Workers' Compensation Rates in Mississippi (2026)

State Overview

Mississippi requires workers' comp for employers with five or more employees. Rates are near the national average.

How to find a Mississippi workers' comp class code from a job description

There is no Mississippi workers' comp class code for a job title. NCCI files the classifications used in Mississippi, and the NCCI rules are what an auditor applies, and what gets classified is the employer's business — not the separate employments, occupations or operations inside it. "Machinist", "CNC operator", "general construction labor" and "data entry" are therefore work that sits inside whichever classification describes the business, not values you can look up on their own.

NCCI publishes Mississippi's classifications in the Basic Manual for Workers Compensation and Employers Liability Insurance for Mississippi (no Mississippi edition date, because Mississippi adopts the manual by approval rather than by reference. Miss. Code Ann. § 83-2-1(2)(g) makes "any manual or plan of rates, classification, rating schedule, minimum premium, policy fee, rating rule" supplementary rate information; § 83-2-7(1) then makes every insurer file its supplementary rate information at least thirty days before the effective date stated in the filing and deems that filing approved unless the Commissioner of Insurance disapproves it within thirty days; and the one Insurance Department regulation that describes the governing manuals at all, 19 Miss. Admin. Code Pt. 5, R. 4.01.5(C), names them only as the workers' compensation and employers' liability manuals "as approved for use in Mississippi by the Commissioner, or as approved for use by members of a licensed data service organization", listing the Basic Manual and, separately, "the classification codes for workers' compensation and employers' liability insurance". Nothing anywhere names an edition: across the 114 regulation citations in the Department's own list of adopted regulations — in which "insurance" appears 120 times as the control, and "classification", "basic manual", "NCCI" and "rating organization" not once — exactly one regulation title names workers' compensation, and it is the assigned-risk plan. The version in force is whichever Basic Manual filing NCCI last made for Mississippi and the Commissioner did not disapprove). To confirm the classification for a specific business, use the Insurance Department's Property and Casualty Company Information page, which carries the monthly Property/Casualty Rate Filing Bulletins, the Department's Loss Cost Filing Procedures and — in place of the per-carrier loss-cost table it used to publish — a notice sending readers to each individual company's filings in SERFF Filing Access, published by the Mississippi Insurance Department rather than by NCCI — that is the filed authority for Mississippi, and a code quoted from another state's manual is not. Mississippi argues a classification through the rate service organization first and ends it in a court the statute names. Miss. Code Ann. § 83-2-13(1) makes every insurer or rate service organization furnish an affected insured "all pertinent information as to such rate" on written request and payment of a reasonable charge, and § 83-2-13(2) makes it provide a means whereby any person aggrieved by the application of its rating system may be heard inside Mississippi on how that system was applied to the insurance afforded — with a thirty-day clock, after which the applicant "may proceed in the same manner as if the application has been rejected". The affected party then has thirty days from notice of the insurer's action to appeal to the Commissioner of Insurance, who holds a hearing on not less than ten days' written notice and may affirm, modify or reverse, and Miss. Code Ann. § 83-2-31 sends any order the Commissioner issues under the chapter to the Chancery Court of the First Judicial District of Hinds County. In the residual market the ladder is set out in the regulation instead: 19 Miss. Admin. Code Pt. 5, R. 4.10.2 gives the Plan or Pool Administrator thirty days to decide a written dispute, the Advisory Board sixty days to review that decision on a request made within thirty days, and then a de novo review by the Commissioner on a written request made within thirty days of the Board's decision. Above both sits NCCI's Basic Manual Appendix G process, under which Mississippi is one of the states whose disputes go to a candidate board member list.

Four things about Mississippi surprise an employer arriving from another NCCI state. First, Mississippi has no workers'-compensation rating law of its own: chapter 83-2 of the Mississippi Code reaches all forms of property and casualty insurance except accident and health, ocean marine, reinsurance, aircraft liability and hull, title, and credit accident and health — workers' compensation is on none of those lists — and the only "Rating Bureau" the code establishes is the fire-insurance bureau of § 83-3-5, so NCCI operates here as a rate service organization licensed under § 83-2-15 rather than as a designated bureau. Second, Mississippi deliberately kept workers' compensation inside the full filing regime when it deregulated the lines beside it: House Bill 773 of the 2020 Regular Session, the Commercial Lines Modernization Act, became law as Chapter 447 effective July 1, 2020 and exempted ten named commercial lines plus a catch-all from rate filing and approval, and its own definition says commercial lines insurance "shall not include workers' compensation, medical malpractice liability, creditor-placed insurance or any insurance issued by residual market mechanisms or assigned risk plans". Third — and this is the part that decides which words actually govern a policy — under the Department's Prospective Loss Costs Filing Procedures, a Loss Cost Bulletin dated October 19, 1990 that the Department still links from its live Property and Casualty page, the advisory or rating organization files "policy-writing rules, rating plans, classification codes and descriptions" for approval on behalf of the insurers that authorized it, and an insurer may then take that filing as filed, take it on a different effective date, decline it, or adopt it "with modifications" by filing the modification with the Department for approval. So in Mississippi the governing classification wording is the version the carrier adopted, and the Department's own monthly bulletins read that way: the 2026 bulletins record Mississippi workers' compensation filings taking effect on at least seven different dates, one of them a carrier adopting NCCI's advisory loss costs effective March 1. Fourth, the residual market is not NCCI's to run — Miss. Code Ann. § 71-3-111(2) designates the Commissioner of Insurance himself as Director of the Mississippi Workers' Compensation Assigned Risk Plan, and 19 Miss. Admin. Code Pt. 5, R. 4.01.4 defines the Plan and Pool Administrator only as whichever organization the Commissioner designates.

the Insurance Department's Property and Casualty Company Information page, which carries the monthly Property/Casualty Rate Filing Bulletins, the Department's Loss Cost Filing Procedures and — in place of the per-carrier loss-cost table it used to publish — a notice sending readers to each individual company's filings in SERFF Filing Access (official Mississippi lookup)

States with a Similar Cost Index

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Related Guides for Mississippi Employers

• The Complete Guide to Workers' Comp Costs in 2026

  National benchmarks, the 2026 state rate-change table, and how to budget your premium.

• Compare Workers' Comp Rates by State

  Rank the states by cost index and see the filed figures for a class code, side by side with up to two other states.

• Workers' Comp Premium Calculator

  Work out annual premium from your Mississippi class-code rate, payroll, and experience modification factor.

• Workers' Comp Class Codes Explained

  How NCCI assigns a code to each job and why it creates a 10–25× swing in your rate.

• NCCI Class Code Lookup & Directory

  Search workers' comp class codes by keyword to find the four-digit NCCI (or Mississippi bureau) code for your business — then see how it is rated above.

• Experience Modification Rate (EMR) Explained

  How your claims history becomes a multiplier that raises or lowers your Mississippi premium.

• 5 Proven Ways to Lower Your Workers' Comp Premium

  Tactics any small business can use to reduce cost at next renewal — from classification audits to return-to-work programs.

• How Rates Are Calculated: NCCI vs Independent States

  Whether Mississippi uses NCCI or an independent bureau — and why the difference changes how your premium is set.