This report benchmarks the performance of the New Jersey workers’ compensation system and 16 other states, focusing on indemnity benefits, overall medical payments, duration of temporary disability, litigiousness, benefit delivery expenses, timeliness of payments, and other metrics.

The summary of major findings and supporting slides compare selected costs for New Jersey with those in other study states and list possible factors that affect New Jersey’s results on those metrics. We also look at changes in key cost components in New Jersey from 2016 to 2021 (evaluated in 2022) to show recent and emerging trends. In some cases, we use a longer time frame to supply historical context for key metrics and to provide a broader context for monitoring changes in New Jersey’s system performance. 

Note that the results we report reflect experience on claims through March 2022, including non-COVID-19 claims only from the first and second years of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020 through September 2021). The study, therefore, provides a look at how the pandemic impacted non-COVID-19 workers’ compensation claims in the first two years of the pandemic.

CompScope™ Benchmarks for New Jersey, 23rd Edition. Evelina Radeva. April 2023. WC-23-09.