regulating an insurer. That work belongs exclusively to the 8 state and territory authorities and Comcare in the table above.

Comcare: the Commonwealth scheme

Comcare administers the Commonwealth's workers compensation scheme under the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1988 (Cth). In Comcare's own words, the Act "contains the workers' compensation scheme for employees of: the Australian Government; Australian Government authorities and corporations; corporations who have a licence to self-insure under the SRC Act," and provides rehabilitation and compensation for a work-related injury or illness on a no-fault basis with limited access to common law (comcare.gov.au, About the Comcare scheme).

Comcare is also the work health and safety regulator for its own jurisdiction under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (Cth), the same one-body-does-both pattern seen in Victoria, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT.

Private corporations can become self-insured licensees under the SRC Act, a mechanism that has been in place since 1992. Some large private employers with no historical government connection, including major banks, hold this kind of licence, which is why an employee of a large private company can sometimes find themselves under Comcare rather than their state scheme.

ACT public servants and other Commonwealth employees claim through Comcare under the SRC Act, not through the ACT's own Workers Compensation Act 1951. The full detail of that split, and how the ACT's own Act defines who it does and does not cover, is on the ACT workers compensation page.

Cross-border workers: the state of connection test

When a worker regularly works across more than one state or territory for the same employer, a nationally harmonised state of connection test determines which single jurisdiction's scheme covers them, so the employer only needs one policy for that worker rather than several. NT WorkSafe's own bulletin on the test, corroborated by SIRA's guidance, sets out five sequential steps, each one only reached if the earlier step does not resolve the question (worksafe.nt.gov.au, Workers compensation cross-border information):

1. Where the worker usually works, based on work history, contract terms and habitual work location, not simply where they spend the most time.
2. If that does not resolve it, where the worker is usually based, meaning where the employer expects them to operate from or where they receive day-to-day instructions.
3. If that still does not resolve it, the employer's principal place of business in Australia.
4. For a worker on a ship, the state or territory where the ship is or was most recently registered.
5. As a last resort, if the worker is injured and nothing else has resolved the question, the state or territory where the injury occurred.

Each state and territory Act carries its own version of this test in its own section. The exact current section number in each Act should be confirmed on that state's own page rather than assumed from this summary, since some of the underlying Acts have been renamed or restructured since the test was first harmonised.

Comparing claim deadlines and common-law access across the states

Benefit amounts, weekly payment caps and detailed procedure are jurisdiction specific and covered in full on each state and territory page. The two facts that matter most for orienting a reader before they pick a page are the claim deadline and whether common-law damages are available at all.

The Northern Territory's absence of any common-law pathway, at any level of impairment, is the single sharpest difference between jurisdictions on this list and is worth reading in full on the NT workers compensation page before assuming another state's rules apply.

Injured in a motor vehicle on the job

A crash on a work journey can sit under two schemes at once: the workers compensation scheme described here and the state's compulsory third party (CTP) motor accident scheme, which in some jurisdictions is no-fault and in others depends on who was at fault. Which one pays, and in what order, differs by state, and the CTP time limits run separately from the workers compensation deadlines above. See motor accident compensation in Australia for each state's CTP scheme, its claim window and how it interacts with a work-related claim.

Starting a claim: the general shape, wherever you are

The exact forms, deadlines and thresholds differ by jurisdiction, but the general sequence is broadly similar across all 8 state and territory schemes and Comcare:

• Report the injury to the employer as soon as practicable, in writing where the scheme requires it. Several schemes, including Victoria, require written notice within a set number of days.
• Get an initial medical certificate confirming the injury and any work capacity, from a doctor recognised by the relevant scheme.
• Lodge the claim with the insurer or, in self-insured or Comcare cases, the employer's claims team, within the jurisdiction's claim deadline.
• Cooperate with the insurer's liability decision, which each scheme decides within its own statutory timeframe, and appeal internally or to the relevant tribunal if the claim is rejected.
• Engage with return-to-work planning once capacity allows, since every scheme places return-to-work obligations on both the worker and the employer.

An injured worker's employment is also protected in ways that overlap with general employment law, including protections against dismissal connected to the injury and against adverse action for exercising a workplace right. Related rights sit outside workers compensation law itself, including unfair dismissal, general protections and adverse action, and notice of termination rules, and casual workers have their own particular coverage questions under casual employee rights. Workers compensation claim deadlines are set by each scheme's own Act and sit outside Australia's general civil statute of limitations rules, which do not govern a workers compensation claim the same way.

Employer obligations

Every scheme places return-to-work and non-discrimination obligations on employers, though the specifics, including dismissal-notice periods tied to an injury and how long a temporary replacement worker can be engaged, vary by jurisdiction and are detailed on each state and territory page. Employers operating across more than one state or territory should apply the state of connection test above to work out which single scheme covers a given worker, rather than assuming their home jurisdiction's Act applies to every employee.

When a Worker Dies

Every scheme on this page pays statutory death benefits to a deceased worker's dependants, typically a lump sum plus periodic payments and funeral costs. Those benefits sit alongside, and interact with, the separate court claim the family may hold under the state's wrongful death legislation, and payments already made are commonly offset against any damages. See wrongful death claims in Australia for the court-claim side: who can claim, what it covers and its time limits.