Workplace Safety Prosecutions in Australia: $164M in Penalties — And Where the Risk Is Highest

Across Safe Work Australia's published record, there have been 1,370 work health and safety (WHS) prosecutions carrying $164.2 million in penalties (2020–2024). The median penalty was around $40,000, rising to a maximum of about $3.6 million for the most serious breaches.

These figures come from the public prosecutions record. We report the aggregate, sector-level picture only — we don't name individual employers. The purpose here is prevention: showing where harm happens so employers can act before it does.

Of the 1,370 prosecutions, 237 (17%) followed a workplace fatality and 709 (52%) followed a serious injury. In other words, roughly seven in ten WHS prosecutions involve a death or a serious injury.

Behind each of those numbers is a person and a workplace that could have been safer. The clearest takeaway for any business is that WHS enforcement is overwhelmingly reserved for cases where someone was genuinely harmed — which is exactly why getting your safety systems right matters before an incident, not after.

Construction leads by a clear margin — 562 prosecutions and about $51.8 million in penalties — followed by manufacturing (303 prosecutions, ~$40.9 million). Together these two industries account for a large share of all WHS enforcement. Transport, utilities and agriculture round out the higher-risk sectors.

If you operate in construction or manufacturing, you're in the sectors where regulators prosecute most often. That's not a reason for alarm — it's a reason to make sure your risk assessments, plant safety, and site controls are genuinely in order.

By volume, Victoria recorded the most prosecutions (501), followed by Queensland (363) and New South Wales (325). Western Australia, South Australia and the smaller jurisdictions follow. Differences partly reflect each regulator's enforcement approach and how prosecutions are reported, not just where incidents happen — so treat the state numbers as a picture of enforcement activity, not a safety league table.

WHS penalties are large, they're rising in seriousness, and they concentrate in physically hazardous industries — but the common thread is that prosecutions almost always follow real harm that a good safety system could have prevented. The cheapest safety programme is always cheaper than a single serious incident.

If you're an employer, it's worth checking your WHS obligations and your psychosocial-hazard duties (now an explicit part of the model WHS laws) rather than assuming you're covered. You can start with our Workplace Safety Hub, and see the full sector-by-sector breakdown, updated as new outcomes are published, in our Workplace Safety Enforcement insight.