U.S. Work Injury Statistics: How Are People Hurt at Work?

From desk jobs to construction, employees face inherent risks. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in a hundred workers in the US experienced nonfatal occupational injury or illness in the two-year period between January 2021 and December 2022.

The rate of injury is highest among workers involved in transporting goods or people, with four out of every hundred workers in transportation and material moving occupations sustaining injuries or experiencing illness. In second and third place for the highest rate of injury and illness are healthcare support workers and cleaning and maintenance workers.

At the same time, the lowest rate of injury tends to be found in white-collar professions – or those likely to be done behind a desk.

This trend in injury rates indicates a correlation between the physical demands of jobs and the associated risk factors. The more physically demanding and interactive a job is, the more likely the probability of an injury occurring.

Overall, the injury rate across all professions included in this sample comes out to 169.9.

We used data collected by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that covers injuries sustained at work that were cases involving days away from work, meaning at least one day was required away from work, with or without does of job transfer or restriction as a result of the injury. As well as injuries sustained at work that involved transfer or restriction, meaning that as a result of the work-related injury or illness an employee is recommended by either the employer or health care professional, to not perform the routine functions of his or her job, and/or to not work the full workday.

As St. Louis injury lawyers that handle many workers’ compensation claims, the team at Floyd Law Firm, P.C. understands how work-related injuries can impact not only your financial well-being, but your mental, physical, and emotional well-being as well.

We worked with data visualization agency, 1Point21 Interactive, to analyze the data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and identify the occupations, mechanism of injury, and injury type.

Which Occupations Have the Highest Rate of Injury?

The chart below shows the 25 US occupations with the highest injury rates. You may sort the chart to see data for all injury types at once or select each injury type individually to see the rate for that specific injury in each of the 25 occupations.

The high incidence rates of injuries in these occupations may indicate that there is a need for improved safety protocols.

Which Occupations Have the Lowest Injury Rate?

The top five occupations with the lowest injury rate all have rates below 2 injuries per 100,000 workers. This is an extremely low rate in comparison to the top five occupations with the highest rate of injuries, which are all above 700 injuries per 100,000 workers. The top five highest injury rate jobs are more than 350 times as likely to be hurt as the top five lowest injury rate jobs.

The top five occupations with the lowest injury rate include:

1. Securities, commodities & financial services sales agents
2. Lawyers, judges & related workers
3. Lawyers & judicial law clerks
4. Architects, except naval
5. Arts, communications, history, & humanities teachers, post-secondary

The chart below shows the 25 US occupations with the lowest injury rates.

How Are People Hurt at Work?

There are many different ways that people can get hurt at work. Depending on the job type, activity levels, and how dangerous job duties are, injuries can range from minor, like a strain, to severe, like an amputation.

The types of injuries ranked from most to least common are:

1. Sprains and strains
2. Cuts and lacerations
3. Soreness and pain
4. Bruises and contusions
5. Fractures
6. Heat (thermal) burns
7. Multiple traumatic injuries
8. Amputations
9. Chemical burns
10. Carpal tunnel syndrome
11. Tendonitis

Jobs that involve more manual labor and are conducted in industrial settings are more likely to experience sprains, strains, and cute. To remedy this, focused efforts could be made to implement ergonomic design and increase safety training to reduce the frequency and severity of these types of incidents.

When we look at the top five occupations with the highest rate of injury, we see that

1. Metal and plastic workers are more than 12 times as likely to get hurt than the average, with the majority of injuries occurring from contact with objects or slips and falls.
2. Dancers are the most likely profession to experience strains from overexertion.
3. Production workers are most likely to get injured by either contact with objects or overexertion.
4. Nursing assistants and aides are likely to be injured due to exposure to harmful substances or environments
5. EMTs & paramedics are likely to be injured due to exposure to harmful substances or environments or by overexertion

Injury Type

Let’s take a look at the injuries and occupations that have interesting outliers.

• Sprains and overexertion are far more likely to occur in dancers and choreographers
• Fractures are highly likely to occur in elementary school teachers
• Chemical burns and corrosions are high among pest control workers
• Carpal tunnel syndrome is high among butchers and other meat-processing workers
• Construction trade workers are highly likely to experience multiple traumatic injuries at once

These outliers point to the unique risk factors that are associated with specific professions. While they may be unexpected, they may make sense.

For example, elementary school teachers deal with small children on a daily basis. These children may have behavioral problems that could lead to teachers experiencing fractures, or the children, being young, may create unsafe environments by leaving a toy in a walkway, causing a teacher to slip, trip, and fall and fracture a bone.

How Are People Actually Injured?

The mechanism of injury is interesting and gives a fuller context of how the injury occurred. Understanding the mechanism that caused the injury provides helpful insight that can be used to develop targeted interventions that may be able to help reduce injury rates and cultivate safer work environments.

The mechanisms that were included in this data set include:

• Contact with object – such as an object falling off of a shelf
• Falls and slips – such as slipping on a wet floor at work
• Overexertion and bodily reaction – such as back pain from repetitive movements at work
• Transportation incidents – such as a delivery driver being involved in an accident while on their route
• Violence and other injuries by persons or animals – such as experiencing aggressive behavior from a patient or customer
• Intentional injury by another person – such as a security guard being injured by a shoplifter
• Injury by person unintentional or intent unknown – such as a warehouse worker being hit accidentally by someone operating a forklift
• Animal and insect-related incidents – such as a postal worker being attacked by a dog while on their route
• Fires and explosions – such as a chef being burned in a grease fire in a restaurant kitchen
• Exposure to harmful substances or environments – such as a construction worker experiencing skin irritation from being exposed to harsh chemicals without being provided the proper personal protective equipment

Use the chart below to explore these mechanisms of injury for over 500 jobs in the United States.

Data, Methodology, and Fair Use

This study was conducted utilizing data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics covering injuries at work that resulted in both days away from work and job transfer or restriction between 2021 and 2022.

If you would like to use any of the findings, data, or images from this study for republishing or a report, please provide credit by linking to this page.

If you would like to set up a free consultation with a workers’ compensation lawyer in St. Louis to file a claim, contact the Floyd Law Firm, P.C. online or at (314) 863-4114.