Two in three workplace falls happen on flat ground. The law's answer is the floor, the light and the housekeeping.

Same level, different law: where this hazard starts and stops

Safe Work Australia's slips and trips fact sheet draws the boundary in its opening lines: it covers falls that result from a slip or trip, and "it does not apply to falls from a height for example, falls from one level to another", which belong to the falls code and regulations 78 to 80, covered on the working at heights page. This page is about the other two-thirds: the fall from no height at all. The fact sheet's definitions are mechanical. A slip is a foot losing traction with the ground, wrong footwear or a polished, wet or greasy floor. A trip is a foot unexpectedly catching on an object or surface, and "in most cases people trip on low obstacles that are not easily noticed": uneven flooring edges, loose mats, opened drawers, untidy tools, electrical cables. The resulting injuries run from musculoskeletal damage, cuts and bruises to fractures and dislocations, and the fact sheet is careful to add that more serious injuries and deaths also happen, many of them from low heights, steps, stairs, kerbs, holes and ditches.

No slips code exists. Regulation 40 does.

There is no model code of practice for slips and trips, and a duty holder should not conclude the topic is soft guidance all the way down. Regulation 40, the duty in relation to general workplace facilities, requires a PCBU to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that "the layout of the workplace allows, and the workplace is maintained so as to allow, for persons to enter and exit and to move about without risk to health and safety, both under normal working conditions and in an emergency", that "floors and other surfaces are designed, installed and maintained to allow work to be carried out without risk to health and safety", and that lighting enables workers to work, people to move about, and everyone to evacuate safely. Those three limbs are the slips duty in regulation form, sitting under the section 19 primary duty and the ordinary risk management provisions. The instrument that operationalises them is the model Code of Practice: Managing the work environment and facilities, December 2025 edition, whose chapter 2 covers floors, lighting and housekeeping in turn. The code is the current, in-force layer; the dedicated slips and trips fact sheet beneath it dates from February 2012 and remains Safe Work Australia's most specific guidance on the mechanism, an age gap noted in the methodology below.

The floor is a maintained thing, not a surface you got with the lease

The code's floors section reads as a maintenance schedule. "Floors must be inspected regularly and maintained to eliminate or minimise slip and trip hazards", and its list of common hazards matches the fact sheet's: trailing cables, uneven edges or broken surfaces, gratings or covers, loose mats or carpet tiles. Floor surfaces "should have enough grip to prevent slipping" especially where they get wet or contaminated, and the code flags a trap inside the fix: cleaning methods themselves can raise the slip risk, "which may be increased by the use of some cleaning agents". Choice of covering follows the work, carpet preferred in offices partly because it reduces the risk of slips, low-friction surfaces where trolleys must roll, fire-safe surfaces where hot metal scrap lands, and anything people walk on, mezzanines included, strong enough for its loads. The lighting section carries the rest of the regulation 40 duty: light levels that let people move around safely, glare managed, outdoor paths and car parks lit after dark specifically so workers can "move about easily without risk of falling", and emergency lighting for evacuation.

Design beats behaviour: ramps, stairs and the power outlet

The fact sheet's strongest material is about buildings rather than habits, because the cheapest slip to prevent is the one designed out. Its elimination examples operate at the drawing board: remove changes in floor level entirely, and install more power outlets so extension cords never cross a walkway. Where levels must change, it prefers ramps to steps with a maximum slope of 1 in 12, and warns against sudden transitions in surface texture without good lighting and visual cues. Stairs get real geometry: risers uniform through the flight and in the 150 to 175 millimetre range, treads between 225 and 320 millimetres, a warning that trips easily occur on risers under 75 millimetres, stair flights pitched between 15 and 55 degrees, and a landing every 16 steps. Edges of steps and any change in floor height should be clearly marked. None of this is regulation in itself, but it is the published benchmark a duty holder would have to argue against after an injury on a non-uniform staircase.

The hierarchy, applied to a wet floor

The fact sheet arranges its controls in the same legal order as every other hazard on this masthead, and the order is the point. Eliminate at the design stage. Substitute the flooring for a more slip-resistant surface. Isolate, by cordoning off the wet area while cleaning is in progress. Engineer, with floor treatments that increase slip resistance, better lighting, fixed leaks, adequate drainage and marked step edges. Only then administrative controls, and the code's housekeeping section is where they live: "spills on floors should be cleaned up immediately", access ways kept clear, signage warning of wet or slippery areas, training and supervision behind all of it. Last comes personal protective equipment, slip-resistant footwear, the same bottom rung examined on the PPE page. The practical reading: a yellow wet-floor sign is an administrative control, second-weakest on the list, and a workplace that relies on signs and footwear for a floor that is wet every day has controls available further up the hierarchy that it has not used, which is precisely what the duty's reasonably-practicable test measures a business against.

What 32,000 claims a year look like

Falls, trips and slips of a person is the second-largest mechanism group in the national claims data, behind only the body stressing claims covered on the manual handling page. The 2023-24 preliminary figures: 32,000 serious claims, 21.8 per cent of the national 146,700, with median time lost of 8.6 weeks and median compensation of $17,800. Inside the group, falls on the same level account for 68.3 per cent, about 21,900 claims, falls from a height 24.4 per cent, and stepping, kneeling or sitting on objects 7.3 per cent. The same-level share is what makes this hazard distinctive: it is not concentrated in construction or heavy industry the way falls from height are, because every workplace with a floor, an entrance mat and a kitchen has the exposure. That ordinariness is the argument for treating the floor as infrastructure with an inspection schedule, which is exactly what the work environment code asks for.