Your Workers' Comp Bill Has Nothing to Do With Your Workers

A roofing company with $500,000 in annual payroll pays roughly $5,900 a year for workers' compensation in North Dakota. The same company, with the same crew doing the same work, pays roughly $144,200 in Georgia. The risk didn't change. The state did.

Workers' compensation is one of the largest fixed costs a small business carries, and it's one of the few that swings this hard on geography alone. Premiums for a roofer run from $28.84 per $100 of payroll in Georgia down to $1.18 in North Dakota, a 24-times difference for identical work, according to the Oregon DCBS 2024 Workers' Compensation Premium Rate Ranking Study. The dispersion tracks how each state regulates its insurance market, not how dangerous the job is.

The spread between the most and least expensive states is about 5 times, from $2.52 per $100 of payroll in Hawaii to $0.50 in North Dakota. Two employers running the same business with the same risk pay multiples apart based only on where they operate. The priciest states sit above 170% of the national median; the cheapest fall below 60%.

The 5-times spread across all industries understates what happens at the class level. We pulled manual rates for five occupations across all 51 jurisdictions:

A clerical worker's rate varies 12 times but stays pennies everywhere. A roofer's rate varies 24 times and turns into real money: the difference between $1.18 and $28.84 on every $100 of wages. For a roofing company with $500,000 in annual payroll, that's roughly $5,900 in North Dakota against $144,200 in Georgia.

Employers can estimate their own exposure with MoneyGeek's workers' comp cost calculator.

The difference doesn't track injury rates. It tracks regulatory structure: how the state sets rates, whether it runs a monopolistic fund, and how it structures benefits and attorney fees.

• Rate-setting method: Most states (37 of 51) use NCCI advisory loss costs. Ten run their own rating bureaus, and the independent-bureau states at the top (New Jersey, New York, California, Wisconsin) are among the most expensive. But rating system alone doesn't determine cost: Hawaii, the single most expensive state, uses NCCI.
• Monopolistic state funds: Four states (North Dakota, Ohio, Washington, Wyoming) require employers to buy from a state fund rather than private insurers. North Dakota, the cheapest state overall, and Ohio (rank 47) are products of that structure. Washington (rank 12) and Wyoming (rank 8) show that a monopolistic fund doesn't guarantee low rates.
• Benefit and legal-system rules: States set their own benefit schedules, attorney-fee rules and medical fee structures, all of which feed back into premium.

The risk doesn't change when you cross a state line. The regulation does.

For the state-by-state rules on who must carry coverage and where you can buy it, see MoneyGeek's workers' comp requirements guide.

Index rate is premium per $100 of payroll, weighted to a common industry mix. Occupation columns are calculated manual rates per $100 of payroll for the listed NCCI class. Rating system shows how each state sets rates. Sorted by index rate, most to least expensive.

We pulled index rates and per-class rates from the Oregon DCBS Workers' Compensation Premium Rate Ranking Study, using 2024 rates published in June 2025. It's the only source that benchmarks all 50 states and Washington, D.C. on a common industry mix. The study surveys every state every two years and weights rates to Oregon's 50 largest industry classes, so each state compares on the same payroll mix. The headline figure is the index rate: premium per $100 of payroll. For occupation-specific figures, we used the study's calculated manual rates by NCCI class code and tagged each state by rating system: NCCI, independent bureau or monopolistic state fund.

We checked the Oregon regulatory benchmark against MoneyGeek's workers' comp cost model, built from more than 1 million modeled estimates across 408 industries and 46 states plus Washington, D.C. The two datasets agree on direction. The Oregon index rate is what the underlying risk costs before insurer adjustments; what any individual employer pays shifts further with experience modifiers, schedule rating, discounts, deductible credits and broker fees. The Oregon study doesn't publish class 3632, so we used the closest published equivalent, Machinery or Equipment Repair (3724).