The Department of Labor (DOL) released a report on the state of workers’ compensation last week, and so did the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI). Their annual report, “Workers’ Compensation: Benefits, Coverage, and Costs” highlights many of the same issues that the DOL report does and provides estimates of comp costs, coverage and benefits. Even though costs are rising for employers, benefits to workers are decreasing.

As a share of payroll, workers’ comp benefits accounted for $0.91 per $100 of payroll in 2014. Employer costs in 2014 were $1.35 per $100 of payroll. In some states costs for employers were even higher- $2.25 per $100 in payroll in Montana and $2.20 per $100 in payroll in Alaska. Medical costs make up a big portion of the total spend. In 2014 they accounted for $0.46 of that $0.91 in benefits paid per $100 of payroll, making up over half of total workers’ compensation benefits.

Marjorie Baldwin, Chair of the NASI’s Study Panel on Workers’ Compensation Data, and a Professor of Economics in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State, thinks this could be in part related to lingering effects of the economic recession in 2008. She says that as the economy is recovering, more workers are being hired. Employers see their comp insurance costs rise right away with premiums, but workers’ comp benefits do not increase as quickly and can be paid out over a long period of time, so they seem to lag behind.

In 2014 there were 132.7 million estimated workers, which would represent a 1.9 percent increase from the year before. Employment has been growing steadily after the recession, increasing each year since 2010 when there was a decrease of 0.2 percent.

The NASI has been issuing this report for 19 years, picking up where the Social Security Administration left off when they stopped producing data on work comp benefits in 1995.

The full report can be found here. Our post about the DOL report can be read here.