Incident reporting requirements: NZ, Australia, and US compared

If your organisation operates in more than one country (or if you're evaluating safety technology for sites across different jurisdictions), one of the first things you'll notice is that incident reporting requirements are not the same everywhere. The terminology is different, the thresholds are different, the timeframes are different, and the regulators you report to are structured differently.

This can get confusing quickly, especially if you're an EHS manager trying to build a consistent safety programme across sites in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. So here's a plain-language comparison of what each country requires, where the key differences lie, and what it all means for how you manage and report on safety.

(A quick note: this is a practical overview, not legal advice. Specific obligations can vary by state or territory in Australia, by state plan in the US, and by industry-specific regulations in all three countries. Always check with your local regulator or legal adviser for your exact obligations.)

New Zealand: notifiable events under HSWA

In New Zealand, incident reporting is governed by the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA). The obligation falls on the PCBU (Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking), which covers most employers, self-employed business owners, and anyone else who has a duty under the Act.

What must be reported. HSWA uses the term "notifiable events," which covers three categories: notifiable deaths (any work-related death), notifiable injuries or illnesses (serious work-related injuries or illnesses, including any that require or would usually require admission to hospital for immediate treatment), and notifiable incidents (unplanned or uncontrolled events that expose someone to a serious risk, even if nobody is actually injured). That third category is important because it captures serious near misses, not just actual injuries.

Who you report to. WorkSafe New Zealand is the primary regulator for most workplaces. Maritime NZ and the Civil Aviation Authority handle their respective sectors.

How quickly. The PCBU must notify WorkSafe as soon as possible after becoming aware of the event. If WorkSafe requests it, a written follow-up must be provided within 48 hours.

Site preservation. The site must not be disturbed until an inspector authorises it, except to help an injured person, make the area safe, or prevent further incidents.

Record retention. Records of notifiable events must be kept for at least five years.

Penalties for non-compliance. Failing to report a notifiable event is an offence, with penalties of up to NZ$50,000 for a business and NZ$10,000 for an individual.

Australia: notifiable incidents under WHS laws

Australia's reporting framework operates through model WHS (Work Health and Safety) laws, which are adopted (with variations) by individual states and territories. Safe Work Australia develops the model laws and guidance, but Safe Work Australia itself is not a regulator. You report to your state or territory WHS regulator (such as SafeWork NSW, WorkSafe Victoria, or Workplace Health and Safety Queensland).

What must be reported. The model WHS Act defines three categories of notifiable incidents: death of a person, serious injury or illness, and dangerous incidents (near misses that expose a person to serious risk). Serious injuries include things like amputations, serious head or eye injuries, serious burns, spinal injuries, loss of bodily function, and any injury requiring hospitalisation for immediate treatment. In December 2025, Safe Work Australia published amendments to the model WHS Act that expanded notification duties to include violent incidents exposing a person to serious psychological harm, work-related suicide or attempted suicide, worker absences of 15 or more consecutive days due to work-related injury or illness, and additional dangerous incident categories covering mobile plant and falls.

Who you report to. Your state or territory WHS regulator. Each state has its own reporting channels and phone lines (for example, 13 10 50 in NSW, 13 23 60 in Victoria).

How quickly. PCBUs must notify the regulator immediately after becoming aware of a notifiable incident. A written notification must be provided within 48 hours if requested. Under the December 2025 amendments, the new "notifiable extended absence" category has a 14-day notification window.

Site preservation. The incident site must not be disturbed until an inspector arrives or gives direction, except to protect safety, assist an injured person, or prevent further incidents. The 2025 amendments also require preservation of electronic and digital records and witness details.

Record retention. Records of notifiable incidents must be kept for at least five years. You must also notify your workers' compensation insurer within 48 hours.

Important nuance. Because WHS laws are adopted at the state and territory level, there can be differences in how requirements are applied. Victoria, for example, operates under its own Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 rather than the model WHS Act. Always check with your specific state regulator.

United States: OSHA recording and reporting

The US system under OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) works differently from the NZ and Australian frameworks. The key distinction is that the US has a two-tier system: ongoing recordkeeping (maintaining injury and illness logs) and event-triggered reporting (notifying OSHA of specific severe events).

Recordkeeping (ongoing). Most employers with more than 10 employees must maintain records of all recordable work-related injuries and illnesses using OSHA Forms 300 (the log), 300A (the annual summary), and 301 (individual incident reports). Recordable injuries include those that result in death, days away from work, restricted work or job transfer, medical treatment beyond first aid, loss of consciousness, or significant diagnosis by a healthcare professional. These records must be kept on-site for five years, and the annual summary (Form 300A) must be posted in the workplace from February through April each year. Certain industries with lower hazard profiles are exempted from routine recordkeeping.

Reporting to OSHA (event-triggered). Separately from the recordkeeping obligation, all employers (regardless of size or industry) must report specific severe events directly to OSHA: work-related fatalities within 8 hours, and work-related in-patient hospitalisations, amputations, or loss of an eye within 24 hours.

Electronic submission. Establishments with 250+ employees in industries required to keep records must electronically submit Form 300A data to OSHA annually (by 2 March). Establishments with 100+ employees in certain designated high-hazard industries must also submit Forms 300 and 301.

State plans. Some US states operate their own OSHA-approved state plans with requirements that must be at least as protective as federal OSHA. These state plans may have additional or more stringent reporting requirements.

Where the three systems differ most

Reading across all three frameworks, several differences stand out.

Terminology. NZ uses "notifiable events" and "PCBUs." Australia uses "notifiable incidents" and "PCBUs." The US uses "recordable injuries and illnesses" for the logging obligation and "reportable events" for the severe-incident notification obligation. If you're operating across multiple jurisdictions, your team needs to understand these different terms to avoid confusion.

Near-miss reporting. NZ and Australia both explicitly require notification of serious near misses (events that expose someone to serious risk, even without injury). The US system focuses primarily on actual injuries and illnesses for recordkeeping, with the severe-event reporting requirement limited to fatalities, hospitalisations, amputations, and eye losses. OSHA encourages near-miss reporting as a best practice but does not mandate it in the same way.

Timeframes. NZ requires notification "as soon as possible." Australia requires "immediate" notification. The US allows 8 hours for fatalities and 24 hours for other severe events, but the ongoing recordkeeping obligation requires entries within 7 calendar days. The December 2025 Australian amendments introduced a 14-day window for the new extended-absence notification category.

Regulator structure. NZ has a single national regulator (WorkSafe NZ) for most workplaces. Australia's regulation is handled at the state and territory level, with Safe Work Australia providing the model framework. The US has federal OSHA plus state-plan states, creating a mixed federal-state system.

Psychological harm. Australia's December 2025 amendments explicitly bring work-related psychological harm, violent incidents, and work-related suicide into the notification framework. NZ and the US do not have equivalent explicit provisions (though NZ's broad "notifiable incident" definition may capture some of these events, and US state-plan states may have their own requirements).

Recordkeeping obligations. The US has the most structured ongoing recordkeeping requirement (the OSHA 300 log system), which requires tracking all recordable injuries and illnesses regardless of whether they meet the severe-event reporting threshold. NZ and Australia focus their formal obligations more heavily on the notification of serious events, with less prescriptive requirements for ongoing logging of lower-severity injuries.

What this means for multi-country operations

If you're managing safety across sites in two or all three of these jurisdictions, the practical challenge is maintaining a consistent internal reporting standard while meeting the specific legal requirements in each country.

A few principles that help.

Set your internal reporting threshold lower than any single jurisdiction requires. If your internal system captures all near misses, all injuries requiring medical treatment, and all dangerous incidents, you'll comfortably meet the notification requirements in all three countries without needing to train frontline teams on the specific legal thresholds of each jurisdiction. The legal team handles the jurisdiction-specific obligations. The frontline teams report everything.

Use a common data platform. When your safety data lives in one system, with consistent event classifications and reporting dashboards, your regional compliance teams can filter and extract what they need for each regulator without duplicating effort. Computer vision AI adds a layer of consistency here, because the system detects and classifies events the same way regardless of which country the camera is in.

Document everything, even when it's not legally required. OSHA doesn't mandate near-miss reporting, but capturing near misses in your safety data gives you the leading indicators that NZ and Australian regulators increasingly expect to see. More importantly, it gives your EHS team the data they need to prevent the incidents that would trigger a formal notification in any jurisdiction.

Build your coaching programme on the data. The strongest compliance position isn't just having the records. It's being able to show that you identified risks, coached your teams, made operational changes, and measured the results. That evidence of proactive risk management strengthens your position with regulators in all three countries, regardless of the specific reporting framework.

The bigger picture

Incident reporting requirements exist because regulators need visibility into what's going wrong in workplaces so they can intervene, investigate, and drive systemic improvement. That's a worthwhile purpose, and compliance with reporting obligations is non-negotiable.

But reporting what happened after the fact is only half the picture. The organisations that achieve the best safety outcomes (and the strongest compliance positions) are the ones that also capture what's happening before an incident occurs: the near misses, the exclusion zone breaches, the pedestrian-vehicle interactions, and the patterns that only become visible when you have continuous, facility-wide data.

That's where the conversation shifts from "did we report everything we needed to?" to "are we preventing the events that would need reporting in the first place?" And that's a much better question to be answering.

If you'd like to see how continuous safety data supports compliance across multiple jurisdictions, book a demo and we'll walk you through it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a notifiable event in New Zealand?

Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, a notifiable event is a work-related death, a serious injury or illness (including any requiring hospital admission for immediate treatment), or an unplanned incident that exposes someone to a serious risk, even if nobody is injured. PCBUs must notify WorkSafe NZ as soon as possible after becoming aware of the event, preserve the incident site, and keep records for at least five years.

What incidents must be reported to OSHA in the United States?

All employers must report work-related fatalities to OSHA within 8 hours, and work-related in-patient hospitalisations, amputations, or loss of an eye within 24 hours. Separately, most employers with more than 10 employees must maintain ongoing records of all recordable work-related injuries and illnesses on OSHA Forms 300, 300A, and 301, and retain those records for five years.

How does Australian incident reporting work across states?

Australia uses model WHS laws developed by Safe Work Australia, but these are adopted and enforced at the state and territory level. PCBUs must notify their state or territory WHS regulator immediately after becoming aware of a notifiable incident (death, serious injury or illness, or dangerous incident). Each state has its own reporting channels. In December 2025, amendments expanded notification duties to include work-related psychological harm, violent incidents, and worker absences of 15 or more consecutive days.

Do all three countries require near-miss reporting?

NZ and Australia both require notification of serious near misses (events that expose someone to serious risk without causing injury). The US does not mandate near-miss reporting through OSHA's recordkeeping system, though OSHA strongly encourages it as a best practice. For multi-country operations, setting an internal reporting threshold that captures all near misses ensures compliance across all jurisdictions.

How does continuous AI monitoring help with incident reporting compliance?

Computer vision AI detects and records safety events continuously across every connected camera, creating a timestamped, classified record of near misses, exclusion zone breaches, and pedestrian-vehicle interactions. This data supports compliance in all three jurisdictions by providing documented evidence of proactive risk identification and management. It also captures events that would go unreported under manual systems, giving EHS teams the leading indicator data that regulators increasingly expect to see.