Risk and cost
Do Safety Cameras Actually Lower Your Insurance Premiums?
Every vendor in this category says 15–25%. Almost none of them say where that number came from. Here is the mechanism that actually moves premium, and how to find out what it's worth on your policy.
VuePoint
Search this question and you will find a lot of confident percentages. Fifteen to twenty-five percent off general liability. Ten to twenty off builder's risk. Twenty to thirty on equipment cover. Two to five thousand dollars a year for a mid-size project.
Those figures are almost all published by companies selling cameras, and almost none of them say which carrier, which policy, which year, or what was measured. We sell analytics, so treat this page with the same suspicion — the difference is that we're going to tell you where to check rather than asking you to take a number on faith.
The mechanism that actually moves the number: EMR
For workers' compensation — usually the largest and most controllable line on a contractor's insurance bill — the lever is the Experience Modification Rate. NCCI, the National Council on Compensation Insurance, calculates it from your claims history and it works as a multiplier on your premium. An EMR of 1.0 is the industry average for your class. Below 1.0 you pay less than the average; above it, more.
- It is calculated on a rolling three-year window, excluding the most recent year. Today's safety improvements show up in your rate two to three years from now — which is the single most misunderstood fact about it.
- Claim frequency generally hurts more than severity. Several small recordables often move EMR more than one large loss, because frequency is treated as predictive of future risk.
- It is not just an insurance number. Many owners and GCs set an EMR threshold — often below 1.0, sometimes below 0.8 — as a prequalification requirement to bid. On that side of it, EMR isn't a cost, it's access to work.
So the honest chain of causation runs: fewer incidents → fewer recordable claims → lower EMR in two to three years → lower workers' compensation premium, and eligibility for jobs that screen on it. Cameras are several steps removed from the premium. They are not several steps removed from the incidents.
Four ways video actually intersects with cost
Where the effect is real, in rough order of how quickly it shows up
- 1
Defeating claims that shouldn't be paid
The fastest and least-discussed effect. A disputed injury with no evidence is usually settled; the same claim with timestamped footage of what actually happened often isn't. This shows up in your loss run immediately rather than in three years, and one avoided claim can outweigh a year of monitoring cost.
- 2
Reducing the behaviours that precede incidents
PPE compliance, work at height without fall protection, people in the path of plant. Detecting these while they are happening turns them into a coaching conversation rather than an OSHA recordable. This is the input to the EMR chain above.
- 3
Theft and vandalism on builder's risk and inland marine
Materials and equipment losses are a separate line from injury, and they respond faster. Carriers do underwrite site security as a risk factor here — but they generally want documented, verifiable coverage and a response protocol, not the presence of cameras.
- 4
Underwriting perception at renewal
Softer and harder to quantify, but real. A submission that includes a documented safety programme with evidence is a different conversation from one that doesn't. Brokers will tell you this matters; none of them will give you a percentage for it.
Where to research this properly
You asked where to look. These are the sources worth trusting, in order — and note that the first one outranks all the others combined for your specific situation.
| Source | What it answers | Why it's authoritative |
|---|---|---|
| Your broker and carrier | What your policy actually credits, and what evidence they want | They are the only party who can tell you what your premium does. Everything else is background. |
| NCCI (ncci.com) | How EMR is calculated and what moves it | They calculate it. They publish the methodology and the state-by-state basis. |
| OSHA — Safety Pays | Estimated cost of a given injury type, and the revenue needed to offset it | The regulator's own model. Useful for building the internal business case in dollars. |
| CPWR | Construction-specific injury data and safety research | The construction industry's research arm. Independent, peer-reviewed, no product to sell. |
| Bureau of Labor Statistics | Injury and illness incidence rates by industry | Federal statistics. The denominator for any claim about being safer than average. |
| IRMI | Risk management and construction insurance reference | Practitioner reference used by brokers themselves. |
Question 4 is the one that produces a number you can act on. Ask your broker to run it against your actual loss run rather than against an industry average.
What we will not claim
We have no data showing that VuePoint reduced anyone's premium by a specific percentage, so we are not going to put a percentage on this page. When we have that data — sourced, with a stated method, from customers who agree to it being published — we will publish it with the method attached.
What we can describe is the mechanism, which is the same for any competent system: detect the behaviours that precede incidents, surface them while someone can still act, and keep an evidence record that survives a dispute. PPE detection on active sites is the clearest worked example, and it is the one most directly connected to the EMR chain above.
Common questions
- How long before better safety shows up in our premium?
- For workers' compensation, two to three years — EMR runs on a rolling three-year window that excludes the most recent year. Claim defence is faster: a disputed claim you can defend with footage affects your loss run now.
- Will a carrier give us a discount just for installing cameras?
- Generally not for installation alone. Where credits exist they tend to require documented coverage, retention, and a defined response protocol — evidence that the system produces action, not just recordings. Ask your broker for the specific requirement in writing.
- Is EMR the same thing as an OSHA rating?
- No, and they get confused constantly. EMR is an insurance figure calculated by NCCI from claims history. OSHA recordables are a regulatory reporting obligation. They are related — recordables often become claims — but they are different numbers maintained by different bodies for different purposes.
- Does this apply outside construction?
- The EMR mechanism applies to any workers' compensation policy, so industrial, warehousing and agriculture all sit in the same structure. The relative weight differs: theft and equipment cover matters more on some sites, injury frequency on others.
Building the internal case?
If you're putting a business case together for a site, tell us what you need to evidence and we'll tell you what the system can and can't document.