Workers aged 65 and over have had the highest work-death rate of any age group in every year for a decade. Their serious claims are the most frequent per hour worked

What the 2026 report says

Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2026, released on 12 October, puts it in one line: Workers aged 65 and over had the highest fatality rate, at 5.5 fatalities per 100,000 workers, more than 3 times the overall worker fatality rate. Workers aged 55 to 64 were next, at 2.7, with 56 deaths, the most of any age group. Together, workers aged 45 and over were 62 per cent of the 222 work-related deaths in 2025. Of the 42 deaths aged 65 and over, 40 were men.

A decade, not a year

Safe Work Australia’s detailed data file, updated on 7 October, five days before the report, gives the same table for every year back to 2016. We set the 65-and-over line against the whole workforce.

Rates are deaths per 100,000 workers. Safe Work Australia, Traumatic Injury Fatalities detailed data file (October 2026), Tables 6.1 and 6.2, calendar years. The last column is our division of the unrounded rates.

Three things stand out. In every one of the ten years, the 65-and-over rate is the highest of the six age groups. It has never been lower than 2.7 times the all-worker rate. And it has no trend: 5.7 in 2016, 5.5 in 2025, moving between 3.3 and 6.5 in the years between. Over the decade, 315 of the 1,904 deaths in the table were of workers aged 65 and over, 16.5 per cent. Their share was 13.7 per cent in 2016 and 18.9 per cent in 2025.

If the rate has stayed about the same and the number of deaths has risen from 26 to 42 between 2016 and 2025, the arithmetic says the number of workers aged 65 and over has grown. That is our inference from how a rate is built, not a figure the report gives; the report points the same way, noting its claims findings are particularly important in the context of Australia’s ageing workforce.

The injuries that do not kill

The report’s workers’ compensation half covers serious claims, those with at least one working week lost, in 2024-25. The year is preliminary, marked p, and the report says its figures are subject to revision as further claims are finalised. By age:

Safe Work Australia, Key WHS Statistics Australia 2026, page 11. All ages: 147,200 claims, 10.7 per 1,000 jobs, 6.7 per million hours worked, median 8.2 weeks off and $19,000 compensation. The report’s notes say median time lost and compensation are not reported for a preliminary year; those two columns, and the all-ages 8.2 weeks and $19,000, are for 2023-24.

Counted per hour worked, which allows for differences in hours between age groups, workers aged 65 and over had the highest serious claim rate, 9.5 per million hours, and the longest median time off, 12.0 weeks, nearly three times the under-25s’ 4.2. Workers aged 55 to 64 had the highest rate per job, 15.1 per 1,000, and the highest median compensation. Over the ten years to 2024-25, the report says, the share of serious claims from workers aged 65 and over rose by 2.4 percentage points, and from those aged 55 to 64 by 0.9.

The age pattern also differs by sex. The report says that from age 45, women recorded higher serious claim frequency rates than men; its chart puts women aged 65 and over at 9.9 claims per million hours and men at 9.2. Deaths run the other way: 40 of the 42 workers aged 65 and over who died in 2025 were men.

What the national strategy says

The Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy 2023-2033, published by Safe Work Australia, names the trend in its section on workforce change: The number of older workers in the labour force is set to increase further as the distribution of our population moves towards older ages. It adds that Data show that when older people are injured, they are likely to require more time off work to recover, and that businesses must take a proactive approach to address any barriers to health and safety posed by these demographic workforce trends. Its targets, among them a cut of at least 30 per cent in traumatic injury deaths and of at least 20 per cent in the serious claim frequency rate by 2033, are set for the workforce as a whole. None is set for an age group.

The legal duty does not change with age. Under the model WHS laws a person conducting a business or undertaking owes every worker the same duty to ensure their health and safety so far as is reasonably practicable (what that phrase means), and the risks have to be managed for the people actually doing the work. We are not giving legal advice; the law that binds a business is its own jurisdiction’s.

Our read, labelled as opinion

A rate that has been at least 2.7 times the all-worker rate every year for a decade, and usually more than three times, is not noise, and a workforce with more people over 65 in it will keep turning that rate into more deaths unless the rate itself moves. The national strategy sees the trend and says what businesses should do, but sets its targets only as national totals; its promised wider monitoring names no age measure, so a stubborn rate in a growing group can hide behind improvement elsewhere. Safe Work Australia already publishes the age table every year; reporting the strategy’s progress for workers aged 55 and over alongside the national figure would cost little and would show whether the problem it names is shrinking. For an employer, the practical reading is simpler: older workers are not a niche case, and the figures put their risk in two places, the fatal incident and the long recovery after a serious injury. This view is ours, built on the figures above.