Three numbers follow. The first is what voluntary turnover already costs you each year. The second is what a single psychological injury claim would add if one occurred. The third is what it costs to put a control in place against both. Every figure carries its source, and the panel near the end sets out what this estimate deliberately leaves out.
Set the inputs
Defaults are illustrative. Change any value to reflect your organisation.
Gallup finds 42% of voluntary departures were preventable through earlier management action. Applied as whole people and rounded down, so it never overstates. An industry finding on what is addressable, not a figure GRACEX guarantees to recover.
The contractor is the realistic cover for the absence: the role is filled while the worker is off, at a market rate higher than salary.
What this estimate leaves out
The figures above are deliberately built low. These real costs are not counted, which means your true exposure is higher, not lower, than what is shown.
- Premium impact. Excluded.
- The injured worker's own wages. Carried by the workers compensation scheme during the absence, so not counted as your cost.
- Knock-on turnover and team morale. A claim or a departure often triggers others. Not modelled.
- Legal, investigation and dispute costs. Variable and excluded.
- The median absence, not the average. The longer mean would raise every claim figure. We use the shorter median.
- Whole people, rounded down. Preventable departures are counted as whole people and rounded down, never up.
Turnover replacement (Exposure 1)
- Replacement cost by role, 40% of salary for frontline, 80% for technical and professional, 200% for leaders and managers, and 42% of voluntary departures preventable through earlier management action. Gallup Workplace, 2024.
Employer claim cost (Exposure 2)
- Median time lost for a serious mental health claim, 35.7 working weeks, 2022-23. Safe Work Australia, Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025.
- Contractor and labour-hire cost runs about 1.3 to 1.5 times the base wage once on-costs and margin are included. The model uses the conservative 1.5x. Wise Recruitment, 2026.
- Management and return-to-work time, around 80 hours at $80 per hour, $6,500. Modelled GRACEX assumption based on claim-handling experience, not a published statistic.
- Productivity ramp is not given a dollar figure. For context only, technical and senior roles take 60 to 90 days to reach full productivity. Oxford Economics, cited in AllenComm, 2026.
Premium impact, why it is excluded
Scheme context
General information, not financial or legal advice. Verify any figure against its source before relying on it. Replacement, contractor and management figures are modelled, and the result is an estimate of exposure, not a guarantee of cost or saving.