The Employee's Compensation Act, 1923

What it does

The Act is a repealed instrument for the future, and the page is written on that footing. It was passed as the Workmen's Compensation Act, 1923, and was renamed by an amendment of 2009. It required an employer to pay compensation, fixed by a scale tied to the worker's wages and the degree of disablement, where a worker suffered personal injury or died from an accident arising out of and in the course of employment, or contracted an occupational disease listed in a schedule.

The scheme was no-fault. The worker did not have to prove negligence, and the employer could not generally defend on the ground that the worker was careless. In exchange, compensation was limited to the scale. Claims were decided by a Commissioner appointed under the Act, who could also decide the amount and the distribution among dependants, and whose orders were appealable to the High Court on a substantial question of law.

Who it binds

An employer, and a principal who engaged a contractor, in the ways the Act provided, in relation to employees falling within its definition and the schedules of employments it covered. Who counted as an employee, and for which employments, was fixed by the Act's own definitions and schedules, and a claim began by testing the worker against them.

What moved out of it

The Code on Social Security, 2020 has gathered the subject of the Act, with the other social security statutes, into one code. The labour codes came into force on 21 November 2025, and the Code carries its own repeal and savings provision. For an accident before the Code applied, the question is which regime governs the claim and the proceeding already begun, and the answer comes from that provision and from the circumstances of the case. The page makes no general statement about it.

What has changed, and when

The Act dates from 1923. It was renamed and widened by the Employee's Compensation (Amendment) Act, 2009. It is now absorbed in the Code on Social Security, 2020, which has been in force from 21 November 2025, with central rules notified on 8 May 2026.

What turns on it in practice

The employment practice area encounters the Act in two places. The first is the claim that arises from a past accident. An employee's family, or a contractor's worker injured on a principal's premises, may bring a claim that depends on facts from before the Code, and the principal's exposure to a contractor's worker is decided by the older provision. The second is the contract. An older contract, indemnity or insurance policy written by reference to the Act of 1923 still uses that Act's definitions, and a reader must decide whether the reference is to be read as to the corresponding provision of the Code.

For a business with contract labour, the point to settle in diligence is who bore the cost of an injury under the labour arrangement, and whether the cover held by the contractor matches what the principal now understands the Code to require. A principal that assumes the contractor's cover is adequate and has not read it takes the risk of a claim that falls to it.