Research—
Manufacturing accounts for more than half of all workplace amputations reported to OSHA
Of the 27,770 amputation reports in the federal OSHA Severe Injury Reports archive (2015–2025), the three manufacturing sectors (NAICS 31–33) account for 15,310 — 55% of the national total. A complete, data-driven breakdown across all 24 industry sectors.
Federal OSHA has required employers to report every work-related amputation within 24 hours since 2015. As of this writing, 27,770 of those reports are indexed here — roughly one in four (26%) of the 105,313 severe injuries in the archive — and more than half come from a single corner of the economy.
Grouping the amputation reports by the reporting establishment's primary NAICS sector, the three manufacturing sectors (NAICS 31, 32, and 33) together account for 15,310 amputation reports — 55% of the national total. No other sector comes close: construction, the next-largest, accounts for about one in ten.
Amputation reports by industry sector
All 24 federal NAICS sectors, ranked — each row links to the live, filterable records behind the count:
The rows above account for every amputation report in the archive; just six records (0.02%) carried no classifiable industry code. The three manufacturing rows alone sum to 15,310 — the 55% headline — while the eight smallest sectors combined, from public administration down, account for just 1,086 reports, fewer than half the construction total.
Why manufacturing dominates
The concentration is not a surprise so much as a quantification. Amputations in this dataset are overwhelmingly caused by unguarded or inadequately guarded machinery — the point-of-operation hazards on presses, saws, augers, conveyors, and food-processing equipment that OSHA's machine-guarding standard (29 CFR 1910.212) exists to control. Those machines live in manufacturing. The single largest slice, NAICS 33, covers fabricated metal, machinery, and equipment manufacturing — the plants where mechanical power presses and metal-forming equipment are densest.
How this was measured
Every figure above is a live query against the federal OSHA Severe Injury Reports this site indexes — records that employers were legally required to file within 24 hours of a work-related amputation, hospitalization, or loss of an eye. The counts reflect the 27,770 reports flagged as amputations between January 1, 2015 and October 31, 2025, grouped by the reporting establishment's primary NAICS sector; click any row to see the underlying records. The table is exhaustive — all 24 sectors, with only six unclassified records excluded — so the shares sum to 100%. Figures are current as of the latest data snapshot shown on the home page, and will shift slightly as OSHA revises and extends the file. Coverage is federal-jurisdiction only; the 22 states that run their own OSHA plans are not included.
Search the full archive by employer, hazard, equipment, body part, state, or industry at safetyincidents.org/search.