Workers' Comp Insurance Cost Calculator

Why workers' comp pricing varies more than any other business insurance

Workers' compensation is not priced like general liability or a Business Owners Policy. It is priced per $100 of payroll using a job classification code assigned to each employee's actual work, not a single company-wide rate.

That distinction matters: a construction company with both office staff and roofers on payroll pays two different rates on two different slices of its payroll, not one blended number.

The spread between classifications is enormous. Clerical and office work (NCCI class code 8810) prices around $0.20 per $100 of payroll, among the cheapest classifications that exist. Roofing (class code 5551) prices around $14.22 per $100, more than 70 times higher, because the injury frequency and severity on a roof are genuinely that different from a desk job.

Retail, restaurant work, and light manufacturing sit in between, each with its own sourced rate reflecting its own real-world claims history.

State matters too, but not as precisely as industry. The National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) publishes the authoritative state-by-state rate index, but it is subscription-gated and not available to fetch directly.

Multiple secondary sources agree on the general pattern, states like Texas, Indiana, North Dakota, and Virginia tend to run cheaper, while California, New York, Alaska, and Hawaii tend to run pricier, but they do not agree closely enough with each other on exact numbers to responsibly publish a precise 50-state table.

Rather than invent that precision, this tool uses a disclosed three-tier state adjustment instead: lower-cost, average, or higher-cost, applied on top of the sourced industry rate.

Two things this estimate deliberately leaves out, both for accuracy, not convenience. First, an experience modification factor, a surcharge or credit tied to your own business's claims history versus its peers, is specific to each business and not a published industry average, so it is disclosed as excluded rather than approximated.

Second, a real policy splits payroll across every distinct classification your employees actually perform, while this tool assumes one classification for your full payroll, useful for a quick estimate, but your real quote will reflect your actual job mix.