Your Workers' Comp Experience Mod Explained: How to Read It and Lower It in Connecticut

If you own a Connecticut business with workers' comp, your experience modifier is the second-largest factor in what you pay every year — after the class codes themselves. And of the dozens of CT business owners we sit down with in any given month, fewer than one in five can actually read their own e-mod worksheet.

That is not their fault. The NCCI worksheet looks like a tax form designed by an actuary. It has "Actual Primary," "Expected Excess," "Ballast," "Weighting Value," and a dozen other lines no captive agent ever bothers to walk through. The math behind the number is also genuinely complicated — but the parts of it that matter for a Connecticut business owner are not.

This guide is a plain-English walk through the e-mod: what each section of the worksheet actually means, how a single open claim turns into 30% higher premium, the four moves that reliably lower an inflated e-mod, and the carrier mistakes we routinely catch when we re-audit them for new clients.

What Is an Experience Modifier — In Plain English?

Picture two identical Hartford restaurants. Same NCCI class code (9082, restaurant NOC). Same $400,000 payroll. Same coverage. One had zero claims over the last three years. The other had two lost-time claims that ran $35,000 in medical and indemnity benefits.

Without the e-mod, both would pay the same workers' comp premium. The e-mod is the mechanism that makes the first restaurant pay less and the second restaurant pay more — rewarding the operation that runs a safer business and creating a financial incentive for the operation that does not.

Specifically:

• An e-mod of 1.00 means your claims experience is exactly average for businesses your size in your industry. You pay 100% of the base manual premium.
• An e-mod of 0.85 means you are running 15% better than average. You pay 85% of base premium — a 15% discount.
• An e-mod of 1.25 means you are running 25% worse than average. You pay 125% of base premium — a 25% surcharge.

On a $40,000 base premium, the spread between a 0.85 e-mod and a 1.25 e-mod is $16,000 a year — for the exact same business, the exact same payroll, and the exact same coverage. Multiply by three to five years of carrying that mod and the numbers get serious.

How NCCI Calculates Your Experience Mod

The full formula has more moving parts than this article needs to cover, but the structure is this:

What you actually need to know:

"Actual Losses" = What Happened

The dollar amount of claims paid (and reserved) over your last three completed policy years — not the current year. So a 2026 e-mod is built off 2022, 2023, and 2024 claims data.

"Expected Losses" = What NCCI Predicts a Business Your Size Should Have

Calculated from your payroll and class codes, using an industry-wide loss-cost expectation set annually by NCCI for Connecticut.

"Primary" vs "Excess" — The Split Point

For 2026, the NCCI split point in Connecticut is $19,500. The first $19,500 of any single claim is called the primary loss. Anything above that is excess loss. Primary losses count at full weight in your e-mod. Excess losses are dampened by the weighting value.

This is critically important. Frequency hurts your e-mod more than severity. Five $15,000 claims do more damage than one $75,000 claim, because all five fall fully into the primary bucket while the single $75,000 claim gets most of its damage discounted into the dampened excess bucket.

"Weighting Value" & "Ballast"

These are stabilizers NCCI builds into the formula to prevent a single bad year from completely destroying a small business, and to prevent a single good year from completely erasing a real safety problem. Both scale with business size — smaller employers get more ballast (more stabilizing), larger employers get less.

Why Lost-Time Claims Hurt Your E-Mod More Than Medical-Only Claims

Inside Connecticut's experience rating formula there is a specific carve-out for medical-only claims: only 30% of the medical-only loss amount counts toward your e-mod. The other 70% is excluded from the actual-loss calculation entirely. This is the ERA discount (Experience Rating Adjustment) and it is built into the formula by NCCI specifically to incentivize employers to handle minor injuries without putting the employee out of work.

A real example. Same $7,500 claim, two different paths:

That single recategorization — from lost-time to medical-only — cuts the claim's e-mod damage by 70%. Stack that across five claims in a year and the e-mod swing is enormous. This is the entire premise of a return-to-work program: keep injured workers in some modified capacity so the claim closes faster and stays in the medical-only bucket.

A Hartford Manufacturer Case Study: 1.34 to 0.92 in 24 Months

A 40-employee Hartford-area metal fabricator came to iConn in mid-2024 with an e-mod of 1.34. Their workers' comp premium was running close to $78,000 a year, of which roughly $20,000 was pure e-mod surcharge. They had three open lost-time claims from 2022–2023 that were keeping the e-mod inflated.

Here is what the next 24 months looked like:

• Month 1–2: We pulled the NCCI worksheet and found one claim with $22,000 in reserves that the carrier had not actually paid. The claimant had returned to work eight months earlier. We requested a reserve review; reserves came down to $4,000.
• Month 3: We built a one-page return-to-work program with their HR director and got the operations manager onboard.
• Month 4–12: Two new claims occurred during this period. Both were returned to modified duty within 7 days. Both stayed medical-only.
• Month 13: New e-mod issued at 1.12 (down from 1.34).
• Month 18–24: Older lost-time claims aged out of the experience period. One additional new claim, returned to modified duty Day 2, stayed medical-only.
• Month 25: New e-mod issued at 0.92.

Annual premium savings vs the starting baseline: roughly $24,000. No change in carrier. No change in class codes. No layoff. The savings came entirely from claims management discipline and a return-to-work program that did not exist before.

The 4 Moves That Reliably Lower a High E-Mod

If your e-mod is above 1.00 and you want it below 1.00, these are the four moves — in order of how quickly they show up on the worksheet.

1. Audit Open Claim Reserves Quarterly

Reserves are the carrier's estimate of what an open claim will ultimately cost. Inflated reserves count against your e-mod just as much as paid losses. We routinely find $15,000–$40,000 in over-reserved claims at the first audit of a new client. A formal request for reserve review — through the broker, in writing, with supporting documentation — gets answered.

2. Build a Return-to-Work Program (Even a One-Page Version)

This is the single highest-leverage move available. The full playbook is in our return-to-work guide, but the short version: predefine 8–12 modified-duty job functions across your operation, have a one-page program document that physicians can sign off on, and train supervisors to offer modified duty before sending an injured worker home.

3. Report Injuries Within 24 Hours — And Get Medical Care Same-Day

Late-reported injuries cost more, on average, than promptly reported injuries. Reporting delays let symptoms compound, let the employee see uncoordinated providers, and let lost time accumulate. Same-day medical care through an occupational-medicine clinic that knows your modified-duty options is the second-highest-leverage move after RTW itself.

4. Catch Carrier Mistakes on the Worksheet

Carrier-side data entry mistakes happen more often than carriers want to admit. We have seen: claims from a different company posted to a CT client's e-mod (acquired entity confusion), the same claim posted twice, payroll reported under the wrong class code, and "incurred" amounts that included reserves the carrier had already released. Every one of those is correctable — if somebody actually reads the worksheet line by line.

How to Read Your NCCI Experience Modifier Worksheet

You can request your worksheet directly from NCCI (free, at ncci.com) or from your broker. It is a two-page document with three sections worth understanding:

Section 1: Loss Detail

Line-by-line list of every claim in your three-year experience period — date, claim number, paid amount, reserve amount, total incurred, and the lost-time/medical-only flag. This is where 90% of errors hide. Read every line. If a claim is from a business you no longer own, a different policy period, or a different state entirely, flag it immediately.

Section 2: Loss Summarization

The math that converts your loss detail into "Actual Primary" and "Actual Excess" using the $19,500 split point. Walk through one claim with the numbers and verify the carrier got the split right.

Section 3: Experience Rating Calculation

The final formula, with your payroll, expected losses, ballast, weighting value, and the resulting modifier. The number at the bottom is what gets applied to your premium for the upcoming policy year.

When the Carrier Is Wrong — And What to Do About It

If you find an error on the worksheet — wrong claim, wrong amount, wrong split — the correction process is:

1. Submit a written correction request to the carrier, copying NCCI's Customer Service center.
2. Include supporting documentation — payroll register, claim file detail, certificate showing the claim belonged to a different entity, etc.
3. Request an interim e-mod recalculation if the correction is material. NCCI can re-issue a modifier mid-policy-period.
4. If the carrier resists, the CT Insurance Department consumer complaint process is available — though it rarely needs to escalate that far.

In our experience, a clean written correction request with documentation gets answered within 30–60 days. The interim e-mod re-issue, if warranted, follows within another 30 days. The premium savings start with the next billing cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions About Your E-Mod

For a full picture of how the e-mod fits into the rest of your workers' comp premium — class codes, audit, payroll reporting, schedule credits — see our complete 2026 guide to CT workers' compensation insurance. And if you are heading into your annual audit, the CT workers' comp audit survival guide walks through exactly what to bring and how to defend your e-mod when the auditor sits down.

iConn Insurance Solutions and our sister agency Insure Connecticut LLC write workers' comp across CT through The Hartford, Travelers, AmTrust, Liberty Mutual, EMC, Berkshire Hathaway GUARD, ICW Group, and other markets — with independent claims management and e-mod review built into every renewal.