California’s workers’ compensation system paid $13.88 billion in benefits in 2023, a 7.1% jump from the prior year and nearly double the 3.8% growth recorded nationally, according to a review of new National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) data released September 24, 2026 by the California Workers’ Compensation Institute (CWCI). The $916 million increase lifted California’s share of all U.S. workers’ compensation benefit payments to 21.7%, up from 21% in 2022.

The CWCI analysis draws on NASI’s 28th annual report, Workers’ Compensation: Benefits, Costs, and Coverage, 2023 Data, published August 11, 2026. NASI, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, took over the national workers’ compensation data series formerly produced by the Social Security Administration and describes its report as the only comprehensive source of benefit, coverage, and employer-cost data for all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and federal programs. NASI builds its estimates largely from state agency responses to an Academy questionnaire, supplemented by insurer premium data from A.M. Best and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and by data from the National Council on Compensation Insurance.

The CWCI review highlights how outsized California’s system is relative to its workforce. The state accounted for 11.9% of the nation’s covered jobs and 14.3% of covered payroll in 2023, yet more than a fifth of all benefits paid — meaning its share of benefit dollars ran roughly one and a half times its share of payroll. California’s total exceeded the combined benefit payments of New York, Florida, and Washington, the states ranked second through fourth, and was nearly four times the $3.52 billion paid under federal programs. Payments were split almost evenly between medical and indemnity benefits, at about $6.95 billion each.

The growth in benefits came even as California’s job base barely moved. Covered employment in the state rose just 0.6% to nearly 17.8 million jobs, compared with 2.3% growth nationwide, according to the CWCI review.

The national picture in NASI’s report offers useful contrast. Across the country, workers’ compensation programs covered nearly 150 million jobs and close to $11 trillion in wages in 2023, surpassing pre-pandemic levels, and paid $64.1 billion in total benefits, with medical care making up more than 47% of that amount. Total employer costs reached $106.6 billion, up 3.5% from 2022. But because payroll grew faster than benefits and costs, NASI found that both measures kept falling when adjusted for covered wages; employer costs came to roughly 98 cents per $100 of covered payroll. Thirty-six jurisdictions saw total benefits per $100 of payroll decline between 2022 and 2023, and 43 saw employer costs per $100 of payroll decline. Private insurers paid 55.6% of benefits nationally, self-insured employers 25.6%, the 22 state funds 13.3%, and the federal government 5.5%.

For California employers and carriers, the findings reinforce a theme running through recent industry research: the state’s system is growing more expensive faster than the national system as a whole. The NASI data arrive on the heels of a separate CWCI loss development study released September 17, 2026, which concluded that the pandemic disrupted but did not halt steady growth in California medical and indemnity claim costs, and that medical costs may be accelerating in the post-pandemic period.

Readers should keep several limitations in mind. The figures reflect benefits paid during calendar year 2023 regardless of when the underlying injuries occurred, so they do not track the cost of any particular group of claims. The data are also nearly three years old by the time of publication, and NASI’s numbers are estimates assembled from multiple sources, with its methodology materials noting that costs and benefits recorded in a given year are not perfectly aligned (see NASI’s Sources, Methods, and State Summaries from the prior edition). The California-specific figures in this story come from Business Insurance’s account of the CWCI review rather than from the CWCI release itself; readers can check the national figures directly against NASI’s executive summary and full state-by-state dataset.