Falls from height claimed the lives of 28 workers across Australia in 2025, making them the country’s second most common cause of fatal workplace injury for the third year running.
Figures published by Safe Work Australia on 12 October also show that construction recorded 41 worker deaths during the year, up from 35 in 2024 but below the 46 reported for 2023.
The regulator’s Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2026 report records 222 deaths from traumatic workplace injuries across all industries in 2025, the highest annual total since 2012. That compares with a five-year average of 197.
Vehicle incidents remained the leading cause of fatal injuries, accounting for 92 deaths, or 41% of the national total. Falls from height were next with 28 deaths, representing 13%, followed by workers struck by falling objects, which accounted for 21 deaths.
Falls remain a major work-at-height risk
The latest fall figure compares with 24 deaths in 2024 and 30 in 2023. Safe Work Australia says falls have occupied second place among fatal incident mechanisms in each of those three years.
Construction’s 41 fatalities represented 18% of the national total in 2025. The industry’s fatality rate was 3.0 deaths per 100,000 workers, according to the report.
The figures do not establish how many of the 28 fatal falls occurred in construction, or how many involved scaffolds, access towers, suspended platforms or mobile elevating work platforms. The national totals therefore cannot be treated as a count of scaffold-related deaths or used to assign responsibility in individual incidents.
Safe Work Australia cautions that annual fatality counts can fluctuate and should be interpreted carefully.
How the figures compare with Britain
For context, the UK’s Health and Safety Executive reported 31 fatal falls among workers in Great Britain in 2025/26, accounting for around a quarter of the 126 work-related fatal injuries recorded in that financial year. Construction accounted for 25 deaths across all incident types.
Those figures cover a different reporting period and use national reporting systems, so the raw totals are not a like-for-like measure of relative risk.
Safe Work Australia’s latest release also records approximately 147,200 serious workers’ compensation claims in 2024–25. That provisional claims figure covers a separate period from the 2025 calendar-year fatality data.
The full Australian report provides national data by industry and incident mechanism, but further case-level information would be needed to identify any scaffolding or access-equipment involvement.
