A new national report puts workplace mental ill-health at $12 billion a year, and the measure it uses for progress is your risk management system

On 20 October 2026, Safe Work Australia shared a new report from Mentally Healthy Workplaces Australia (MHWA), Australia's Economic Case for Mentally Healthy and Safe Workplaces. Safe Work Australia said it highlights the importance of managing psychosocial hazards in creating healthy and safe workplaces. Here is what the report and the coverage of it say. MHWA estimates workplace-driven mental ill-health already costs the Australian economy about $12 billion a year in lost GDP in 2025-26, which it describes as a conservative figure. On current trends it projects the annual cost reaching about $27.2 billion by 2041-42, in 2025-26 dollars. Lost productivity from absenteeism, presenteeism, turnover and lower workforce participation makes up close to 54 per cent of the direct cost, and MHWA says those costs fall first on industry before moving to workers' compensation, insurers and government. The report ties the projection to claims data. As reported in the trade press, serious mental health claims have grown by more than 10.6 per cent a year since 2018-19 and median working weeks lost per claim have risen by about four per cent a year. Over the same period, other serious injury and illness claims grew by about four per cent a year with no growth in median weeks lost. MHWA projects mental health conditions will account for almost 40 per cent of all weeks lost to workplace injury and illness by 2041-42, up from an estimated 25.5 per cent in 2025-26. It helps to be clear about what kind of document this is. MHWA is a consortium convened by Monash University, and the report makes the case for funding it. The coverage says the modelled benefits assume more than $180 million in cash funding over seven years, and the report itself says its projections show an indicative scale, not a definitive calculation. That does not make the numbers wrong, and the direction matches what regulators have been reporting. It does mean the figures are best read as an estimate from an interested party, and the full report is available from MHWA on request. The part most useful to an employer is in MHWA's partnership prospectus, not the headline figure. Its first measure of progress, a lead indicator for preventable harm, is the proportion of the workforce covered by employers with evidence-based and fully operational psychosocial risk management systems. The lag indicators are claims incidence, median weeks lost and median payout. That is a useful way to read your own position. A national economic case is about totals, but the thing being counted at the level of one organisation is whether a risk management system is actually operating. In practice that means a hazard register with named hazards, a control and an owner for each, review dates that were met, and a record of what workers raised and what changed. Those are the same records SafeWork NSW has said inspectors will ask for during its current compliance operation, and the same records that decide how a claim is tested. The cost figures are national and no single employer can verify them. What an employer can verify is its own side: whether the system exists, whether it is current, and whether it could be shown to someone tomorrow.