More than the year it happened in. A workers' compensation claim is re-priced every year it remains in your experience data.
BWC builds base rates by job classification using payroll, claim costs, safety service costs, and administrative costs, then uses historical data to project what future claims will cost. For an experience-rated employer, the modifier is a prediction. Employers with worse-than-expected losses carry a higher one. Employers with better-than-expected losses carry a lower one.
Experience rating means a shoulder injury in March shows up in your premium long after the employee is back on the floor. Claim payments and open reserves stay in the calculation across multiple rating years, which turns an inaccurate reserve into a number that gets multiplied.
To self-insure in Ohio, an employer needs 500 employees in-state, 2 years with the State Insurance Fund, 5 years of certified GAAP financial statements, demonstrated financial stability, an Ohio banking relationship, a BWC-certified medical management plan, and the internal capability to administer a claims program.
A 40-person machine shop in Dayton will not clear that. Neither will a 120-person mechanical contractor with 3 crews and a good safety record. The threshold exists for solvency, and solvency at that scale looks like a company with 500 people on the payroll.
Ohio Administrative Code 4123-17-15.5 opens a second door. A registered PEO can apply to become a self-insuring employer, and the shared employees of its client companies count toward that employee threshold. The PEO carries the financial qualification, the guaranty fund contribution, the actuarial reporting, and the security requirement. The client company's people are covered inside it.
The mechanism is the same one that gets a 30-person nonprofit large-group health rates. Size is a qualification, and a PEO is a way to be counted at a size you have not reached yet. On a climb, you clip into an anchor someone else was responsible for placing, and you trust it because placing it was their whole job.
One person becomes responsible for the claim on the day it happens.
Under the state-fund process, a claim gets reported to BWC or to your managed care organization, BWC assigns the number and decides what conditions are allowed, and the MCO handles the medical side. That system works, and it also means the employer is one voice among the employee, the physician, the MCO, BWC, and whatever counsel gets involved. Coordination is available to you. Nobody is assigned to do it.
Under a self-insured structure, the claim is reported through the self-insuring employer's own process. IronRoad administers it and pays eligible benefits under Ohio law. The Industrial Commission still decides disputed matters and BWC still regulates. What moves is the starting point: there is a person whose responsibility begins the hour the injury is reported and does not end until the claim resolves.
That responsibility runs in both directions, as it should. When the organization paying for an employee's surgery is the same one that put him on transitional duty, accuracy stops being an accounting preference. PEO stewardship starts there.
Let's say a press brake operator is working second shift at a shop outside Dayton. He catches his hand at 9:40 on a Tuesday. His supervisor reports it that night rather than Friday. Someone from IronRoad speaks with him Wednesday morning and with his employer the same day. Care gets coordinated instead of chased. His restrictions come back on paper, and his plant manager gets a call about what work exists inside those restrictions before he has time to wonder whether he still has a job.
Week 2, he is running QC checks and cycle counts at full pay while his hand heals.
A claim handled that way costs less than the same claim picked up 3 weeks late, and the employee gets a better recovery out of it. Both of those come from the same behavior: the injury gets reported the day it happens, and someone with authority acts on it that week. That is what an HR team fighting for you actually buys.
Your exposure level, and transitional duty.
Because your exposure is physical and constant (machinery, vehicles, work at height, heavy material, repetition), a strong safety culture lowers frequency, and it does not get you to zero. That is why most of your cost gets decided in the 72 hours after an injury.
Transitional duty is easy to write into a policy and hard to run in a 12-person shop where every job requires both hands. This is where most return-to-work programs quietly fail. Real transitional duty in a plant could be tool crib, inventory counts, QC inspection, jobsite documentation, training refreshers, or staging work for the next shift. It has to be identified before someone gets hurt, because writing a light-duty job description while an employee sits at home is how 4 weeks become 14.
On a multi-employer jobsite, add one more variable: your crew, your claim, someone else's site conditions. Documentation on day 1 decides how that resolves.
When your losses are already low, already stable, and already reported on time. Three questions:
If you answered yes to all three, you may be better served by looking at classification accuracy and hazard-level fixes than by changing carriers of any kind.
And if the plan is to change the structure without changing how injuries get reported, a self-insured program will not help you. Run with late reporting, it produces expensive claims faster than the state fund does, because there is no one else to absorb the delay.
This strategy fits employers who have accepted that their claims cost is a management problem with a financial tail, and who want somebody accountable for those costs with skin in the game.
Does self-insurance reduce what an injured employee receives?
No. A self-insuring employer pays the compensation and medical benefits due under Ohio law, the same benefits available under the state fund. The Industrial Commission of Ohio retains authority over disputed matters, and BWC continues its oversight role.
Do we lose control of hiring, firing, or discipline in a PEO arrangement?
No. Co-employment covers administrative employment: payroll, benefits, and compliance. Hiring, firing, pay decisions, scheduling, and culture stay entirely with you.
What happens to our existing claims?
Open claims follow the rules that applied when they were filed. Handling of prior claims and experience is specific to your policy and should be reviewed directly before any transition.
How long does a change like this take?
Timing depends on your current policy period, your open claim inventory, and your renewal date. The conversation is worth having 90 days ahead of a renewal rather than 2 weeks ahead of one.
If you run a plant or a crew in Ohio and your workers' compensation costs have been climbing without an obvious reason, the reason is usually sitting in claim handling rather than in your safety record.
We will look at your loss runs, your experience data, and your current claim inventory, and tell you plainly whether a self-insured structure would change your numbers. If it would not, we will say so.
Because at IronRoad, we are your PEOple, on purpose.