The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has analysed the data and found that falls continue to be the biggest cause of death at work with 31 fatalities in this period.

Overall, 126 workers died in work-related incidents in 2025/26 but this still ranks the UK as one of the safest places to work.

Excluding the pandemic years, this is the lowest number of recorded fatalities in a single year. For contrast, there were 495 work-related deaths in 1981 alone.

Workers aged 60 and over accounted for around a third of all fatalities during the year (40) despite that age group accounting for just 12% of the workforce.

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A further 104 people who were not at work were killed as a result of work-related incidents in 2025/26. This refers to members of the public who were not directly working themselves at the time of the incident.

The HSE has also published findings around mesothelioma, a cancer caused by past exposure to asbestos.

These show that 2,146 people died from the disease in the UK in 2024, representing a fall of 109 compared with 2023 and substantially lower than the average of 2,508 deaths per year over the ten-year period 2011-2020.

“Every one of these numbers represents a loved one lost; serving as a powerful reminder of the importance of the work we do,” said Sarah Albon, CEO at the HSE.

“We can be proud that Great Britain remains one of the safest places in the world to work, and the new analysis we have developed this year, for the first time, allows us to compare our safety record with a wide range of other advanced economies.”