HSE’s statistics cover Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales). Northern Ireland has its own regulator and figures. All numbers below are taken from HSE publications listed at the end.
The headline figures
- 35 worker deaths in construction in 2024/25. The five-year average to 2024/25 is 40 a year.
- About 50,000 non-fatal injuries a year to workers, based on the Labour Force Survey, averaged over 2022/23 to 2024/25. That is about 2.5% of construction workers, and 29% of those injuries led to more than seven days off work.
- About 2.2 million working days lost a year to work-related injury and ill health in construction, or around 1.1 days per worker.
- £1.4 billion was the estimated cost of work-related injury and ill health in construction in 2023/24, around 6% of the all-industry total. HSE gives a 95% confidence interval of roughly £1.0 billion to £1.8 billion, so treat it as an estimate.
Construction is still one of the most dangerous sectors
HSE puts the fatal injury rate in construction at 1.92 per 100,000 workers, about 4.8 times the rate across all industries. The biggest single cause is falls from height, which accounted for 53% of construction worker deaths over the five years to 2024/25.
HSE’s provisional figures for 2025/26, published on 30 June 2026, record 25 construction fatalities among 126 worker deaths across all industries. Provisional figures can change as cases are confirmed, and HSE says the final numbers will be published in July 2027, so they should not be compared directly with the final figure above.
Ill health is the bigger cost
It is easy to think of safety as preventing accidents. HSE’s figures show that in construction, 82% of working days lost were due to ill health and 18% to injury. Across all industries, ill health accounts for 72% of the cost of work-related harm. Dust, noise, vibration, manual handling and stress are less dramatic than a fall, but they remove far more people from work.
Who pays?
HSE estimates that work-related injury and ill health cost Britain £22.9 billion in 2023/24 across all industries. By who bears it, that is £13.4 billion for individuals and families (lost income, reduced quality of life), £5.2 billion for government (benefits, health care, lost tax) and £4.3 billion for employers.
That employer share is the part that lands on a business like yours, but the figure only captures what can be counted. Behind it sit the things small contractors feel most: a skilled worker off for weeks, a job running late, a client who does not call back, higher insurance costs, an investigation that takes a director away from running the business, and the human cost to the person hurt and the people who were there.
What this means for your business
- Falls and ill health deserve your attention first. Work at height planning and health surveillance pay back faster than most other safety spending.
- Prevention is a planning job. Almost every serious incident has a plan-shaped hole in it: no method, no check, no briefing.
- Evidence matters. A site-specific RAMS, a signed briefing and a record of reviews show that you thought about the risks and told your people what to do.
None of that is a guarantee. Good paperwork does not stop a fall. What it does is force the conversation and the controls to happen before the work does. That is the point of a RAMS.