An interactive timeline
The 2025 to 2027 reform left a lot of organisations unsure whether the duty to manage psychosocial risk still applies to them. For most, it does, and it hasn't moved since 2015. Follow the story event by event, from Pike River to 2027.
Last reviewed July 2026 · Compiled by 3 Big Things registered psychologists
If you're working out what the reform means for your organisation, you're reading a moving target. The government has narrowed the focus away from psychosocial risk. The opposition wants to repeal it. No code exists yet, and Australia is heading the opposite way with prosecutions already underway.
Underneath the noise, one thing hasn't moved. This timeline separates the settled duty from the shifting politics, so you can see where you really stand.
Where things stand today
—days
until the reforms commence on 1 April 2027. For most organisations, the duty to manage psychosocial risk applies on every one of those days.
Live countdown
You are here
Bill passed · awaiting commencement
Parliament has finished and the clock is running. Guidance, regulations and repeal politics are the live threads. See “Looking ahead” below the story.
Now rewind
Twelve years, two countries, one duty that never moved. Each event below carries three things: what it means for you, who said what, and our read.
2015NZ law
Enacted after Pike River. Section 16 defines health as both physical and mental, and section 36 requires organisations to manage risks to it so far as is reasonably practicable. Psychosocial hazards are in scope from day one.
2021WorkSafe
WorkSafe surveys 3,612 workers with the COPSOQ instrument: 24 work factors scored, 35% of workers exposed to at least one harmful behaviour in a year. Still the only nationally representative psychosocial dataset for New Zealand.
2022Australia
Safe Work Australia amends the model WHS Regulations: duty holders must identify psychosocial hazards and put controls in place, backed by a model Code of Practice. States adopt it progressively.
Jun–Oct 2024NZ law
MBIE consults on overhauling the health and safety system: is it too complex, does it burden small businesses disproportionately? More than 1,000 submissions arrive. The shift toward “risks most likely to kill or seriously harm” starts here.
MBIE health and safety reform →2024WorkSafe
Even as the reform points at physical risk, WorkSafe names psychosocial harm a key focus area and keeps publishing guidance and data.
Dec 2024Australia
A Commonwealth employer is convicted for failing to manage psychosocial hazards, the first case of its kind, on legislation New Zealand’s law mirrors.
“It seems only a matter of time before there is a similar prosecution in relation to a failure to manage psychosocial risks in a New Zealand workplace.”Buddle Findlay
Feb 2025WorkSafe
Psychosocial risk profiles for agriculture, construction, forestry, manufacturing and all workers, consolidating the survey data, suicide findings and notified concerns.
Mar–Aug 2025NZ law
Cabinet re-centres the whole system on “critical risks”, defined around death, serious injury and serious illness, a physically weighted test. Small, lower-risk businesses get narrowed duties focused on those critical risks. Sector relief follows: heights, machinery, hazardous substances. All of it physical.
Dec 2025Australia
Victoria’s Psychological Health Regulations take effect: employers must identify psychosocial hazards, and larger employers must report on them.
9 Feb 2026NZ law
The Amendment Bill is introduced. It draws the small-business line in the Act itself (a small PCBU has fewer than 20 workers for at least nine months of the year), but psychosocial harm is not named a critical risk, and no psychosocial regulations or code come with it. Law firms flag the omission. Crucially: the Bill does not amend section 16’s definition of health or remove the section 36 duty.
“Psychosocial hazards may not be captured unless and until there is further regulation or guidance.”Bell GullyBell Gully analysis →
Read this part carefully
The system's focus. WorkSafe’s objective and enforcement priorities now point at “critical risks”, defined around death and serious physical harm. Psychosocial harm loses regulator spotlight, not legal status.
Small businesses. The Act draws the line itself: a small PCBU has fewer than 20 workers for at least nine months of the year. Below it, duties centre on critical risks. At 20 or more, nothing narrows.
The rulebook that never arrived. No new psychosocial regulations, no code of practice. The law firms’ warning is about a guidance vacuum, not a repeal.
The duty itself, for everyone else. Section 36 and section 16 are untouched, as is the section 44 duty on directors personally.
Overlooked is not exempt. When something goes wrong, the standard you’ll be measured against is the one that already exists — WorkSafe’s guidelines and ISO 45003 — sharpened by the Australian precedent.
The spotlight moved, small business got carve-outs, and the rulebook never came. The duty, for most organisations, never went anywhere.
1 Jul 2026NZ law
The Bill passes. Labour calls it “an absolute horror of a bill” and pledges repeal; unions warn against softening the post-Pike-River framework. The settings stay politically contested.
1 Apr 2027NZ law
The reforms come into force, delayed from 1 November 2026. Throughout the transition and after it, the mental-health duty for standard organisations is unchanged.
Looking ahead
The story isn't finished. Here's what we're watching that could raise the bar, and what could move the date without moving the duty.
Four developments that could sharpen what compliance looks like.
An Approved Code of Practice is the step-by-step rulebook the reform made a stronger route to compliance. None exists yet for psychosocial risk, which is exactly the gap law firms flag. If one lands (our bet is an adaptation of Australia’s within two to three years), it becomes the checklist your organisation is audited against.
The survey behind every national benchmark on our data page has run once, in 2021. The 2026 wave has just been fielded. When results land they refresh the baseline you’re compared against, and typically re-energise regulator attention on whatever the numbers show worsening.
Australia’s 2024 conviction proved prosecutions succeed under the legal framework our Act mirrors. New Zealand law firms expect a local case. When it comes, it will define in practice what “reasonably practicable” management of psychosocial risk means here, retrospectively, for whoever it lands on.
The Act defines a small PCBU: fewer than 20 workers for at least nine months of the year. Below that line, duties centre on physical “critical risks”, and Bell Gully notes psychosocial hazards may sit outside them unless further regulation or guidance pulls them back in. Whether that guidance arrives is the live question, and if your headcount hovers near 20, so is which side of the line you sit on.
Three things that could shift the timing. None of them shifts the duty.
Labour has pledged to repeal the Amendment Act. Repeal would unwind the reform, and restore a system more focused on psychosocial risk, not less.
Either wayThe s36 duty stands.
Commencement has already slipped once, from 1 November 2026. A further deferral is possible if implementation lags.
Either wayThe duty applies throughout.
Supporting regulations still have to be drafted, including anything that would pull psychosocial hazards back into small-PCBU duties. Parts of the reform could commence later or narrower than announced.
Either wayYour standard today is WorkSafe guidance + ISO 45003.
Quick answers
Yes. The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 defines health as physical and mental, so psychosocial hazards must be managed like any other. The 2025 to 2027 reform narrows the system's focus toward physical risks, but it doesn't remove that duty for standard organisations. WorkSafe's Good Practice Guidelines and ISO 45003 remain the standard you'll be measured against.
A PCBU, almost always the organisation itself, must eliminate or minimise risks to both physical and mental health, so far as is reasonably practicable. WorkSafe’s guidelines set out the steps: identify the hazards, assess them, control them, monitor and review. The Act also places a personal due-diligence duty on company officers under section 44. Once a hazard is reasonably foreseeable, and psychosocial harm clearly is, the duty applies.
For small businesses, yes, and this is the one genuine carve-out in the reform. The Act defines a small PCBU as an organisation with fewer than 20 workers for at least nine months of the year. Small PCBUs will manage only “critical risks”, the hazards most likely to cause death or serious harm, rather than every workplace risk. Psychosocial hazards sit outside that critical-risk list, so unless future regulation or guidance pulls them back in, a small business’s psychosocial obligations genuinely narrow. Two caveats. The carve-out only takes effect on 1 April 2027, and only if the Act is not repealed before then; until that date a small business carries the same psychosocial duty as everyone else. And it narrows the Health and Safety at Work Act only: employment law claims for bullying, harassment or constructive dismissal apply to employers of any size, reform or not. For every organisation with 20 or more workers, nothing changes. The duty to manage psychosocial risk stands, alongside the critical-risk priority, not instead of it.
The everyday cost is turnover, absence, and people who've quietly checked out. The legal cost is rising: in December 2024 Australia recorded its first conviction of an employer for failing to manage psychosocial hazards, on legislation New Zealand's own law mirrors. As Buddle Findlay puts it, it seems only a matter of time before there's a similar prosecution here. “We didn't measure it” is not a defence.
Not the underlying duty for standard organisations. The Bill, introduced in February 2026 and passed on 1 July 2026, refocuses the system on physical “critical risks” and doesn’t name psychosocial harm as one, which has led law firms to warn it could be overlooked. The obligation to identify and manage psychosocial hazards remains for organisations with 20 or more workers (the small-PCBU carve-out is the one exception, covered above). Commencement is set for 1 April 2027.
Yes. Section 44 of the Act places a due-diligence duty on directors and officers as individuals: know your hazards, know your controls, and make sure the organisation is actually managing them. That duty has covered psychosocial harm since 2015, and the reform doesn’t touch it. The practical test is whether the board can answer what its psychosocial hazards are and what it is doing about them.
Section 44
Most duties under the Act fall on the organisation. Section 44 is different. It places a due-diligence duty on directors and officers as individuals: know your hazards, know your controls, and make sure the organisation is actually managing them. That duty has covered psychosocial harm since 2015, and the reform doesn’t touch it. So when a board asks whether psychosocial risk is “still a thing”, the honest answer is that it was never only the organisation’s problem. It has the board’s name on it.
We work with boards who take this seriously and still can’t answer a simple question: what are our psychosocial hazards, and what are we doing about them? That isn’t a lack of care, it’s a measurement gap. Closing it is how a director discharges the duty, and it’s the first thing any enforcement action looks for.
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