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Workplace stress in Australia: research, statistics and employer action

Workplace stress is not simply a personal coping problem. It can arise when the design, demands or social conditions of work create sustained pressure without sufficient control, clarity, resources or support. Australian workers’ compensation data shows that severe work-related mental health conditions are increasing, take considerably longer to recover from than most serious claims and require employers to look beyond one-off wellbeing activities.

Direct answer: The strongest Australian evidence points to a systems response: identify psychosocial hazards, consult workers, improve work design, control risks at their source and review whether those controls are working. Individual skills and training can support this work, but they cannot make persistently harmful working conditions safe.

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Australian workplace stress statistics at a glance

There is no single official measure of how many Australians experience workplace stress. The most reliable national indicators combine accepted workers’ compensation claims, validated workplace surveys and return-to-work data. The claims figures below describe serious, accepted cases; they do not measure every worker experiencing stress.

Statistic	What it means	Source
17,600	Serious claims for mental health conditions in 2023-24 preliminary data	Safe Work Australia, 2025
12.0%	Share of all serious workers’ compensation claims attributed to mental health conditions in 2023-24p	Safe Work Australia, 2025
14.7%	Increase in serious mental-health-condition claims over one year	Safe Work Australia, 2025
161.1%	Increase over the ten years to 2023-24p, the largest change of any major nature-of-injury group	Safe Work Australia, 2025
35.7 weeks	Median working time lost for serious mental-health-condition claims, compared with 7.4 weeks across all serious claims	Safe Work Australia, 2025; time-loss year 2022-23
$67,400	Median compensation paid for serious mental-health-condition claims, more than four times the median across all serious claims	Safe Work Australia, 2025; compensation year 2022-23

Source: Safe Work Australia’s Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025. A serious claim is an accepted workers’ compensation claim involving at least one working week lost, excluding fatality and journey claims. The “p” suffix means preliminary data and later revisions may change the count.

What is workplace stress?

A workplace stress response is the physical, mental and emotional reaction that can occur when a worker perceives that the demands of work exceed their ability or resources to cope. Demanding work is not automatically harmful. Challenge, responsibility and effort can contribute to purpose and achievement when demands are reasonable and people have the time, capability, control, support and resources to do the work safely.

Safe Work Australia explains that stress itself is not an injury. The risk of psychological or physical harm increases when stress is severe, frequent or prolonged. Read Safe Work Australia’s guidance on psychosocial hazards.

Stress, burnout and psychological injury are not interchangeable

These terms are often blurred in workplace conversations, but they describe different things. Keeping the distinctions clear helps employers respond appropriately and prevents compensation data from being mistaken for a measure of everyday stress.

Workplace stress is a response to work-related demands or conditions. It is not, by itself, a diagnosed injury.
Burnout is defined by the World Health Organization as an occupational phenomenon associated with chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is not classified by WHO as a medical condition.
Psychological injury is a broader legal, clinical and workers’ compensation concept. It may include conditions such as anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder when relevant criteria are met.
Mental stress is a workers’ compensation mechanism category describing the action, exposure or event associated with a claim. It is not the same as a diagnosis or a prevalence estimate.
For the WHO definition and its three dimensions, see Burn-out as an occupational phenomenon in ICD-11.

Which workplace conditions can create the greatest risk?

Psychosocial hazards are aspects of work that can cause psychological harm and, in some cases, physical harm. They often interact. A high workload may create more risk when deadlines are unrealistic, staffing is thin, priorities conflict and workers have little control or support.

High or low job demands: excessive workloads, sustained time pressure, emotionally demanding work, monotonous work or long periods of vigilance.
Low job control: little influence over how, when or in what order work is completed.
Poor support: inadequate practical help, information, training, resources or emotional support.
Lack of role clarity: unclear responsibilities, reporting lines, standards or priorities.
Poorly managed change: insufficient consultation, communication, planning or support during change.
Poor organisational justice: processes or decisions that workers perceive as unfair, inconsistent or opaque.
Inadequate reward and recognition: a sustained mismatch between effort and acknowledgement.
Remote or isolated work: limited access to help, connection, communication or timely supervision.
Traumatic events or material: direct or repeated exposure to distressing events, content or circumstances.
Bullying, harassment, conflict, violence or aggression: harmful behaviour from colleagues, leaders, clients, customers or members of the public.
Poor physical environment: conditions that add discomfort, distraction, fatigue or safety risk.

See the full list and definitions in Safe Work Australia’s psychosocial hazards guidance.

What do Australian claims tell us about the main causes?

In Safe Work Australia’s 2021-22 preliminary claim data, the leading recorded mental-stress mechanisms for serious mental-health-condition claims were work-related harassment or workplace bullying (27.5%), work pressure (25.2%) and exposure to workplace or occupational violence (16.4%).

Important limitation: The detailed mental-stress subcategories exclude Victorian claims because Victorian data was not available at the same coding level. These figures describe accepted serious claims from that reporting period. They do not prove that the same ranking applies to every Australian worker or workplace.

Read Safe Work Australia’s Psychological health and safety in the workplace report.

The human and organisational consequences

The clearest national signal is not that every experience of stress becomes an injury. It is that when work-related mental health conditions become serious claims, the effects can be prolonged and costly for the worker, their family and the organisation.

Longer recovery:

median time lost was 35.7 working weeks for serious mental-health-condition claims, almost five times the 7.4 weeks across all serious claims.

Higher compensation:

median compensation paid was $67,400, more than four times the $16,300 median across all serious claims.

Rising claim volume:

serious claims increased 14.7% in one year and 161.1% over the decade to 2023-24p.

Operational effects can appear earlier:

sustained pressure may show up in overtime, leave patterns, mistakes, conflict, reduced concentration, turnover intentions and difficulty retaining experienced people. No single indicator proves workplace stress, so patterns should be interpreted alongside worker consultation.

What the evidence says employers should do

The practical response is not to remove every demanding task. It is to design and manage work so that foreseeable psychosocial risks are eliminated where reasonably practicable, or otherwise minimised so far as is reasonably practicable. The exact legal framework varies by jurisdiction, so employers should also check the guidance of their state, territory or Commonwealth WHS regulator.

Identify reasonably foreseeable hazards. Use consultation, incident and hazard reports, workload data, overtime, leave patterns, complaints, exit themes and observations of how work is actually performed.
Assess how the risk is created. Consider who may be exposed, how severe the exposure is, how often it occurs, how long it lasts and how hazards interact.
Control the risk at its source. Review workload, staffing, deadlines, task allocation, role clarity, decision authority, work processes, resources, change practices, supervision and exposure to harmful behaviour.
Consult workers and health and safety representatives. Use methods that make it safe to speak honestly, including confidential or anonymous options where appropriate. Surveys can support consultation, but should not replace agreed consultation processes.
Support managers to act. Give managers the authority, capability and escalation pathways to adjust work, respond to early warning signs and address behaviour or resource constraints.
Review whether controls are working. Track leading and lagging indicators, seek worker feedback and revise controls when risks remain or work changes.

For a complete risk-management process and examples of controls, see the Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work.

What training can – and cannot – achieve

Well-designed training can build mental-health literacy, help people recognise early warning signs, give managers a shared language for supportive conversations and strengthen practical stress-management or recovery skills. It can also help workers understand reporting pathways and the control measures their organisation has introduced.

Training cannot compensate for chronic understaffing, impossible deadlines, unclear roles, harmful behaviour or a culture in which people are penalised for raising concerns. It should sit within a broader risk-management approach, not be presented as the primary control for hazards embedded in work design.

Safe Work Australia’s model code states that training must be suitable and adequate for the work, the hazards and the controls being implemented. It is not sufficient simply to tell a worker about a procedure and ask them to acknowledge it. See the Model Code of Practice.

A practical workplace stress checklist

We consult workers about workload, role clarity, support, change and harmful behaviours.
We examine the duration, frequency and severity of exposure, not just whether a hazard exists.
Workloads and deadlines are reviewed against staffing, skills, tools and available time.
Workers know how to report psychosocial hazards and can do so without fear of retaliation.
Managers know what they can change themselves and when to escalate a risk.
Bullying, harassment, violence and aggression are addressed through clear prevention and response systems.
Change programs include consultation, role clarity, resourcing and transition support.
Individual wellbeing initiatives do not replace action on work design or conduct.
We monitor several indicators rather than relying on a single engagement or wellbeing score.
Controls are reviewed after incidents, complaints, restructures, workload changes and worker feedback.

How to interpret workplace stress data responsibly

Different datasets answer different questions. Using them together gives a more complete picture, but none should be treated as a perfect measure of workplace stress.

Workers’ compensation data measures accepted claims, not every case of stress or psychological harm. Some workers are not eligible, some do not lodge claims and stigma or workplace culture may affect reporting.
Claim coding records the most serious injury or disease and the mechanism that best describes the incident. Interacting psychosocial hazards may therefore be reduced to a single recorded category.
People at Work is an Australian-validated psychosocial risk assessment survey, but its historical national dataset was not designed as a representative sample of all Australian workers.
Return-to-work surveys describe injured workers within compensation systems. They are valuable for understanding recovery, but they do not represent the full employed population.
Organisational surveys provide local insight but can be affected by response rates, trust, question design, timing and whether workers feel safe to answer honestly.

For a free Australian-validated psychosocial risk assessment approach, explore People at Work.

Where HSG can help

HSG supports organisations with live, human-centred workplace education and practical program design. The right starting point depends on whether you need participant skills, manager capability, psychosocial-risk support or a broader wellbeing strategy.

Build practical skills for recognising and responding to pressure through HSG’s Stress & Burnout Prevention Workshops

View the workshops

Strengthen workplace mental-health literacy and early support through Workplace Mental Health Training

Explore the training

Support the identification and management of psychosocial hazards through HSG’s Psychosocial Risk Programs

Explore psychosocial-risk support

Connect stress prevention with broader mental health and resilience support

Visit Workplace Mental Health & Resilience

What HSG clients say

Jane was an excellent speaker with great content, practical exercises and examples. Myself and other staff really enjoyed this presentation. Thank you

St John Ambulance (NT)

Frequently asked questions

There is no single official national prevalence figure for workplace stress. Workers’ compensation data captures accepted serious claims, not everyone experiencing stress, while surveys use different questions and samples. The best assessment combines national claim trends with representative research where available and organisation-specific consultation and risk data.

There is no defensible single answer for all Australian workers. In Safe Work Australia’s 2021-22 preliminary data on serious mental-health-condition claims, work-related harassment or workplace bullying was the largest recorded mental-stress subcategory at 27.5%, followed by work pressure at 25.2%. The detailed subcategories exclude Victorian claims and should not be treated as a prevalence ranking for the whole workforce.

No. Safe Work Australia states that stress itself is not an injury. Severe, frequent or prolonged stress can, however, contribute to psychological or physical harm. Whether a condition is work-related or compensable depends on the evidence, diagnosis and applicable law.

The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition. A workers’ compensation claim would generally depend on an accepted diagnosis, work contribution and the rules of the relevant scheme. Employers and workers should obtain advice for the specific circumstances rather than relying on the term “burnout” alone.

Not by itself. Training can strengthen knowledge, skills, reporting and manager responses, but employers must also identify, assess and control psychosocial risks arising from work design, systems and behaviour. Training should support those controls, not substitute for them.

Use a balanced set of indicators: worker consultation, psychosocial hazard reports, workload and overtime, leave patterns, turnover themes, complaints, incidents, claims and confidential survey results. Interpret patterns in context, protect privacy and avoid using individual wellbeing data for performance management.

No organisation can remove every demanding moment, and not all pressure is harmful. The goal is to eliminate foreseeable psychosocial risks where reasonably practicable and otherwise minimise them, while providing the control, clarity, resources, support and recovery conditions people need to work safely.

Talk to HSG about the right next step

If your organisation is deciding between staff education, manager training, psychosocial-risk support or a broader program, HSG can help you clarify the scope before you commit.

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Source notes

General information only: This page is educational and does not constitute legal, clinical, workers’ compensation or work health and safety advice. Requirements differ across jurisdictions and circumstances.