Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 71 
4.1.2 Serious non-fatal and fatal work accidents  
Eurostat defines a fatal work accident as follows: ‘A “fatal accident” means an accident which leads to 
the death of a victim within one year of the accident’. 160    
Fatal commuting accidents are excluded, or when counted at national level, excluded from the ESAW 
data.  
In the last decade,  most EU Member States  registered a significant decrease of fatal work 
accidents.161 From 2010 to 2019, for the EU27, the incidence rate of fatal accidents decreased over 
all sectors from 2.31 to 1.74 , or a minus of 25%. In the period between 20 10 and 2019 the sectoral 
figures of five major sectors developed as follows:  
 
Table 19: Incidence rates of fatal accidents per sector in 2010 and 2019 (EU27)162 
 
Also, large differences between countries can be noted. The following figure — taken from the OSH 
Barometer — calculates the number of fatal accidents in periods  and compares the period 2010- 2014 
with 2015-2020. The reason is that — particularly in smaller Member States — a year with one serious 
and large work accident and several fatalities, or another year without any fatal accident , would distort 
the annual picture and create significant changes from year to year. Romania, Luxembourg and Bulgaria 
have the highest incident rates, and the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany the lowest. In 25 countries 
the rate fell or stagnated in these two periods, with exceptions being Luxembourg and Greece.  
 
Figure 23: Comparison of the average incidence rate of fatal accidents in two periods: 2010-2014 and 2015-
2020163