What psychological injury claims cost Quebec employers
In Quebec in 2025, psychological injuries averaged CAD 47,091 in CNESST payments and 323 days of income replacement, counted from acceptance to the work-capacity decision. What those figures mean for one employer, and what they leave out.
Psychological injury claims cost real money in Quebec: in 2025 they averaged CAD 47,091 in payments and 323 days of income replacement, according to the CNESST, the province's workplace health and safety body. Those averages run from the acceptance of the injury to the CNESST's decision on the worker's capacity to work. Counting every psychosocial claim, violence and harassment included, the CNESST recorded 7,096 accepted injuries in 2025, and its payments that year totalled CAD 295.1 million, up 102.4% since 2021.
These are the CNESST's payments, not an employer's invoice. The cost of each claim is generally charged to the employer's file and can affect its premium. This post gives the scale, shows what the figures leave out and offers a calculator for your own range.
How much do psychological injury claims cost in Quebec?
The CNESST counted 3,248 accepted psychological injuries in 2025, up 93.4% in five years. Its total payments on psychological injuries in 2025, whatever the year the injury was accepted, reached CAD 216.9 million, up 107.5% from 2021. The averages of CAD 47,091 and 323 days are not that total divided by that count: the CNESST calculates them from the acceptance of an injury to its decision on the worker's capacity to work, for decisions made in the year. The CNESST uses the term for acute and chronic stress. Acute stress follows a traumatic event; chronic stress follows a situation that continues over a long period, such as harassment or the strain of the task and of how work is organized.
Widen the lens to every psychosocial risk, meaning violence and psychological injuries, with harassment counted inside them, and the 2025 totals are 7,096 injuries (up 61.2% on 2021), 225 days of compensation on average (34 more than in 2021) and CAD 33,233 in average payments (up 38.9%), on the same basis. More than half of those injuries, 54.2%, are violence without a psychological injury, so the two averages describe different groups.
Do not add the categories together. The CNESST notes that a psychological injury can also result from violence, and the 913 harassment injuries of 2025 (up 229.6% since 2021, at CAD 53,146 and 379 days on average) are counted inside the other categories.
What does one claim cost an employer?
The CNESST generally charges the cost of a claim's benefits to the file of the injured worker's employer, a step it calls imputation. Income replacement, bodily injury indemnity, health services and adapted equipment, and rehabilitation costs are among the benefits charged in full, and the CNESST says the amount charged can affect the employer's insurance premium. It can grant a transfer or sharing of the cost under certain conditions.
How much it matters depends on size. On its current page, the CNESST says the personalized rate generally applies to employers who pay between CAD 11,500 and CAD 425,000 in annual premiums. For a large employer that rate is strongly personalized, so the premium depends more on the cost of the injuries on its file. Costs are read over a four-year reference period: for 2027, the years 2022 to 2025.
The statistics stop at what the CNESST pays. They hold nothing on salary paid for days not worked, on replacing someone who leaves, or on managers' time. The calculator below puts a range on absence days and departures from your own numbers.
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Where do psychological injury claims come from?
The data say who is injured and what the CNESST records as the causal agent; they do not say why claims are rising. In 2025, women account for 61.3% of psychological injuries and for 47.0% of the full-time-equivalent workers the CNESST covers. Health care and social assistance supplies more than a quarter of the injuries, and education shows the largest rise in share, 13.2% in 2025, up 6.4 percentage points.
Among causal agents, a superior or subordinate (19.3% of injuries in 2025, up 5.0 points) and colleagues (17.6%, up 6.2 points) are two of the three that grew most in share. Chronic stress went from 24.7% of psychological injuries in 2021 to 38.5% in 2025, and the number of chronic-stress injuries rose from 414 to 1,251. Adjustment disorder is the nature of injury that grew most, from 31.9% of psychological injuries to 51.3%.
To look for those pressures inside a team, start with a team's calendar, its decisions and its hand-offs, as our post on spotting psychosocial hazards in the workplace sets out.
What does Quebec law expect of an employer on harassment?
For information only: according to the CNESST, every Quebec employer must provide a workplace free of psychological harassment, take reasonable means to prevent it and stop any situation that resembles it. Each employer must also have a policy for preventing and handling harassment and make it known to staff.
The Act respecting labour standards (section 81.18) defines psychological harassment as vexatious conduct shown through repeated hostile or unwanted behaviour, words, acts or gestures that harms a person's dignity or psychological or physical integrity and leads to a harmful work environment. One serious incident can also qualify if it causes the same harm and has a lasting harmful effect on the employee, and a complaint must be filed within two years of the last occurrence. The CNESST says several measures of the Act to prevent and combat psychological harassment and sexual violence in the workplace came into force in 2024, and it recorded 7,848 harassment complaints under the Act in 2025, up 78.4% in five years.
The CNESST adds that psychosocial risks related to work can be present in any workplace and, like other health and safety risks, must be identified and dealt with by the workplace.
What should HR measure before the next claim?
Claims data are a late signal: payments and days describe what has already happened. Earlier in the chain sit the demands of the work. The CNESST lists high workload, or overload, as a risk factor present in every workplace, and asks that risk factors be considered together rather than one by one.
OHA's Five Loads framework sorts those demands into decisional, cognitive, emotional, relational and administrative load, because the response to each differs. A team waiting on approvals needs process work; a team absorbing other people's distress needs something else.
A bounded way to start: pick one team, measure its loads before changing anything, make one change and measure again at about 90 days with the same instrument. Set that beside the absence and departure range from the calculator and the CFO has a baseline and a comparison to read. For the national picture of what poor mental health costs Canadian employers, see our post on what employee burnout costs an employer.
What OHA does about this
OHA's Capacity Diagnostic is designed to measure the Five Loads across your teams, show which one dominates in each function, and set a baseline for a 90-day Capacity Circle™ built around that load, with the same measurement repeated at day 90. HR gets a starting point it can put numbers on, and a comparison the finance team can read when the next budget conversation about absence and claims comes round.
Book a Capacity DiagnosticSources
- CNESST, Statistiques relatives aux risques psychosociaux liés au travail 2021-2025, August 2026 (in French).
- CNESST, Imputation du coût des prestations liées aux lésions professionnelles, n.d. (page in French).
- CNESST, Tarification de la moyenne et grande entreprise, n.d. (page in French).
- CNESST, Risques psychosociaux liés au travail, n.d. (page in French).
- CNESST, Facteurs de risques psychosociaux liés au travail, n.d. (page in French).