A New South Wales cafe or restaurant pays workers compensation at 2.250% of its total wages, so a A$400,000 wage bill starts at A$9,000 a year. Skai Solutions has worked that out below, because it is the only part of a restaurant's insurance bill published by law.
Everything else, public liability, property, glass, food spoilage, business interruption, is quoted individually and no regulator publishes what it costs. That is why searching for a restaurant insurance price returns broker forms instead of numbers. This page gives you the figure that is published, shows you how to read it against your own wages, and is honest about which parts of the bill cannot be quoted without a broker looking at your venue.
All figures below are current for the 2026-27 policy year and dated where they came from a market rate rather than a regulator.
Workers compensation. Every Australian state runs a scheme that sets a published rate per industry, and in New South Wales that rate is gazetted as a Workers Compensation Industry Classification, a WIC. It is not a quote and there is no negotiation: your accountant multiplies your total wages by the rate for your classification.
The relevant hospitality classifications from the icare NSW WIC rate order, read 20 September 2026, are these. The dust diseases contribution in the right hand column is a separate levy on the same wages.
| WIC code | Classification | Rate on wages | Dust diseases |
|---|---|---|---|
| 573000 | Cafes and Restaurants | 2.250% | 0.004% |
| 512500 | Takeaway Food Retailing | 2.370% | 0.004% |
| 512400 | Bread and Cake Retailing | 2.430% | 0.004% |
| 572000 | Pubs, Taverns and Bars | 2.550% | 0.004% |
| 574000 | Clubs (Hospitality) | 3.690% | 0.004% |
| 571000 | Accommodation | 3.780% | 0.004% |
Those rates are frozen. The Workers Compensation Legislation Amendment (Reform and Modernisation) Act 2026 holds NSW premium rates at their 2025-26 level, and SIRA confirms that the 2025-26 WIC rates carry into the 2026-27 policy period. So the table above is what you will be charged this year and, on current law, next year too.
Take a suburban restaurant paying A$400,000 a year in wages, which is roughly eight to ten staff on a mix of full time and casual hours. Multiply it out and the base premium falls where you would expect, except in one place.
| Venue type | Wages | Base premium | Plus dust diseases |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cafe or restaurant | A$400,000 | A$9,000 | A$16 |
| Takeaway shop | A$400,000 | A$9,480 | A$16 |
| Pub or bar | A$400,000 | A$10,200 | A$16 |
| Hospitality club | A$400,000 | A$14,760 | A$16 |
Two things in that table are worth stopping on. The first is the size of the spread: a hospitality club pays A$5,760 a year more than a cafe on identical wages, 64% more, purely because of how the venue is classified. The second is that a takeaway shop pays a higher rate than a sit down restaurant, 2.370% against 2.250%. Most operators assume the kitchen with the open flame and the full service floor is the riskier premises. The NSW claims data says otherwise.
This is the same shape of problem as award misclassification, and it costs about the same. Getting the wrong award wrong by one level runs into the thousands a year, and so does a WIC code that does not match what you actually do. If you run a cafe with a small bar, which classification is on your policy schedule is worth checking once.
Two more numbers from icare's 2026-27 settings, both published in 2026: the minimum premium payable on any policy is A$240, so a one person operation with negligible wages still pays that floor; and the cap on a year on year premium increase for experience rated employers drops from 30% to 25%.
No regulator publishes a price for these. What follows are market rates advertised by Australian business insurers and brokers and read in September 2026, so treat them as a range to sanity check a quote against, not as a benchmark. Date matters here, because insurance pricing in hospitality has been moving.
The honest version: for a single site restaurant, workers compensation is usually the largest line on the insurance page of your P&L, and it is the only one you can predict to the dollar before you ask anyone. Build your budget from it and treat the rest as a range until a broker comes back.
There is no published average and the two most specific Australian guides show exactly why. Read on 12 October 2026: one guide, last modified 31 August 2026, puts basic public liability on its own at A$480 to A$960 a year and then says an average restaurant pays A$1,200 to A$1,700. An insurance broker's guide, last modified 28 October 2025, puts public liability at A$500 to A$5,000 a year. Neither publishes a methodology and the broker labels its own numbers general estimates.
Those two ranges differ by a factor of ten at the top, and that is the useful finding rather than an inconvenience. Public liability for a venue is priced on turnover, whether you serve alcohol, your trading hours and your claims history, and those four move the premium far more than the cover does. So any page quoting you a single average for restaurant public liability has picked one venue's profile and called it the market.
Where the two guides DO agree is the thing worth budgeting from. Both put a package of the essential policies at A$2,000 to A$5,000 a year for a small venue, and the first adds property and contents at A$1,500 to A$2,000 on top of a small cafe's liability policy. Agreement between two independent guides on the package, with a tenfold spread on one line inside it, is a reasonable description of how this market actually quotes.
Set that against the one insurance number on this page you can work out to the dollar before you ring anybody. Workers compensation on a NSW wage bill is a published rate times your wages, so on the A$400,000 example above it is A$9,000 and it is not a range. The practical order is therefore: calculate workers compensation exactly, budget A$2,000 to A$5,000 for the package, and treat every public liability figure you read online, including the ones above, as a prompt for a question rather than an answer.
No, and this is worth saying plainly because insurance renewal is the kind of bill that feels bigger than it is. On the A$400,000 wage example above, workers compensation is A$9,000, which is 2.25% of wages by definition. Set against the cost lines that actually decide whether a venue survives, it is a rounding error.
Wages themselves typically run 30 to 35 per cent of turnover in an Australian restaurant, and food another 28 to 35. Those two together are your prime cost and they decide the outcome. Insurance sits inside the overhead block, which lands somewhere between 21 and 30 per cent of turnover for a restaurant in the A$500,001 to A$2m band on ATO benchmark data.
So the practical advice is the unglamorous kind. Do not spend a week shopping insurance to save A$400. Spend it on the lines that move by thousands: your rostering, your food cost, and the revenue you are losing to a phone nobody answers.
Only three levers exist, and two of them are slow.
Check your classification. The fastest of the three. Your WIC is set from what your business actually does, not what it is called. A cafe classified as a pub because it holds a liquor licence is paying 2.550% instead of 2.250%, A$1,200 a year on a A$400,000 wage bill, for nothing. Ask your insurer to confirm the code on your schedule.
Reduce your claims experience. Above a certain size your premium is experience rated, so claims history feeds back into what you pay. Burns, slips and knife injuries are the hospitality pattern. This works, but it works over years.
Reduce your wage bill without reducing your service. Because the premium is a straight percentage of wages, every dollar of wages you do not need to pay is 2.25 cents of premium you do not pay either. That is a small effect on its own. It matters because it points at the same place everything else on this page points: the hours you are paying for that are not producing revenue.
Here is the connection, and it runs the other way to what you would guess. Insurance is a cost you cannot do much about. The phone is a cost you can.
A staff member standing at the pass taking a booking over the phone during service is being paid award rates to do it, and on a Sunday that is a penalty rate. Those minutes are inside the wage bill your premium is calculated on. More to the point, the calls that ring out during a rush are revenue that never arrives, and unlike an insurance premium nobody sends you an invoice for them, which is exactly why they go unnoticed.
Skai Solutions answers those calls. It picks up every inbound call including several at once, takes bookings and pickup orders straight into your POS, and works after close and on public holidays. Setup takes five days. It does not reduce your insurance bill and we are not going to pretend it does. It addresses the line next to it.
If you are costing the fixed lines of a small venue one by one, the phone is the one usually left out. Our page on whether an AI receptionist works for a coffee shop puts a number on it.
This page prices the premium. The separate question of what you have to do on the day is on our page on what to do when an employee is injured at work, which carries the 48 hour notification duty and the seven day payment rule.
The workers compensation figures on this page are New South Wales. Victoria (WorkSafe), Queensland (WorkCover Queensland), South Australia (ReturnToWorkSA), Western Australia and Tasmania each run their own scheme with their own industry rates, and they are not the same numbers. The structure is the same everywhere, a published rate applied to your wages, but you need your own state's rate order.
The market rates for public liability, property and business interruption are advertised ranges read in September 2026, not a survey and not a regulator's figure. They will be wrong for a venue with an unusual risk profile, a claims history, or a heritage building. And none of this is financial or insurance advice. It is arithmetic on published rates so you can tell whether a quote is in the right postcode.
New Zealand operators: your equivalent is ACC levies, which work on a similar published classification basis but are a different scheme entirely. Our New Zealand wages page covers the ground next to it.
Spoiled stock and a lost Friday are two different claims and most policies only answer one of them. Restaurant power outage procedures has the discard thresholds and the regulator payments that sit outside insurance entirely.
An insurer assessing a fire claim will ask for the maintenance records before anything else. What fire extinguisher servicing costs and what the records have to show sets out the seven year rule in New South Wales and the 24 hour production rule in Victoria.
There is no published figure, because it is individually underwritten. Advertised market rates for a small single site venue in September 2026 sit in the hundreds to low thousands a year for a A$10m or A$20m limit, moving with turnover, whether you serve alcohol, and whether you have outdoor seating on a footpath. Treat any range you read online, including this one, as a sanity check rather than a quote.
Yes, in every Australian state, if you employ anyone. In New South Wales you must hold a policy if your annual wages exceed the threshold or you employ an apprentice or trainee. The premium is calculated from your industry classification and your wages, and the minimum premium payable on a NSW policy is A$240 for 2026-27.
Because the rates are set from claims data for each classification, not from an assessment of how dangerous the work looks. Takeaway Food Retailing sits at 2.370% and Cafes and Restaurants at 2.250% in the NSW WIC order for 2025-26, which carries into 2026-27 under the rate freeze. The gap is A$480 a year on a A$400,000 wage bill.
Nobody publishes one, and any site quoting a single average figure has estimated it. The part that can be stated exactly is workers compensation: 2.250% of wages for a NSW cafe or restaurant, so A$9,000 on a A$400,000 wage bill. The rest of the schedule depends on your fitout value, your turnover and your limits, and has to be quoted.
It lowers it only if the current classification is wrong. Your WIC is meant to describe what the business actually does, and deliberately misdescribing it to obtain a lower rate is a false declaration. What is worth doing is checking: venues that changed what they do, a cafe that added a bar or dropped table service, often carry a code set years ago that no longer matches.