Data: What Workers’-Comp Ratings Say About California Passenger-Transport Operators
NEMT Wire analysis of 13 months of WCIRB experience-rating publications for class 7382 — median mods, the county spread, and a warning in the year-over-year numbers.
Workers' compensation is one of the largest controllable costs in a California passenger-transport operation, and the experience modification — the x-mod — is where an operator's claims history becomes a price. NEMT Wire analyzed thirteen months of experience-rating publications from the WCIRB (August 2025 through September 2026) for classification 7382 — the bus, shuttle-van and limousine class where California NEMT and paratransit operations are typically rated — covering 127 debit-rated employers (mods of 1.00 or higher) with 2026 ratings.
The numbers
| Metric (class 7382, 2026 ratings, debit-rated) | Value |
|---|---|
| Employers in sample | 127 |
| Median x-mod | 1.24 |
| 75th percentile | 1.54 |
| Share at 1.50 or higher | 30.7% |
| Worst rating observed | 6.47 |
| Year-over-year: share that worsened | 53.9% (median change +4 points) |
Three readings
First, the tail is heavy. Nearly a third of debit-rated operators in this class sit at 1.50+ — paying at least half again the manual rate for workers' comp. In a business of thin per-trip margins, that differential alone can decide which of two competing operators survives a rate card.
Second, Los Angeles runs hottest. LA County accounts for the largest concentration of rated operators in the sample (34) and posts a median of 1.37 — well above the class-wide 1.24. Riverside (1.08) and Orange County (1.07) medians show the geography of the problem: the dense urban core is where claims frequency lives.
Third, the drift is real but slower than construction. A 54% worsening rate (median +4 points) is gentler than what we see in building trades — but it still means most debit-rated operators got worse, not better, this year. Passenger-assistance injuries — lifting, transfers, securement — are the class's signature loss driver, and they are trainable.
Method & limitations
Sample: WCIRB experience-rating publications compiled weekly, Aug 1, 2025–Sep 10, 2026, via a commercial monitoring feed; deduplicated to each employer's latest 2026 rating; mods shown in decimal form. The feed predominantly captures debit-rated employers, so these figures describe the debit-rated population — not the average of all rated 7382 employers, most of which rate below 1.00. Class 7382 includes non-NEMT operations (charter shuttles, limousines); California does not break out a NEMT-specific class. First edition; we expect to update as the dataset grows.
Disclosure: NEMT Wire's parent company, Thrive Risk Management (CA Lic #6012320), brokers workers' compensation for transport operators. The data above is from WCIRB public rating publications and is published CC-BY — cite freely with attribution and a link.