Recordable vs Reportable Incident or Injury: The Australian Answer

This question almost always reaches me after something has already happened. A supervisor rings at nine at night to ask whether what they are looking at is a reportable injury. The honest first answer is that the word is not in Australian law.

Recordable Is an American Term, and That Is the Whole Confusion.

“Recordable” comes from the United States. OSHA’s recordkeeping rule at 29 CFR Part 1904 requires many employers with more than 10 employees to keep a record of recordable work-related injuries and illnesses on Forms 300, 300A, and 301.² The same rule makes an employer notify OSHA within 8 hours of a work-related death, and within 24 hours of an in-patient hospital admission, an amputation, or the loss of an eye.²

That split is good, and it is American. Australian WHS law uses neither word as a legal category. It uses notifiable incident, and separately requires a register of injuries: two duties, owed to two different bodies, on two different tests.

There is a quick tell for copied material. An Australian safety procedure that tells you to post a summary of last year’s injuries on a noticeboard has been lifted from the OSHA rule, which requires the annual Form 300A summary to be certified and posted.³ No Australian jurisdiction requires that.

A Notifiable Incident Is One of Three Things.

Section 35 of the WHS Act defines a notifiable incident as the death of a person, the serious injury or illness of a person, or a dangerous incident. Serious injury or illness is then defined in section 36, and dangerous incident in section 37.¹

WorkSafe WA puts it plainly: a notifiable incident may relate to a worker, a contractor, a visitor, a member of the public, or a volunteer.⁸ On a construction site running six subcontractors, the duty does not stop at your own payroll.

The Statutory List of Serious Injuries and Illnesses.

Section 36 defines a serious injury or illness by the treatment it requires, not by days lost. Comcare’s guide sets it out in full.¹

• Immediate treatment as an in-patient in a hospital, for any duration, even if the stay is not overnight.
• Immediate treatment for the amputation of any part of the body.
• Immediate treatment for a serious head injury, a serious eye injury, or a serious burn.
• Immediate treatment for the separation of skin from underlying tissue, such as de-gloving or scalping.
• Immediate treatment for a spinal injury, the loss of a bodily function, or serious lacerations.
• Medical treatment by a doctor within 48 hours of exposure to a substance.

The regulations add two illnesses. Any infection where the work is a significant contributing factor, including work treating or caring for a person, contact with human blood or body substances, or handling animals, hides, wool, carcasses, or animal waste. And seven named occupational zoonoses: Q fever, anthrax, leptospirosis, brucellosis, Hendra virus, avian influenza, and psittacosis.¹

The test is the part people miss: Comcare’s position is that it does not matter whether the person actually receives the treatment, only that the injury could reasonably be considered to warrant it.¹ A worker who drops a load on his foot, keeps his boots on, and finds a broken foot hours later was notifiable from the moment it happened.

The Statutory List of Dangerous Incidents.

Section 37 covers incidents that expose a worker or anyone else to a serious risk from immediate or imminent exposure to any of the following.¹

• An uncontrolled escape, spillage, or leakage of a substance.
• An uncontrolled implosion, explosion, or fire.
• An uncontrolled escape of gas or steam, or of a pressurised substance.
• Electric shock.
• The fall or release from a height of any plant, substance, or thing.
• The collapse, overturning, failure, malfunction of, or damage to, plant required to be authorised for use under the regulations.
• The collapse or partial collapse of a structure.
• The collapse or failure of an excavation, or of any shoring supporting one.
• The inrush of water, mud, or gas in an underground excavation or tunnel.
• The interruption of the main ventilation system in an underground excavation or tunnel.

Nobody has to be hurt. A load released from a crane onto an empty slab is notifiable. Electric shock counts, including a minor shock from direct contact with exposed live parts, but it excludes static, extra low voltage, and a defibrillator used for first aid.¹

Notify Immediately, by the Fastest Means, and Keep It Five Years.

Section 38 requires the business to notify immediately after becoming aware that a notifiable incident arising out of its business has occurred, by the fastest possible means, by telephone or in writing. If you notify by telephone, the regulator may require the same notification in writing within 48 hours.¹

“Aware” is stricter than it reads. Comcare’s position is that a business becomes aware the moment any worker in a supervisory or managerial role knows.¹ The clock starts with the leading hand, not head office.

Section 38(7) requires a record of each notifiable incident to be kept for at least five years from the date the regulator was notified.¹ WorkSafe ACT⁹ and Business Queensland⁶ state the same five-year minimum.

Failing to notify is an offence. SafeWork NSW states the maximum penalty as AU$50,000 for a body corporate and AU$10,000 for an individual, read on 12 September 2026.⁵ Penalties differ by jurisdiction, so take your own regulator’s current figure.

Preserve the Site Until an Inspector Arrives, With Five Exceptions.

Section 39 puts a separate duty on the person with management or control of the workplace. So far as is reasonably practicable, the site must not be disturbed until an inspector arrives or directs otherwise, and it includes any plant, substance, structure, or thing associated with the incident.¹

It does not freeze the whole workplace. Where the incident is confined to one part and no immediate risk remains elsewhere, only that part needs preserving. Section 39(3) then allows five things regardless.¹

• Assisting an injured person.
• Removing a deceased person.
• Anything essential to make the site safe, or to minimise the risk of a further notifiable incident.
• Anything associated with a police investigation.
• Anything an inspector has given permission for.

The Regulator Is Different in Every State and Territory.

There is no national WHS regulator. Safe Work Australia writes the model laws; the states, territories, and the Commonwealth enforce them. These are the notification lines we opened and verified on 12 September 2026.

• Commonwealth, Comcare: 1300 366 979.¹
• New South Wales, SafeWork NSW: 13 10 50.⁵
• Victoria, WorkSafe Victoria: 13 23 60.⁷
• Queensland, Workplace Health and Safety Queensland: 1300 362 128.⁶
• Western Australia, WorkSafe WA: 1800 678 198.⁸

South Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory, and the ACT are missing because we did not verify their numbers today, not because they have none.

Victoria deserves its own line. It never adopted the model WHS Act and still runs the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, with its own list and its own additions; from 1 July 2024 new types of plant must be notified when involved in an incident.⁷ Cross that border and you are running two lists.

The Register of Injuries Is a Different Duty Altogether.

Notification is WHS law. The register of injuries is workers compensation law, and it catches far more.

In New South Wales, SafeWork NSW requires a register of injuries for workers to record workplace injuries or illnesses. Each entry must carry the worker’s name, address, age, occupation, and industry at the time, the time and date of the injury, and its nature and cause. It may be kept on paper or electronically, and there are penalties for not keeping one.¹⁰ Separately, an employer must notify its insurer within 48 hours.⁵

So the near miss that hurt nobody, the first aid cut, and the strain that cost a day are not notifiable, and they still belong on a record. That is why what goes into an incident report matters more than the label on it: a regulator, an insurer, or a solicitor will ask for the same record in two years.

What Is About to Change, and Why It Matters Now.

In December 2025 Safe Work Australia published amendments to the model WHS Act. They extend notification to dangerous incidents involving the fall of a person, electrical hazards, and mobile plant; to serious brain injuries, serious crush injuries, and serious bone fractures; to violent incidents, including sexual assault, that expose a person to a serious risk of psychological harm; to work-related suicide and attempted suicide; and to a worker’s absence, or likely absence, of 15 or more consecutive calendar days from a work-related injury or illness.⁴

None of it is law yet. The changes apply only once each jurisdiction adopts them, on its own timeline, and Safe Work Australia says to check with your regulator before changing anything.⁴ Passed and in force are different things.

The one to watch is the 15-day absence. It is triggered by a date rather than an event, it turns a category almost nobody notifies into a duty, and catching it falls to the safety manager.

Put the Test in Front of the Person on Site, Not in a Policy.

Every duty above turns on one decision, made by whoever is standing there. In minutes. Usually by a supervisor. Often at night. Almost never by the person who wrote the policy.

A procedure in a folder does not help at that moment. The question has to arrive at the point of entry. In ComplyFlow’s incident module, the notifiable-incident workflow asks the user whether the incident is potentially notifiable immediately after the record is created. Answer yes and the incident is restricted to the security group configured for it, that group is notified at once, and the user is shown the instructions your business wrote, including who to ring.¹¹

That stops two things going wrong: a supervisor guessing at section 36 at nine at night, and the record being edited by everyone while legal is still deciding. The incident sits against the worker, their induction, their licence, and their sign-in that morning, so the investigation starts from a record instead of a reconstruction. When the call is made on a phone in the dark, how the app captures it decides whether it becomes a notification, and the inspection record is often where the dangerous incident showed up first.

Get the Borderline Ones Decided by Someone Who Can Decide Them.

This describes the law rather than giving legal advice, and the borderline cases are genuinely hard. Comcare is blunt about them: where you are in any doubt whether the duty to notify applies, the best course of action is to notify.¹

The businesses that get this right are not the ones with the best-written procedure. They are the ones where the person on site is asked the question while the incident is still in front of them, and where the answer is still on the record five years later.