Injury rates are down. Costs are up. Here's what's happening in between.
Construction has gotten measurably safer. Injury frequency has fallen faster in construction than in any other industry over the past decade.
Claim costs rose anyway.
That combination frustrates a lot of good risk managers, because the lever they've been pulling for thirty years is working exactly as intended. The problem is that what a claim costs is no longer determined mostly by whether it happens. It's determined by what unfolds afterward.
Six things are driving that.
1. Who gets hurt has changed
Travelers' analysis of more than 1.2 million workers' compensation claims found that first-year employees account for roughly 44% of construction injuries. That isn't a training failure. Construction has the highest workforce turnover of any major industry, with average tenure around four years, so the industry is permanently staffed with people in their most dangerous year on the job.
At the other end, employees aged 60 and over account for about 16% of lost-time claims and miss roughly 97 workdays when injured. Slips, trips and falls cause about 40% of their injuries and are the leading cause of claims exceeding $250,000.
The same injury costs more at 58 than at 31 and takes longer to recover from. As the workforce ages, that arithmetic moves against the industry a little each year.
2. The injuries cost more, and last longer
NCCI reports construction medical severity rose 13% in a single accident year, and construction now carries the highest lost-time medical severity of any industry.
Duration compounds it. Injured construction workers miss an average of 114 workdays against an 80-day average across all industries — the longest recovery of any sector Travelers studied. A claim that stays open accumulates treatment, develops complications, and gives everyone more time to form a different view of what it's worth.
3. The expensive claims don't look expensive at first
NCCI's research on large claims separates them into fast-emerging and slow-emerging. The fast ones come from falls from elevation and vehicle accidents; they announce themselves immediately. The slow ones begin as a strain or lifting injury, usually a lower back strain, and take years to reach a million dollars.
Construction is over-represented in both categories. For months, the slow ones look like ordinary files, which is exactly why they're dangerous.
4. Attorney involvement arrives late, and changes everything
This is the driver most risk managers underestimate, because it's invisible on a loss run until it isn't.
Research from Milliman, which identified attorney references in adjuster notes rather than relying on claim coding, found that 36% of lost-time claims eventually involve an attorney. But attorneys were known on only 8% of claims within the first two days after the first report of injury.
Read those together. Attorney involvement overwhelmingly develops while a claim is open, rather than arriving with it.
And when it develops, the economics shift sharply. Claims with representation take 2.1 times longer to close and cost 2.3 times more, with indemnity running 3.5 times higher. Aon found average indemnity benefits rising from $7,957 per claim without representation to $41,148 with it. The share of claims affected is growing — litigated workers' compensation claims reached 12.3% of total claims inventory in 2024, up from 7.6% in 2018.
What drives someone to retain counsel usually isn't the injury. It's the experience of the claim: the call that didn't come, the authorization that took three weeks, the return-to-work conversation that never happened.
5. The exposure doesn't stop at the jobsite
Construction companies are fleet operators, whether or not they think of themselves that way. Pickups, dump trucks, mixers and equipment haulers move between yards, suppliers and projects all day.
Auto liability behaves differently from workers' compensation. A jobsite injury to your own employee stays largely inside the comp system, where benefits are statutory and outcomes are bounded. A vehicle accident involving a third party has no such ceiling.
It's also the line moving fastest. Triple-I and the Casualty Actuarial Society found commercial auto liability claim severity rose 78% between 2014 and 2023 — a 6.6% annual rate, more than double the 29% increase in the Consumer Price Index over the same period.
For most contractors, auto liability is the line where a single event produces the largest unexpected number. And unlike a slow-developing comp claim, an auto file can go from routine to severe in a matter of weeks.
6. Verdicts in other people's cases are repricing your open claims
This is the one that feels unfair, because it is.
When a large verdict lands in your venue, it doesn't just affect that case. It resets what plaintiff attorneys believe a comparable injury is worth, which means settlement demands climb on files that have nothing to do with it.
So, a claim you opened eighteen months ago, with facts that haven't changed, is now worth more than it was. The reserve you set was reasonable at the time and is inadequate today. Nobody did anything wrong. The market for that claim simply moved underneath you.
That's what social inflation does at the file level. Research from Triple-I and the Casualty Actuarial Society put the effect at roughly $30 billion in additional commercial auto liability claims over a recent ten-year period, outpacing economic inflation by two to three points a year. And the verdicts driving it keep getting larger — the median trucking verdict reached $36 million by 2022, according to the US Chamber's Institute for Legal Reform.
The practical consequence is that time is working against you in a way it wasn't a decade ago. A claim that stays open isn't just accumulating medical costs and legal expenses. It's sitting in a market that keeps repricing it upward.
You can't prevent that. You can resolve claims before it catches them.
Key Takeaways
Who gets hurt has changed. First-year employees account for a disproportionate share of construction injuries, and an industry with four-year average tenure is permanently staffed with them. Older workers cost more and recover slower.
Injuries cost more and last longer. Construction carries the highest lost-time medical severity of any industry, and injured workers miss an average of 114 days against 80 across all sectors.
The expensive claims look ordinary at first. Slow-developing million-dollar files begin as lifting injuries and lower back strains, and take years to get there.
Attorney involvement arrives late. It is present on only a fraction of claims in the first days, but eventually touches more than a third of lost-time files, and when it does, claims cost over twice as much.
The exposure extends beyond the jobsite. Construction companies are fleet operators, and auto liability has no statutory ceiling the way workers' compensation does.
Verdicts in other cases reprice your open claims. Social inflation moves the market for a claim you already have, making reserves set in good faith inadequate after the fact.
Taken together, the pattern is consistent. Very little on this list is preventable. The age of a workforce, the duration of a back injury, a verdict in a case you were not party to: none of these respond to a safety program, however good it is. What remains is attention, and whether anyone is watching a claim closely enough to act while action still changes the outcome.
The industry has spent three decades getting better at preventing injuries, and it has succeeded. The next gain will come from what happens after.
CBCS is a third-party claims administrator serving construction companies nationally, handling workers' compensation, auto liability and general liability claims, with a dedicated construction claims team and in-house coverage counsel.