Construction Fatality Statistics in the United States

One in Five American Worker Deaths Happens in Construction

Construction killed 1,034 workers in 2024: the highest death count of any private industry, and about one of every five workplace deaths in the country.

A construction worker dies in a fall from height, on average, more than once a day.

The industry employs about one in twenty American workers and produces one in five of the deaths.

Every figure on this page names its federal or industry source and its data year.

Statistics last verified against their sources on August 22, 2026. Construction death counts circulate in three conflicting versions; this page uses the standard federal private-industry count and says so.

If a jobsite death or serious injury has reached your family, call (888) 713-6653 for a free case review, any hour.

 

How Construction Workers Die: the 2024 Federal Breakdown

The Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries sorts 2024's 1,034 private-construction deaths into five event categories:^[1]

The exposure category covers electrocutions, toxic atmospheres, and environmental deaths including heat; contact covers the struck-by and caught-between events that OSHA's "Focus Four" training targets. Each category maps to a page of this cluster: electrocutions, struck-by and caught-in accidents, and heat illness on site among them.

A counting note this page holds to: 1,034 is the federal private-industry construction count. The 1,064 figure sometimes quoted adds government construction workers, and 1,032 counts the construction-and-extraction occupation group. They are three different measures.

A Fatal Fall From Height Every Day, and the Rule Cited Most

Of the 389 fall, slip, and trip deaths, 95.9 percent, 373 workers, were falls to a lower level: off roofs, scaffolds, ladders, and unguarded edges. That is more than one death per day, and construction alone accounts for nearly half of all fatal workplace falls in American private industry.^[2]

The regulatory echo is exact. Fall protection, 29 CFR 1926.501, was OSHA's most frequently cited standard again in fiscal year 2025, with ladders third, scaffolding sixth, and fall protection training seventh.^[3] The deadliest event on American jobsites is also the most cited violation, year after year, which says everything about how preventable the deaths are.

The trades confirm it: roofers die at 48.7 per 100,000 full-time workers, structural iron and steel workers at 37.8, and construction-trade helpers at 35.8, against 3.3 for the American workforce as a whole.^[4] The mechanics of these cases live in our roofing fall and scaffolding accident guides.

Small Contractors and Hispanic Crews Carry the Heaviest Toll

Two distribution facts describe who actually dies on American jobsites.

Company size first: in the most recent federal analysis period, 70.3 percent of fatal construction falls, and 57 percent of all construction deaths, happened at establishments with ten or fewer employees, even though such firms employ under a quarter of the industry's workers.^[5] The small residential contractor with no safety program is statistically the deadliest employer in construction.

Workforce second: Hispanic workers accounted for 37.5 percent of construction fatalities in the latest ethnicity analysis, up from 25.3 percent a decade earlier, and more than three-quarters of those killed were immigrants.^[6] Language-splintered safety training, temp-labor arrangements, and fear of complaining all feed the number, and none of them reduces anyone's legal rights: an injured worker's immigration status does not cancel an injury claim, as our page on undocumented worker injuries explains.

Road Work Zones: 122 Worker Deaths, Half Struck on Foot

Workers building and repairing roads occupy their own corner of the data, and 2024 was a bad year for it: 122 workers died at road construction sites, up from 82 the year before, and in nearly half the deaths the worker was on foot and struck by a vehicle.^[7]

Those cases straddle two bodies of law: workers' compensation for the employment side, and third-party claims against the drivers, and sometimes the traffic-control contractors, who turned a coned-off lane into a fatality scene. The struck-by mechanics, on-site and off, are covered in our guide to backover and heavy equipment accidents.

The Trend: Better Than 2023, Worse Than a Decade Ago

The near-term direction is down: 1,075 deaths in 2023 became 1,034 in 2024, and the industry's fatality rate eased to 9.2 per 100,000.

The longer arc is not. Counting all ownerships, construction deaths rose 25.3 percent between 2012 and 2024, with building construction up more than 50 percent over that stretch.^[8] A building boom explains the exposure; it does not excuse the deaths, because the hazards driving them are the same regulated, guarded-against hazards they were in 2012.

The nonfatal side rounds out the picture: 167,100 recordable construction injuries in 2024, including 67,500 serious enough to cost days away from work.^[9]