Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2026

This 2026 edition of “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect” marks the 35th year the AFL-CIO has produced the only comprehensive report on the state of safety and health protections for America’s workers. This report features national and state information on workplace fatalities, injuries and illnesses, as well as workplace safety inspections, penalties, funding, staffing and public employee coverage under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act). It also includes information on the state of mine safety and health, key topics such as artificial intelligence, and prevention of workplace violence, musculoskeletal disorders, chemical exposures and heat illness, and transitions in policies on government occupational data reporting, transparency and equity. 

This report focuses on the most recent data available from several sources: government job fatality, injury and illness data from 2024, government enforcement data from FY 2025 and peer-reviewed research, reports, union experience and other evidence. 

Over the last 35 years of this report, job safety agencies’ resources have diminished dramatically, even as their responsibilities have grown immensely. For instance, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is now in charge of 85% more establishments, 44% more workers and new hazards and technologies, yet Congress has reduced its budget by 10% and staffing by 26%, including a 16% reduction in inspectors. These percentages have massive impacts on such a tiny agency and very real personal effects on workers and their families. Agencies now have a paltry number of staff to write standards, analyze data, conduct inspections, perform oversight on states, orchestrate needed research on important hazards and respond to emerging threats. The number of OSHA inspectors has now hit a new low, and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) does not have enough inspectors to meet its statutory requirement to inspect each mine multiple times a year.

Fifty-five years ago on April 28, the OSH Act went into effect, promising every worker the right to a safe job. More than 735,000 workers now can say their lives have been saved since the passage of the OSH Act. The federal Mine Safety and Health Act was enacted 49 years ago. Since that era, workplace safety and health conditions have improved. But too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death as chemical plant explosions, major fires, construction collapses, infectious disease outbreaks, workplace assaults, toxic chemical exposures and other preventable tragedies continue to permeate the workplace. Workplace hazards still kill approximately 140,000 workers each year in the United States—including 5,070 from traumatic injuries in 2024 and an estimated 135,000 from occupational diseases each year. That is more than 380 workers each day. Job injury and illness numbers continue to be severe undercounts of the real problem. But these are all preventable.

 Workplace safety is not solely a worker issue—it impacts all of us from the public, consumers and our families. When workers are protected, patients are safer; children are safer; food is safer as it is grown, harvested and processed; families are protected from illness and economic instability; and communities are safer near industrial facilities and construction sites and on planes, trains, buses and roads. America can innovate best when strong worker protections are prioritized and the public is protected. But there needs to be political will. 

Making progress is more challenging than ever. Corporate power has eroded worker protections for years, but under the Trump administration, corporations and billionaires are aggressively accelerating efforts to dismantle hard-won progress and the democratic institutions that uphold it. These structures have safeguarded workers from employers who prioritize excessive profit over effective safety measures, resist workers’ rights and protections and seek to shift the responsibility for providing safe jobs from employers onto individual workers. 

National progress over the decades has undoubtedly made workplaces safer and saved lives. But that progress is under attack—now more than ever. The nation’s workers now must fight fearlessly and vigorously to hold on to worker protections and public health systems, as they did a century ago to create agencies, laws and standards that keep us safe at work. We must prioritize protecting workers from job injury, disease and death, restoring dignity and justice to working people, improving livelihoods, and reducing burdens on families and communities over the whims and greed of billionaires. Employers must meet their responsibilities under the law to protect workers and be held accountable when they put workers in danger. 

There is much more work to be done to ensure this promise and the promises of our nation’s workplace health and safety laws are a reality for all of America’s workers. We must hold the line to defend the protections we have won and to rebuild a better future.

In 2024:

• More than 380 workers died each day from hazardous working conditions.
• 5,070 workers were killed on the job in the United States.
• An estimated 135,000 workers died from occupational diseases.
• The overall job fatality rate decreased to 3.3 per 100,000 workers.
• Workers of color die on the job at a higher rate: Black and Latino worker job fatality rates are disproportionate compared with all other workers.
• An estimated 530 workers died from heat on the job, but both fatal and nonfatal data are an undercount of the real problem.
• Workplace homicides continue to be a significant problem, increasing by 3% since 2023; workplace suicides decreased 6.4% from 2023.
• Separately, unintentional overdoses at work decreased 21% from 2023 to 2024, due to increased attention paid to and efforts to combat the opioid crisis. 
• Employers reported nearly 3.1 million work-related injuries and illnesses, a decrease from the previous year. 
• The rate of serious workplace violence injuries has decreased to 2.6 per 10,000 workers.
• Musculoskeletal disorders from repetitive motion injuries continue to be a major problem, accounting for approximately 32% of all serious work-related injuries and illnesses in private industry.
• Underreporting of all workplace injuries and illnesses is widespread—the true toll of work-related injuries and illnesses is estimated to be 5.0 million to 7.5 million each year in private industry.
• Chemical exposures continue to plague working people, leading to debilitating, life-threatening diseases that are preventable. 

The cost of job injuries and illnesses is enormous, estimated at $177 billion to $354 billion a year—an undercount of the real impact on society, families and communities.

States with the highest fatality rates in 2024 were:

• Wyoming (13.9 per 100,000 workers)
• Mississippi (8.0 per 100,000 workers)
• Alaska (7.1 per 100,000 workers)
• North Dakota (6.8 per 100,000 workers)
• Arkansas (6.2 per 100,000 workers)

Industries with the highest fatality rates in 2024 were: 

• Agriculture, forestry, and fishing and hunting (20.9 per 100,000 workers)
• Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction (13.8 per 100,000 workers)
• Transportation and warehousing (12.2 per 100,000 workers)
• Construction (9.2 per 100,000 workers)
• Wholesale trade (4.6 per 100,000 workers) 

The job fatality rate increased in the leisure and hospitality industry from 2.3 to 2.4 per 100,000 workers and in the government sector from 1.8 to 2.0 per 100,000 workers.

Black and Latino workers are more likely to die on the job. 

In 2024: 

• 624 Black workers died on the job, with a job fatality rate of 3.4 per 100,000 workers, above the national average. 
• Latino workers’ job fatality rate decreased to 4.3 per 100,000 workers—but Latino workers continue to face the greatest risk of dying on the job compared with all workers, at 30% higher than the national average.
• The number of Latino workers killed on the job was 1,229; 68.5% were immigrants, a larger percentage than in previous years.

Older workers and minors are at serious risk. 

In 2024: 

• More than one-third of workplace fatalities occurred among workers ages 55 and older.
• Workers 65 and older have nearly three times the risk of dying on the job as other workers, with a job fatality rate of 9.1 per 100,000 workers.
• The rate of young worker deaths increased from 1.3 in 2022 to 1.9 in 2023 and then to 2.7 in 2024—nearly doubling the rate from 2020.
• Many children, mostly migrants, have become the focus of stark exploitation, working in dangerous conditions.

Job safety oversight and enforcement: 

The Trump administration has: 

• Pushed out so many staff that job safety agency staffing is at new lows, leaving fewer inspectors than ever to cover a growing workforce.
• Instructed its OSHA and MSHA inspectors to focus on employer outreach and assistance, taking time and resources away from inspections with citations.
• Expanded OSHA penalty reductions for employers when they violate the law.
• Proposed twice to eliminate worker safety and health training grants, even though Congress has rejected these cuts so far.
• Proposed to eliminate the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, in charge of independent, nonregulatory investigations after an industrial explosion, leak or other major incident.
• Stopped conducting MSHA impact inspections, a critical enforcement tool for focusing on mines with a poor history of compliance with MSHA standards, high numbers of injuries, illnesses or fatalities, or other indicators of unsafe mines.
• Issued zero criminal referrals for violations of the OSH Act.
• Indefinitely halted the enforcement of the silica standard in coal and metal/nonmetal mining.
• Extended deadlines for companies to comply with important Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chemical regulations that specifically protect workers, such as methylene chloride.
• Proposed to remove dozens of OSHA and MSHA standards from the books and supported efforts to dismantle the regulatory process.

OSHA resources in FY 2025 still are too few to be a deterrent:

• Federal OSHA has the lowest number of inspectors in the history of the agency—only enough to now inspect workplaces once every 191 years—and state OSHA plans have one fewer inspector compared with FY 2024. By comparison, it would have taken federal OSHA 84 years to inspect each workplaces once in 1991, as written in our first report published in 1992.
• There are 1,651 inspectors (618 federal and 1,033 state) to inspect the 12 million workplaces under the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s jurisdiction, covering 155 million workers—a workforce that keeps growing while OSHA staff numbers do not. In 1991, there were 1,953 federal and state inspectors to cover 6.5 million workplaces and 107 million workers under OSHA’s jurisdiction.
• There is one inspector for every 93,877 workers. By comparison, there was one inspector for every 54,952 workers in 1991.
• The current OSHA budget amounts to $3.85 available to protect each worker. In 1991, the OSHA budget amounted to $6.53 per worker after inflation adjustments.

Penalties in FY 2025 still are too weak:

• The average penalty for a serious violation was $4,678 for federal OSHA.
• The average penalty for a serious violation was $2,720 for OSHA state plans.
• The median penalty for killing a worker was $16,550 for federal OSHA.
• The median penalty for killing a worker was $10,550 for state OSHA plans.
• Only 144 worker death cases have been criminally prosecuted under the Occupational Safety and Health Act since 1970.

Workers need more job safety and health protection, not less.

Action needed from Congress:

• Support and reinstate appointees at independent labor agencies who were wrongfully fired or displaced as part of a broad attack on labor unions and worker rights.
• Oppose any continued efforts to weaken or destabilize worker health and safety agencies, including NIOSH, OSHA, MSHA, EPA and the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), and support full accountability to ensure these agencies can carry out the responsibilities assigned to them by Congress.
• Defend a federal budget that maintains and increases funding and staffing for job safety agencies for both standard-setting and enforcement, modernizing the flat-funded budget that has prevented agencies from fulfilling their obligations.
• Put the critical need to protect workers’ health and safety above billionaire and corporate motives.
• Reject attempts by corporations to weaken broad regulatory frameworks under the guise of “reform” that actually would make it more difficult—or impossible—for agencies to issue needed safeguards.
• Pass legislation on heat and workplace violence to ensure OSHA develops and issues strong standards on these major problems.
• Oppose efforts to codify voluntary employer programs and divert enforcement resources to self-audit programs.
• Pass the Protecting America’s Workers Act to extend the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s coverage to workers currently excluded, strengthen civil and criminal penalties for violations, enhance anti-discrimination protections, and strengthen the rights of workers, unions and those who have been injured or made ill because of their jobs.
• Pass the Robert C. Byrd Mine Safety Protection Act to strengthen the federal Mine Safety and Health Act related to mine incident investigations, standards, miners’ rights and protections, and training for miners.

Action needed from job safety agencies:

• Reinforce employers’ responsibility to protect workers under U.S. law: Defend against staff reductions and funding and resource cuts—all of which are the lifelines for protecting workers.
• Fully enforce OSHA, MSHA and EPA job safety and health protections to hold employers accountable for violating workplace safety and health laws.
• Strengthen federal OSHA oversight of state OSHA plans.
• Strengthen protections for workers facing higher job fatality, injury and illness rates, rather than launching attacks on immigrant workers and workers of color that keep them living in fear of raising safety concerns—which puts all workers in danger.
• Strengthen anti-retaliation protections and worker participation rights.
• Issue an OSHA workplace violence standard for health care and social service workers.
• Issue an OSHA heat illness and injury prevention standard to protect indoor and outdoor workers from dangerously hot working conditions.
• Establish national guardrails for the development and use of artificial intelligence in workplaces to ensure these technologies do not introduce or increase risks that undermine workers’ health, safety or their rights.

Action needed to restore and improve injury and illness data:

• Restore and improve the collection and reporting of detailed data for workers killed on the job through agreements and policies that allow BLS to publish more comprehensive and descriptive worker fatality data.
• Refocus and realign data collection and analysis efforts with emerging worker safety and health issues to support the tracking and understanding of these key areas.
• Develop a national occupational disease surveillance system to determine and illuminate the true toll of occupational illnesses from workplace exposures, and inform prevention efforts to reduce chronic illnesses.