These comprehensive reference reports measure the performance of 17 state workers’ compensation systems, how they compare with each other, and how they have changed over time.

The reports are designed to help policymakers and others benchmark state system performance or a company’s workers’ compensation program. The benchmarks also provide an excellent baseline for tracking the effectiveness of policy changes and identifying important trends, including the impact of COVID-19.

The reports examine how income benefits, overall medical payments, costs, use of benefits, duration of temporary disability, litigiousness, benefit delivery expenses, timeliness of payments, and other metrics of system performance have changed from 2016 through 2021, with claims experience through 2022.

The 17 states in the study are Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. There are individual reports for every state except Arkansas, Iowa, and Tennessee.

Note that the results we report reflect experience on claims through March 2022, including non-COVID-19 claims only from the early pandemic period (March–September 2021). The study, therefore, provides a look at how the pandemic impacted non-COVID-19 workers’ compensation claims in the early months of the pandemic.

CompScope™ Benchmarks, 23rd Edition. Roman Dolinschi, William Monnin-Browder, Evelina Radeva, Karen Rothkin, Bogdan Savych, Carol A. Telles, and Rebecca Yang. April 2023. WC-23-01 to WC-23-14.

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