Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 66 
Table 15: Incidence rates of non-fatal accidents per sector in 2010 and 2019 (EU27)142 
 
These figures cover all employed persons, that is, employees, self -employed with employees = 
employers, self -employed without employees and contributing family member. Literature shows that 
some categories of self -employed have higher accident rates than employed worker 
persons.143ESAW data can hardly be used for a comparison between self -employed and other 
groups, because self-employed are in many EU Member States not part of an obligatory work accident 
insurance, but can instead take a choice between obligatory insurance, additional private insurance or 
full private insurance. 144 Moreover, according to the ESAW regulation, the EU Member States can 
decide whether to report work accident data of self-employed to Eurostat or not.145  
Since the start of ESAW the identification of the level of underreporting was of high importance. 
Periodically, Eurostat itself estimates underreporting rates per country, for example, in the ESAW 
methodology 2001. This is necessary to understand the very different incidence rates in Member States, 
reporting at the lowest 62 (Romania) and highest 3 ,425 (France) non-fatal accidents per 100, 000 
employed persons (2019).146 These enormous differences of the occurrence of non-fatal accidents can 
only be explained by different levels of reporting levels and respectively underreporting.  
A quite common method for correcting underreporting is to extrapolate the number of fatal accidents — 
the reporting rate for fatal accidents is regarded as reliable — to calculate non-fatal accidents. Eurostat 
provides the coefficient between fatal and non-fatal accidents.  
Methodology: 
EU-OSHA used the average coefficient between non-fatal and fatal work accidents of the four 
countries Finland, France, Germany and Spain. The coefficient of registered non- fatal accident per 
fatal accident varies between 970 (France) and 2,085 (Germany), in 2019. The coefficient average for 
these four countries is 1,462. If we multiply all ESAW-registered fatal accidents in the EU27 (3,408 
cases) with this coefficient, we end up at 4.98 million non-fatal accidents with more than three days of 
absence. 
For the EU27 in 2019, the average ratio is 922 non-fatal accidents for every fatal accident .147 For 
an estimate, the coefficients of benchmark countries  with a known high reporting rate are used to 
estimate underreporting throughout the EU27.148  
The following table shows the data and the calculation steps.