Roofing Fall Injury Claims

Hurt in a Fall From a Roof? You Were Doing the Third-Deadliest Job in America

Roofing kills more of its workers, per hour worked, than almost any other occupation in the country.

Only loggers and commercial fishermen face worse odds.

The overwhelming cause is the obvious one: the fall.

Federal law has required fall protection at six feet for decades, and most roofing falls happen where that protection was missing, defeated, or never anchored.

If you fell from a roof on the job, or lost someone who did, the absence of that equipment is where your case begins.

A roofing fall is rarely bad luck. It is usually a skipped requirement.

Call (888) 713-6653 and tell us who was supposed to provide the fall protection. You pay nothing unless we win.

Roofers Die at Nearly Fifteen Times the National Rate, and Falls Do It

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 104 roofer deaths in 2024, a fatality rate of 48.7 per 100,000 full-time workers against an all-occupation rate of 3.3.^[1] The year before, falls, slips, and trips caused 95 of 113 roofer deaths, about 84 percent. No other major construction trade concentrates its danger in a single hazard the way roofing does.

The injuries that follow a survivable roof fall are the expensive kind: spinal fractures, traumatic brain injuries, shattered heels and ankles that end careers, and internal injuries that take months to declare their full cost.

A fall from a single-story eave can produce all of them. The height of the roof sets the odds, not the stakes.

Those numbers are why the law treats roof work differently, and why the first question in every roofing fall case is the same: where was the protection?

The Fall Protection OSHA Required at Six Feet, and Who Skipped It

Federal regulation 29 CFR 1926.501 draws the line at six feet above a lower level. On low-slope roofs, workers must be protected by guardrails, safety nets, personal fall arrest systems, or defined combinations of warning lines and monitoring. On steep roofs, the options narrow to guardrails with toeboards, nets, or personal fall arrest. Skylights and roof holes must be guarded or covered, because a skylight is legally a hole in the roof, and workers fall through unguarded ones every year.^[2]

In practice, the violations that produce our cases are repetitive. Harnesses on site but never anchored. Anchor points that were never installed because the crew was "only going up for an hour." Warning lines used on a steep roof where they are not permitted. A skylight covered by weathered plastic instead of a rated cover. Each one maps to a specific requirement, which is what makes a roofing fall case unusually provable: the rule says exactly what should have been there.

 

What the Investigation Looks For After a Roof Fall

The physical evidence answers most roofing cases within weeks, if it is preserved. The anchor points, or the bare deck where they should have been. The harness and lanyard, which show whether they were worn, connected, and rated. The delivery records showing whether fall protection equipment ever reached the site. The photographs OSHA takes if it opens an inspection. The sequence matters because roofs get finished: the surface that proves the case is often shingled over within days of the fall, which is why preservation demands go out immediately.

 

An OSHA citation for a fall protection violation does not decide a lawsuit on its own, but it fixes the duty and the breach in a federal record while the site still exists. How that record gets used at trial is covered on our page about OSHA violations as evidence.

Residential Roofing: Where the Subcontractor Chain Hides the Defendant

Commercial roofing has safety programs, superintendents, and paper trails. Residential roofing has a different economy: a homeowner hires a roofing company, the roofing company passes the job to a crew leader, and the crew leader pays workers in cash. When someone falls, the company that sold the job announces that the injured man was never its employee.

That structure is not an accident, and it does not end the case. A roofing contractor that controlled the job, supplied the materials, set the schedule, and profited from the work cannot always disclaim the crew doing it, and the label on your pay does not decide the question; the control does. We cover the misclassification fight in depth on our page about 1099 misclassification on construction sites.

The other residential pattern is the multi-trade site: a framing crew's debris underfoot, a ladder supplied by the GC that should have been retired years earlier, a skylight opening another sub left uncovered. Falls covered on our ladder accident and floor and roof opening pages often begin as roofing jobs, and the liable party is frequently a company the roofer never met.

 

What a Roofing Fall Case Recovers When Workers' Comp Falls Short

If you were an employee, workers' compensation covers medical care and partial wage replacement regardless of fault. It does not pay for pain, disability beyond its schedules, or your family's losses, and roofing falls are exactly the injuries where that gap is widest. A third-party claim against a general contractor, a property owner, another subcontractor, or an equipment manufacturer can recover the rest: full lost earnings, future medical care, pain and suffering, and wrongful death damages where a fall was fatal.

Which parties can be reached depends heavily on your state. New York's Scaffold Law puts fall liability on owners and GCs directly; a few states raise the duty by statute; Texas and California shield property owners. The full map is on our page covering scaffold-law equivalents in every state, and the general framework is on the third-party liability page. What does not vary: the sooner the site, the gear, and the records are preserved, the more of the case survives.