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

Updated 16 October 2026. A reader’s correction request said this page did not properly explain what causes falls on the same level, and pointed us to SafeWork NSW’s guide. We read that guide in full and added a section on what it covers that the 2012 fact sheet does not, or covers only as checklist questions: missteps, the mismatch between the surface people expect and the one in place, and, in much more depth, load handling and work pressure. Nothing previously published was wrong; it was incomplete.

Updated 15 October 2026. The claims figures now come from Safe Work Australia’s Key WHS Statistics Australia 2026, released on 12 October: 32,700 claims in 2024-25 replace 32,000 in 2023-24. The new edition does not split falls, trips and slips by type, so the same-level share, and the two in three in the headline, remain the 2023-24 figure from the 2025 edition.

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 the 2012 fact sheet says little about: missteps, loads and the floor people expect

Safe Work Australia’s main slips guidance is the eight-page fact sheet from 2012, whose checklist asks in one line each whether loads block vision or upset balance, whether heavy trolleys go up ramps and whether workers are hurried. SafeWork NSW has since published a 48-page Guide to preventing slips, trips and falls at work, adapted with permission from a Workplace Health and Safety Queensland guide. It does not present itself as an approved code of practice, so the change that made NSW codes the minimum standard does not attach to it. Read beside the fact sheet, it explains more of why people fall on flat ground. It adds a third mechanism to slips and trips: the misstep, where a person unexpectedly steps down to a lower surface, such as a bottom step they did not see. It counts a loss of balance with no fall as an injury event too, because the effort to recover can cause a significant back injury. And it says these incidents usually involve a combination of multiple and interacting contributing factors rather than a single cause, which is why it spends most of its pages on planning and work design rather than on the floor alone.

Its most useful idea is the mismatch. People walk to suit the surface they expect, rough ground on an outdoor track, a clean dry floor in a shopping centre, and the guide says a mismatch between what a person would normally expect of a walking surface and what is in place increases the risk. Its two examples are a single step in a stairway that differs from the rest, and a change in grip nobody can see: worn, slippery patches of the same kitchen floor, or adjacent surfaces that look alike but grip very differently, such as bathroom and hallway flooring. The fix it offers is to make the change detectable. Mark step nosings and trip hazards in strong contrast, judged on lightness rather than colour, ideally a Light Reflectance Value difference of at least 30 per cent between adjoining surfaces, and consider flooring that shows a spill, such as a porous floor that darkens when wet. For grip itself it names the standards a buyer should ask about: AS/NZS 4586 for new surfaces, AS/NZS 4663 for surfaces already in place, and Standards Australia’s handbook HB 198 for the slip resistance a given use needs.

Then it goes where a floor inspection cannot. On load handling, carrying, pushing or pulling while walking raises the risk when the load blocks the view of the path, when carrying with two hands limits normal trunk movements and reactions when balance is challenged, when no hand is free for a rail on stairs or a ramp, and when a trolley is pushed on a slope, which needs more grip underfoot. The risk grows with distance and with wet, muddy or uneven ground. The controls are trolleys, lifts, smaller loads, powered devices, better trolley wheels, less carrying outdoors in the wet, less pushing uphill, one hand kept free on stairs, and scheduling that stops people rushing. That overlaps the hazardous manual tasks duty, and the guide sends readers to that code. On work pressure, it names production demands and pay incentives, such as ‘finish and go’ policies or per piece payment, as a cause of short cuts off the maintained route, faster walking and bigger loads than planned. It also says plainly that footwear by itself is not enough to reduce these falls.

Our view: the fact sheet still sets the geometry, and the national code still cites it. The NSW guide is the better working manual for anyone investigating a fall on a floor that passed inspection, because it asks what the person was carrying, how fast they were made to work and what they expected underfoot. Those are questions a floor-only risk assessment can miss, and the fact sheet’s task checklist only begins to ask them.

What 32,700 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 2024-25 preliminary figures: 32,700 serious claims, 22.2 per cent of the national 147,200, with median time lost of 8.8 weeks and median compensation of $19,100. The 2026 report does not split the group. The 2025 edition did, for 2023-24: falls on the same level 68.3 per cent, about 21,900 of that year’s 32,000 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.