Research—
Forklift severe injuries: 6,323 OSHA reports and a decade with no decline
Since 2015, federal OSHA has logged 6,323 severe injuries involving forklifts and powered industrial trucks. Nearly nine in ten put a worker in the hospital, the annual count has barely moved in ten years, and Texas leads every state. The full breakdown.
Forklifts and other powered industrial trucks are among the most heavily regulated machines on any worksite, yet they remain a steady source of serious harm. Federal OSHA's Severe Injury Report archive holds 6,323 reports that name a forklift, lift truck, order picker, or similar powered truck in the injury narrative — about 6% of all 105,313 severe injuries indexed here.
These are crush injuries, not amputations
5,587 of the 6,323 forklift reports (88%) resulted in a hospitalization, and 1,166 (18%) in an amputation. That amputation share is actually below the 26% rate across the whole archive: forklift harm is dominated by struck-by and caught-between crush injuries — pinned limbs, tip-overs, and pedestrians hit by a moving truck — rather than the blade and pinch-point amputations that dominate in food and metal manufacturing.
No measurable improvement in a decade
The yearly count is remarkably flat. Despite a decade of OSHA's powered-industrial-truck standard (29 CFR 1910.178) and operator-certification requirements, the number of forklift severe injuries has not fallen.
| Year | Forklift severe injuries |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 545 |
| 2018 | 627 |
| 2020 | 545 |
| 2022 | 609 |
| 2024 | 550 |
Where forklift injuries land
The state ranking tracks federal OSHA jurisdiction and warehouse density, not necessarily where forklifts are most dangerous. Each count opens the live records.
| State | Forklift severe injuries |
|---|---|
| Texas | 1,147 |
| Florida | 609 |
| Georgia | 556 |
| Ohio | 544 |
| Pennsylvania | 535 |
Browse the full set of 6,323 forklift severe-injury records, or read how the same data breaks down by industry sector.
Method & source
All counts are live queries against the federal OSHA Severe Injury Report archive (events dated 2015-01-01 through 2025-10-31) indexed by Safety Incidents, which holds 105,313 reports. The forklift figure counts reports whose narrative or coded fields match the query forklift (which also captures “lift truck” and related powered-truck language); hospitalization and amputation shares are of those 6,323 reports and overlap, since one injury can be both. Reproduce any figure by applying the same filters on the search page. Severe-injury reporting has been mandatory for most employers under federal OSHA jurisdiction since January 2015; the 22 states running their own OSHA-approved plans report separately and are under-represented here — see the 22-state blind spot.