How many people die at work in Ireland?

According to the Health and Safety Authority's provisional figures published in January 2026, 58 people died in work-related incidents in Ireland during 2025. That figure is a 61% increase on the 36 deaths recorded in 2024, which had been the lowest fatality rate year on record. The work-related fatality rate rose from 1.3 to 2.1 deaths per 100,000 workers over the same period.

The 2025 total is the highest fatality rate Ireland has seen since 2020. HSA Chief Executive Mark Cullen described the increase as deeply concerning while noting that annual figures can fluctuate. The longer trend still points downward: the rate fell from 2.7 per 100,000 in 2015 to 1.3 in 2024 before the 2025 reversal. One year of data is a snapshot, not a trend, and the 2025 spike does not by itself undo a decade of gradual improvement.

The table shows the two figures that matter most read together: the raw count of deaths and the rate per 100,000 workers, which adjusts for the size of the workforce. Counts can rise while the long-term rate trend falls, which is why the rate column matters.

Source: Health and Safety Authority, press release 5 January 2026 and fatal-injury statistics. hsa.ie. The Irish Times reported that total workplace deaths have exceeded 500 since 2015 in its analysis of HSA data.

Which sectors are most dangerous?

Agriculture is consistently Ireland's most dangerous sector for work-related deaths. In 2025 the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector accounted for 23 fatalities, around 40% of the national total, from a sector that employs only about 4% of the workforce. That disproportion has held year after year despite sustained safety campaigns by the HSA and the Irish Farmers' Association.

Construction recorded the second-highest toll, with fatalities doubling from 5 in 2024 to 10 in 2025. Manufacturing rose from zero deaths in 2024 to 5 in 2025, and transportation and storage also recorded 5. The table below sets the latest provisional figures against the prior year so the year-on-year movement is visible.

Source: Health and Safety Authority provisional 2025 figures and the Fatal Workplace Injuries by Economic Sector 2025 dataset. Workforce shares are approximate and drawn from CSO Labour Force Survey employment data.

For the legal duties that apply in the two highest-risk sectors, see our pages on farm and agricultural accident claims and construction site accident claims. These explain how an employer's responsibilities differ by working environment.

Workplace deaths by county

The HSA also records where work-related deaths happen. In 2025, Cork, Donegal and Dublin recorded the highest provisional totals, with six work-related deaths each. County figures are small and shift from year to year, so they are best read as a multi-year pattern rather than a single-year ranking. Rural counties with large farming sectors tend to recur near the top, which is consistent with agriculture driving the national toll.

What are the leading causes of workplace deaths?

The leading causes of workplace death in Ireland in 2025 were being struck by a vehicle and being hit or crushed by falling objects, each linked to 14 deaths. Falls from height claimed 9 lives, followed by being trapped by an object, livestock-related incidents and loss of control of a vehicle, with 4 deaths each.

Two of these causes map directly to dedicated guidance on this site. Where a death or serious injury follows a fall from height, see falls from height at work. Where machinery or a vehicle is involved, see machinery accident at work. The same hazards that appear at the top of the fatality data are the hazards an employer's risk assessment is legally required to address.

How common are non-fatal workplace injuries in Ireland?

In 2024, 10,441 non-fatal workplace incidents were reported to the HSA, a 3% increase on 2023. Fatalities are the most severe outcome, but the volume of non-fatal injury reveals the everyday cost of workplace accidents, and the true figure is higher still because many injuries go unreported.

Non-fatal figures come from a different system to the fatality data, and the distinction matters when reading any workplace statistic. Fatalities are confirmed work-related deaths recorded by the HSA. Two systems capture non-fatal injuries. Employers report incidents directly to the HSA, and the Central Statistics Office runs a dedicated Accidents and Illnesses module within its Labour Force Survey. That module surveys around 16,000 households about injuries in the previous 12 months. The survey captures incidents that are never formally reported, which is why it gives a broader estimate than the HSA's reported-incident count.

There is a recognised pattern in the non-fatal data that inverts the fatality picture. Agriculture and construction dominate the deaths. The non-fatal picture inverts that. The human health and social work sector recorded the highest volume of non-fatal worker incidents in 2024, around 24% of the total, followed by manufacturing at about 15%. Heavy outdoor industry kills through sudden force, while indoor procedural environments such as healthcare and manufacturing generate large numbers of injuries that disable workers without killing them. The most common triggers for non-fatal injury remain manual handling and slips, trips and falls on the same level. For the most frequent non-fatal mechanism, see manual handling injury claims.

The time cost is substantial. HSA and CSO data for 2024 record around 688,000 working days lost to work-related injury. A further 1,330,000 days went to work-related illness, more than two million lost working days in a single year. Under-reporting of non-fatal injury is a recognised problem across the European Union, particularly for short absences and the self-employed, so the true figure is higher than any reported count.

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Who is most at risk?

Self-employed workers and older workers carry a share of workplace deaths far above their share of the workforce. The data points to who is most exposed, and why.

Self-employed people accounted for 23 of the 58 work-related deaths in 2025, around 40% of the total. Many self-employed workers operate alone in high-risk sectors such as agriculture and construction, without the supervision, shared equipment and safety structures found in larger organisations. When something goes wrong, there may be no one present to help or to raise the alarm. We have advised on fatal and serious-injury cases where a lone worker's accident went undiscovered for a critical period. That is one reason the self-employed figure stands out as starkly as it does.

Older workers are the other clear pattern. Of the 58 people who died in 2025, 19, or 33%, were aged 65 or over, and the oldest was 88. Workers aged 55 and over have represented around two-thirds of fatalities in recent years. Ireland's labour force is ageing, and more people now work beyond traditional retirement age. The HSA has urged employers to pay particular attention to the risks older workers face, as they can be less mobile and more prone to serious injury.

Source: HSA provisional 2025 figures. Age bands here are grouped from the HSA distribution.

The groups most exposed to fatal risk are, in short, the self-employed, older workers, lone workers, and anyone working in agriculture, where the disproportion is most extreme. These are factual risk patterns drawn from the official data, not predictions about any individual workplace.

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How does Ireland compare with the UK and Europe?

Ireland's workplace fatality rate sits broadly in line with other western European countries, but its farming record stands out. The 2025 rate of 2.1 deaths per 100,000 workers is higher than the rate in Great Britain, where the Health and Safety Executive reported a rate of 0.37 per 100,000 workers in 2024/25, though the two regulators count and classify deaths differently, so direct comparison should be treated with care.

The clearest international parallel is agriculture. In Ireland, farming makes up about 4% of the workforce but around 40% of work-related deaths. In Great Britain, agriculture accounts for roughly 1% of workers but recorded 23 of the 124 work-related deaths in 2024/25, about 18% of the total. The HSE puts the sector's fatal-injury rate at 22 times the all-industry average. In Northern Ireland the pattern is closer to the Republic, with agriculture making up about 3.5% of workers and around a third of deaths. Across these neighbouring jurisdictions, farming is consistently the most dangerous sector, and Irish farm fatality rates have long run above the European average.

One point matters for anyone reading UK figures: the United Kingdom is a separate jurisdiction with its own regulator and its own law. The Health and Safety Executive, the RIDDOR reporting system, and UK time limits do not apply in Ireland. Ireland's regulator is the Health and Safety Authority, reporting uses the IR1 form, and the personal injury time limit is two years less one day rather than the three years that applies in the United Kingdom.

Workplace injury compensation: what the IRB data shows

The Injuries Resolution Board, the body formerly known as PIAB, recorded a median employer liability award of 20,250 euro and an average of 28,330 euro in the first half of 2025. Workplace claims, classed as employer liability, consistently produce the highest average awards of any claim type in the State, which reflects how serious workplace injuries tend to be. Awards follow the Personal Injuries Guidelines.

In the first half of 2025, employer liability claims accounted for about 12% of completed IRB assessments. The median award for an employer liability claim was 20,250 euro and the average was 28,330 euro. Across all claim types, the overall median was 13,300 euro and the average 19,343 euro. Awards follow the Judicial Council's Personal Injuries Guidelines, which replaced the Book of Quantum in April 2021.

Source: Injuries Resolution Board H1 2025 Award Values report. injuries.ie. Special damages cover quantifiable financial losses such as lost earnings and medical costs.

The special-damages figures tell their own story. The median special damages for an employer liability claim, 1,600 euro, runs to nearly double the all-claims median of 837 euro. That gap reflects the longer absences from work and the higher medical and rehabilitation costs that workplace injuries tend to involve. We regularly see workplace claims carry larger loss-of-earnings and care elements than a typical road-traffic claim of similar injury severity, which is consistent with this pattern in the IRB data. Earlier IRB analysis of employer liability claims between 2019 and 2022 found three clear patterns. Men made up about two-thirds of claimants. Most workplace accidents happen between Monday and Friday, with Monday the most common day, and claims among workers aged 19 to 24 more than doubled over that period. There is also a notable gap between how many injuries are reported and how many become claims. The HSA received 10,441 non-fatal injury reports in 2024, while IRB analysis shows employer liability claims running at roughly 3,600 to 5,800 a year in recent years. Many reported injuries cause lost time without ever proceeding to a formal claim, which is part of why the duty to report an accident matters in its own right. This is context on how workplace injuries are valued and resolved, not a forecast of what any particular claim is worth.

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What the data means if you have been injured at work

Behind every figure on this page is an injured worker or a bereaved family. The statistics connect directly to a person's ability to understand and pursue compensation for an injury at work in Ireland. The data shows what went wrong, and the law sets out what can be done about it. A workplace injury claim is one form of personal injury claim in Ireland, and the route it follows is well defined.

Employers owe their staff a duty of care under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005. The Act requires a safe system of work, safe equipment, and adequate training and supervision. The leading causes in the fatality data, vehicles, falling objects and falls from height, are precisely the risks an employer's risk assessment must address. Where an employer's failure to manage a known hazard causes injury, that failure is the basis of a claim. In our experience acting for injured workers in Dublin, the cases that turn on these duties involve exactly the hazards the data flags. The recurring ones are unguarded machinery, unsafe work at height, and vehicles moving in shared workspaces.

Three points matter for anyone considering a claim. First, the time limit. A personal injury claim must generally begin within two years less one day of the date of the accident, or the date you first became aware of the injury. This is the Irish limitation period and it is shorter than the position in the United Kingdom. Second, the process. Most workplace injury claims go through the Injuries Resolution Board (IRB), unlike most medical negligence claims, which proceed directly to litigation. Third, the evidence. A reported accident, medical records and witness details all strengthen a claim, which is one practical reason the reporting duty matters.

To go further, a few pages set out the law in detail. See the main accident at work claims hub, the detail on an employer's duty of care in Ireland, how the Injuries Resolution Board assesses claims, and our guide to workplace injury compensation in Ireland. Where an accident at work has been fatal, see fatal workplace accident claims and fatal injury claims.

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Sources and methodology

Every figure on this page is drawn from official Irish sources and dated to its reporting year. Where a figure is provisional, it is marked as such. We review this page once a year. The HSA publishes provisional annual fatality figures in early January, then a fuller Annual Review of Workplace Injury, Illness and Fatality Statistics later in the year, and we update the figures here to match.

1. Health and Safety Authority, provisional work-related fatality figures for 2025, press release 5 January 2026. hsa.ie/eng/topics/statistics/fatal_injury
2. Health and Safety Authority, statistics hub, the Annual Review of Workplace Injury, Illness and Fatality Statistics, and CSO Labour Force Survey data on non-fatal injury. hsa.ie/eng/topics/statistics and the CSO Labour Force Survey data page
3. Central Statistics Office, Labour Force Survey and the Accidents and Illnesses module. cso.ie
4. HIQA, Work-Related Fatal and Non-Fatal Incident Database, for reporting definitions and methodology. hiqa.ie
5. Injuries Resolution Board, H1 2025 Award Values report and Analysis of Employer Liability Claims and Awards. injuries.ie
6. Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 and the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (Reporting of Accidents and Dangerous Occurrences) Regulations 2016 (S.I. No. 370 of 2016). See our summary of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005.

Methodology note: fatality counts are confirmed work-related deaths recorded by the HSA and are provisional until finalised. Non-fatal injury figures combine mandatory employer reports to the HSA with the CSO Labour Force Survey estimate, and under-reporting means reported counts understate the true total. Compensation figures are IRB assessment data and describe awards already made, not predictions. Where a row in a table is marked for editor verification, it is held back until confirmed against the primary source.

Key terms used on this page

Provisional figures

Recent-year fatality counts the HSA publishes before they are final. The HSA revises them as each death is confirmed work-related, which is why a year's total can change after first release.

Fatality rate per 100,000 workers

The number of work-related deaths for every 100,000 workers. Because it adjusts for the size of the workforce, it allows fair comparison between years.

Reportable injury

An injury that leaves someone unable to do their normal work for more than three consecutive days, not counting the day of the accident. The employer must report it to the HSA on the IR1 form within ten working days.

NACE sector

The European standard for classifying economic activity. The HSA reports fatalities by NACE sector, such as agriculture, construction or manufacturing, so figures line up with official employment data.

ESAW

European Statistics on Accidents at Work, the shared methodology that sets how Irish workplace accident data is collected and recorded, so it can be compared across the European Union.

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Last updated: 30 June 2026. Figures are reviewed annually when the Health and Safety Authority publishes new data. Recent-year fatality figures are provisional and subject to change.