Research—
Severe workplace injuries by state: why Texas tops the list and California barely registers
Texas (17,377) and Florida (11,630) lead federal OSHA's severe-injury archive, while California — the largest U.S. workforce — shows just 535. The full 2015–2025 state ranking, and why it maps OSHA jurisdiction, not danger.
Federal OSHA has required most employers to report any work-related hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye within 24 hours since January 2015. The archive indexed here now holds 105,313 of those Severe Injury Reports, and 105,215 of them carry a coded state. Ranking those by state produces a leaderboard — but not the one you might expect.
Texas leads by a wide margin with 17,377 severe-injury reports, followed by Florida (11,630) and Pennsylvania. What the top of the list has in common is not danger — it is jurisdiction. Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Illinois are all federal-OSHA states, where private-sector severe injuries are reported straight to federal OSHA and land in this dataset.
The California anomaly
California has the largest workforce in the United States, yet it records just 535 severe injuries here — fewer than Wisconsin (4,276), a state with roughly a seventh of its population. The reason is structural: California runs its own OSHA-approved state plan (Cal/OSHA), and its private-sector severe-injury reports flow into that state program, not the federal Severe Injury Report system. Twenty-two states operate their own plans covering private employers, so their reports are largely absent from this federal dataset. We cover this coverage gap in depth in The 22-state blind spot in federal OSHA severe-injury data.
Read the ranking accordingly: it measures where federal OSHA has direct reporting jurisdiction, not where work is most or least hazardous. States marked state-plan below are under-represented for this reason.
Severe-injury reports by state, 2015–2025
All 52 states and territories with at least one report, ranked. Each row opens the live, filterable records behind the count.
| # | State | Severe-injury reports | Share of archive |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Texas | 17,377 | 16.5% |
| 2 | Florida | 11,630 | 11.0% |
| 3 | Pennsylvania | 8,314 | 7.9% |
| 4 | Ohio | 8,196 | 7.8% |
| 5 | Illinois | 6,336 | 6.0% |
| 6 | Georgia | 5,943 | 5.6% |
| 7 | New York | 5,260 | 5.0% |
| 8 | Wisconsin | 4,276 | 4.1% |
| 9 | Alabama | 3,514 | 3.3% |
| 10 | Missouri | 3,239 | 3.1% |
| 11 | Colorado | 3,193 | 3.0% |
| 12 | New Jersey | 2,674 | 2.5% |
| 13 | Louisiana | 2,403 | 2.3% |
| 14 | Massachusetts | 2,314 | 2.2% |
| 15 | Oklahoma | 2,282 | 2.2% |
| 16 | Arkansas | 2,257 | 2.1% |
| 17 | Kansas | 2,088 | 2.0% |
| 18 | Mississippi | 1,825 | 1.7% |
| 19 | Nebraska | 1,684 | 1.6% |
| 20 | Connecticut | 1,139 | 1.1% |
| 21 | Idaho | 1,058 | 1.0% |
| 22 | West Virginia | 1,050 | 1.0% |
| 23 | North Dakota | 944 | 0.9% |
| 24 | Maine | 769 | 0.7% |
| 25 | South Dakota | 687 | 0.7% |
| 26 | New Hampshire | 661 | 0.6% |
| 27 | California · state-plan | 535 | 0.5% |
| 28 | Montana | 518 | 0.5% |
| 29 | Delaware | 421 | 0.4% |
| 30 | Rhode Island | 369 | 0.4% |
| 31 | Virginia · state-plan | 363 | 0.3% |
| 32 | District of Columbia | 318 | 0.3% |
| 33 | Washington · state-plan | 168 | 0.2% |
| 34 | North Carolina · state-plan | 159 | 0.2% |
| 35 | Maryland · state-plan | 133 | 0.1% |
| 36 | Arizona · state-plan | 126 | 0.1% |
| 37 | Tennessee · state-plan | 109 | 0.1% |
| 38 | New Mexico · state-plan | 101 | 0.1% |
| 39 | South Carolina · state-plan | 92 | 0.1% |
| 40 | Oregon · state-plan | 89 | 0.1% |
| 41 | Hawaii · state-plan | 83 | 0.1% |
| 42 | Michigan · state-plan | 72 | 0.1% |
| 43 | Kentucky · state-plan | 71 | 0.1% |
| 44 | Minnesota · state-plan | 69 | 0.1% |
| 45 | Utah · state-plan | 63 | 0.1% |
| 46 | Alaska · state-plan | 56 | 0.1% |
| 47 | Indiana · state-plan | 49 | 0.0% |
| 48 | Nevada · state-plan | 49 | 0.0% |
| 49 | Iowa · state-plan | 36 | 0.0% |
| 50 | Wyoming · state-plan | 28 | 0.0% |
| 51 | Puerto Rico · state-plan | 16 | 0.0% |
| 52 | Vermont · state-plan | 9 | 0.0% |
Method & source
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, grouped by the reporting establishment's state. Shares are of the 105,313-report archive; about 98 reports lack a coded state. State-plan designation reflects the 22 states operating an OSHA-approved plan covering private-sector employers. Reproduce any figure by appending ?state=XX to the search page.