The Australian Workplace Data Index

The Employer Distress Index

A single 0–100 signal that fuses three separate government feeds — company-insolvency momentum, year-on-year insolvency change, and growth in redundancy safety-net (FEG) claims. Nobody else publishes it.

Enforcement reality

What Fair Work breaches actually cost — real penalties and back-pay from the public record.

Employer distress signals

The inputs behind the index — insolvencies, banned directors, and the redundancy safety net.

Work, pay & demand

Casualisation, skills shortages, job demand and pay extremes across the labour market.

The median Australian employee earns $1,425/wk ($42.86/hr) — ranging from $1,300/wk in South Australia & Tasmania up to $1,600/wk in Australian Capital Territory, with a 21.9% gender gap at the median (all employees, not adjusted for occupation or hours). This ABS household-survey median (August 2025) is a different measure from the ATO-based Pay Benchmark occupation figures above — different underlying populations, not directly comparable.

Regional labour market

Australia's national unemployment rate was 4.2% in Mar 2026 — but that headline number hides a huge local spread. The widest jobs gap in the country runs from Palm Island, QLD 87.5% vs Ashburton, WA 0.8%, a 86.7pp difference between Australia's highest and lowest-unemployment local government areas (Jobs and Skills Australia Small Area Labour Markets, smoothed estimate).

Occupation outlook

Total Australian employment is projected to grow 13.3% from 2025 to 2035. Allied health — chiropractors, dental practitioners, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, podiatrists, and audiologists & speech pathologists — is the fastest-growing occupation field at 19.4% over five years, and Healthcare & Social Assistance alone is projected to add 290,325 jobs by 2030. At the other end, Personal Assistants is the fastest-shrinking occupation, down -7.7% over five years as software and self-service tools eat routine administrative work (Jobs and Skills Australia Employment Projections, May 2025 to May 2035).

Tax & retirement

The average Australian taxpayer claims $2,955 in work-related tax deductions — rising to $12,540 for Surgeons, the highest-deducting occupation on record (ATO Taxation Statistics 2023-24). Superannuation balances tell their own gender story: the gap is 19% across all ages and widens to 20.9% by age 60-64, where the approximate median balance is just $228,439 — well short of a comfortable-retirement benchmark for a cohort a few years from drawing it down.

NDIS provider compliance

668 NDIS provider banning orders are currently in force out of 807 ever issued, part of 2,470 NDIS Commission compliance actions in force nationally. Compliance action volume rose 317.8% from 2024 to 2025 (NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission register).

Childcare quality ratings

17.4% of Australia's 18,164 registered childcare and early-education services are rated Exceeding the National Quality Standard, ranging from 40.2% in ACT to 3.8% in WA (ACECQA national register).

Aged care staffing & ratings

26.5% of Australian aged-care homes were below their mandated care-minutes target in the August 2026 Star Ratings, and 11.6% were below their registered-nurse minutes target, across 2,600 rated homes.

Visa & skills pipeline

Australia granted 140,816 482 (Skills in Demand) visas in FY2025-26 — led by Chef (5,794 grants) and India nationals. Only 40% of the top 20 occupations nominated for 482 visas by grant volume are on the national shortage list — a gap between where the visa program grants and where Australia says it is short-staffed. Nobody else publishes this crosswalk.

Labour-hire licensing

10,725 labour-hire providers are actively licensed across Victoria, Queensland and the ACT, while regulators have cancelled or refused 1,737 licences — an 11.7% cancellation/refusal rate. Separately, 8,884 employers hold a Victorian Fair Jobs Code certificate for government procurement.

Fair Work Commission claim volumes

The FWC received 44,075 lodgments in FY2024-25, including 16,500 unfair dismissal applications and 6,209 general protections dismissal disputes — rising to 4,878 unfair dismissal applications in the latest quarter alone. The FWC does not publish a conciliation settlement rate or a median settlement amount, and neither do we.

Enterprise bargaining wage growth

New enterprise agreements delivered an Average Annualised Wage Increase (AAWI) of 3.95% last quarter — 4.09% in the private sector against 3.49% in the public sector. Construction led all industries at 6.48%, while Information Media and Telecommunications recorded the smallest gains at 2.02% (DEWR enterprise bargaining trends).

Workers on new enterprise agreements secured wage rises 0.75pp above the economy-wide Wage Price Index last quarter — the enterprise bargaining premium, and a comparison nobody else publishes (DEWR AAWI vs ABS WPI, both to the same quarter).

Workplace-safety regulator registers

Beyond the national Safe Work Australia dataset behind our workplace safety insights, FairWork Mate separately tracks 3,137 WHS prosecutions sourced directly from state and territory regulator registers, carrying $297.3M in penalties, including 3 industrial manslaughter matters. VIC accounts for the most so far — coverage is still being extended jurisdiction by jurisdiction, so totals will keep rising. This is a distinct register from the Safe Work Australia figures above; the two are never summed together.

Separately — and never summed with prosecution penalties — regulators have accepted 165 WHS enforceable undertakings, each one a PCBU's accepted alternative to prosecution rather than a prosecution outcome, committing $35.79M to remediation and worker safety, with VIC accounting for the most of any jurisdiction so far.

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