In this article:
- The Death Rate for Older Workers Has Not Shot Up
- It's Mostly About Self-Employment
- It's Also About Farming
- The Same Accident, a Worse Ending
- Why Everyone Else Got Safer
- What Changed Over These Years
- What This Means for the Rest of Us
There's a number in the official work-death figures that gets quoted every year, and it always lands the same way. Workers aged 60 and over are about a third of everyone killed at work, even though they're only about one in eight of the workforce. It's a shocking figure, and the usual take is that something is going wrong for older workers, that the danger to them is rising and we can't keep up.
I wanted to know if that take actually holds up. So I went into the official HSE figures, the work-death tables split by age, and tracked the death rate for each age group over more than ten years. I used the rate, not the raw share, on purpose. The rate is the number of deaths for every 100,000 workers of that age. It matters more than the share, because it takes account of how many people in each group are actually working. A share can go up just because a group gets bigger. A rate tells you whether the work itself is getting more or less deadly.
What I found changed how I think about this. I think it should change how the industry talks about it too.
The Death Rate for Older Workers Has Not Shot Up
Here's the finding, straight from the numbers. For workers aged 65 and over, the death rate has bounced between roughly 1.1 and 2.4 deaths per 100,000 every year since 2014/15, with no rising trend at all. It was 2.23 in 2014/15. It was 2.42 in 2017/18. It dropped through the Covid years, climbed back to 2.19 in 2023/24, and sits at 1.62 in the latest 2025/26 figures. It's high, it jumps around, and over the ten years it's flat.
So the story isn't that older workers are more likely to die at work than they used to be. Their risk has been stubbornly high for as long as we've had the figures by age, and it isn't climbing.
What has changed is the other line on the chart. The death rate across all ages drifted down from about 0.46 to 0.37 over the same years. The gap between older workers and everyone else didn't grow because older work got more dangerous. It grew because everyone else kept pulling away.
That change of view matters. If you think older-worker risk is shooting up, you go looking for a recent cause. Once you see the rate is just steady while everyone else improves, you ask a better question. What is it about older workers that the safety gains of the last few decades never reached?
It's Mostly About Self-Employment
The biggest reason is sitting right there in the same figures. Self-employed workers die at around three times the rate of employed ones. Across all ages, the five-year average is about 0.93 deaths per 100,000 for the self-employed against 0.30 for employees. The official figures show the self-employed are more than a third of work deaths while being only about 15% of the workforce.
Older workers are much more likely to be self-employed, and being self-employed takes away everything that normally drives safety up. There's no employer running a safety system. No employer handing out training, kit or supervision. No one else legally on the hook for how the job gets done. An employed 68-year-old on a well-run site has all of that around them. A self-employed 68-year-old working on their own has none of it.
You can see it even within the older group. In the latest figures the self-employed 65-and-over rate is about 2.65 per 100,000, against 1.11 for employed workers the same age. Being self-employed roughly doubles the risk again, on top of the age. So a lot of "older workers stay high" is really "older workers are more likely to be self-employed, and self-employed is the most dangerous way to work."
It's Also About Farming
Then there's where these workers are. Farming is about one in a hundred workers but around one in five work deaths, and it has the highest death rate of any industry. It also has the oldest workforce in the country. More than 40% of farmers are over 65, and the average age of a farmer is 59.
Put that together and farming is close to a perfect storm. It's mostly self-employed people, often working alone, using the very things that kill, vehicles, machinery and heights, in an industry where the death rate has flat-out refused to fall. The HSE's own view is that taking chances is a big part of the problem in farming, and that those working alone are especially at risk. The industry with the most older self-employed men is the exact one where safety has moved the least.
The Same Accident, a Worse Ending
There's also a hard fact about the body that no system can fix. Falls from height are the biggest cause of death at work, and a fall that injures a 40-year-old can kill a 70-year-old. Poorer balance, slower reactions, thinner bones and a slower recovery all make the same accident more likely to be fatal. One study put it bluntly: what a 30-year-old walks away from can end a 70-year-old's life, with almost all fatal hip fractures at work happening to workers aged 55 and over.
So even with the same risk on the job, older workers are more likely to die from it. It's not just about how often things go wrong. It's about how badly they end. For an ageing workforce, the thing to watch is how serious an accident is likely to be, not just how often one happens.
Why Everyone Else Got Safer
The reason the rest of the workforce kept getting safer is mostly about which jobs Britain does now. Total work deaths have roughly halved since 2001, from 251 to around 124. That drop came from moving out of mining, heavy industry and factories into safer service work, along with more machines doing dangerous jobs and steady rules for employed workforces. Those gains went to the employed, mostly younger side of the economy.
They barely touched the self-employed farmer or the one-man band. The wind that made work safer for most people just doesn't blow through the corner where older workers are.
What Changed Over These Years
If you're looking for things that happened, in the world and in the law, that made this harder rather than easier, three stand out, and they all pulled the wrong way.
The first is about who's working. The rule letting employers force people out at 65 was scrapped in 2011, and the State Pension age has been rising since 2010. The number of over-65s in work has roughly doubled since 2000, and there were about three million more workers over 50 in 2015 than in 2000. More people are working later, at exactly the ages where the rate is highest. That makes the at-risk group bigger, even if the risk per person stays the same.
The second is a real change in the law. The Deregulation Act 2015 changed the main health and safety law so that self-employed people whose work doesn't put others at risk are no longer covered by it. That took an estimated 1.7 million self-employed people out of the law from October 2015. I'd be careful not to make too much of this, because high-risk work like construction and farming was deliberately kept in, so farmers and builders still have duties. But it's a fair sign of the mood of the decade, that self-employed safety was seen as red tape to cut back.
The third, and the biggest, is about who's checking. Since 2010 the HSE's core funding was cut by around 45% in cash terms, from £228 million to £126 million by 2019, and its inspector numbers fell from 1,651 in 2010 to under 1,000 by 2023. The number of workplaces looked at by an inspector fell by around 70% over ten years, and prosecutions fell by more than 90% over twenty years. By the mid-2020s the average workplace the HSE covers might get a visit less than once every 50 years.
That matters most for the very group we're talking about. Inspections and the threat of being taken to court are the outside pressure that reaches small, informal and self-employed operators who won't sort it out on their own. Well-run big sites manage risk anyway. But when the checking falls away, the hardest-to-reach corners drift, and those corners are small farms, small building jobs, and older one-man bands. It's a fair read that the overall improvement stalled around 2010 to 2015 partly because the body that might have kept reaching those places lost nearly half its strength.
One honest note. The link between the funding cuts and actual deaths is argued strongly by the TUC, Prospect and others, but the figures on their own can't prove it. Treat it as the widely-held expert view, not settled fact.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
The point of all this isn't to be gloomy about older workers. Their experience is worth a lot, and most of them work perfectly safely. The point is that the usual story has it backwards. We don't have a new, fast-rising danger that's caught us out. We have a steady, well-understood risk sitting in the parts of work our safety gains never reached, standing out more each year only because everyone else keeps getting safer.
That should change where the effort goes. If you employ or take on older workers, especially in building, farming or anything with heights or vehicles, the smart move is to plan for how bad an accident could be, not just how often one might happen. Assume that if something does go wrong, it's more likely to be fatal, and put your controls in place with that in mind. Pay special attention to the self-employed and sole traders you work alongside, because they carry the highest risk with the least support around them.
And it makes the case, to me anyway, for getting ahead of this with information rather than waiting for the accident report. The only reason this pattern stayed hidden so long is that the numbers get quoted as a share, when the real story only shows up when you track the rate over time and split it by employment and industry.
The information was always there. It just wasn't being read properly. That's the gap worth closing, and it's a big part of why I do what I do.
References
• HSE. RIDFATAL — fatal injuries to workers by age (Table 4), 2021/22–2025/26. https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/tables/index.htm
• HSE. RIDAGEGEN — fatal and non-fatal injuries by age, gender and industry (Table 1), 2014/15–2024/25. https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/tables/index.htm
• HSE. Work-related fatal injuries in Great Britain, 2024/25 (press release). https://press.hse.gov.uk/2025/07/02/latest-annual-work-related-fatalities-published
• HSE. Latest annual work-related fatalities published, 2025/26 (press release). https://press.hse.gov.uk/2026/07/01/latest-annual-work-related-fatalities-published-2/
• HSE. Reported fatal injuries to workers from 1974 (RIDHIST long series), via Statista with HSE attribution. https://www.statista.com/statistics/292272/fatal-injuries-at-work-great-britain-by-employment-y-on-y/
• HSE. Health and safety in agriculture. https://www.hse.gov.uk/agriculture/hsagriculture.htm
• WorkNest. Key takeaways from the HSE's 2024/25 fatal injury statistics. https://worknest.com/blog/fewer-lives-lost-key-takeaways-from-the-hses-2024-25-fatal-injury-statistics/
• IOSH Magazine. Fatal falls from height on the increase, HSE finds. https://www.ioshmagazine.com/2024/07/11/fatal-falls-height-increase-hse-finds
• McClarron Insurance. Insights from the 2025 HSE Fatal Injury Report (age profile of farming). https://www.mcclarroninsurance.com/news/hse-2025-fatal-injury-report/
• Centre for Ageing Better. The State of Ageing 2020: Work. https://ageing-better.org.uk/work-state-ageing-2020
• TUC. Postponing the Pension: are we all working longer? https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/PostponingThePension.pdf
• Deregulation Act 2015, s.1, amending s.3(2) HSWA 1974; Prescribed Undertakings Regulations 2015. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/20/notes/division/5
• CPD Online College. Law changes for the self-employed (1.7m removed from scope). https://cpdonline.co.uk/knowledge-base/business/law-changes-for-the-self-employed/
• TUC. Austerity and the pandemic (HSE funding, inspections and prosecutions). https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/austerity-and-pandemic
• British Safety Council. A perfect storm: why funding cuts are affecting HSE's ability to regulate. https://www.britsafe.org/safety-management/2023/a-perfect-storm-why-funding-cuts-are-affecting-hse-s-ability-to-regulate
• Hazards Magazine. Ghosted: HSE is missing in action. https://www.hazards.org/deadlybusiness/ghosted.htm
• HSE Blog. Ageing workforce safety: risks and accommodations explained (severity, drawing on US BLS data). https://www.hseblog.com/ageing-workforce-safety/
Fatal injury figures relate to RIDDOR-reported work-related deaths to workers (employees and the self-employed) in Great Britain. Years spanning 2019/20 to 2021/22 are affected by the coronavirus pandemic. 2024/25 figures are revised and 2025/26 figures are provisional. HSE data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.