Welding and construction work sound dangerous, so it’s not surprising that these top our list. But the number three spot will surprise you!
Here’s a fun trivia game: make a guess at the top ten most dangerous jobs
in America and see if you at least get the spirit of the jobs captured
in our table below. You might not have had dietetic technicians
in your top 100, but they rank number 3. Is the moral of this story to
stay away from hungry people?
It could be that these rankings are a reflection
of which jobs report their injuries, and that some in our top ten aren’t
appearing due to a lack of reporting. Nonetheless, this is fun data to
explore. As you examine the jobs below, you can see the nature of the most frequent injuries in the table as you scroll to the right. If you select the
checkbox, we’ll show you the cause of the injuries instead. Because a
single event could result in multiple injuries, this rearranges the list a bit.
After the chart, we’ll look at the salaries and education level for workers in the most dangerous jobs, and at the bottom of the page we’ll explain how the numbers are calculated.
The most dangerous jobs by injury
Show the cause of the incident rather than the injury
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Career
Select any row to see in-depth career details at Ididio.
Some of the most dangerous jobs compensate worker risk with pay. In the
chart below, we can see the incidents reported by each job. Each line
is colored by comparative salary, with orange and yellow lines corresponding to those that typically pay below the US median salary for all workers. You
can explore the specific jobs in the top 50 by selecting the table view under the table’s title.
The Fifty Most Dangerous Jobs by cause
Show the cause of the incident rather than the injury
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SOURCES:
2018 BLS Injuries_ Illnesses_ and Fatalities
2019 BLS Occupational Employment
2018 ACS microdata
There is safety in education
When we check injuries where at least a quarter of the worker have bachelor’s degrees, we see
The lines are almost entirely green and blue coloring, which indicate higher salaries.
The injuries are typically far from the highest rates reported by other jobs.
The exceptions tend to be jobs that cause muscle sprains and tears, such as
those in transportation (cargo agents and flight attendants), athletes, photographers, and health-care related jobs.
High education jobs by cause
At least a quarter of the workforce has a bachelor’s degree
Show the cause of the incident rather than the injury
View as
SOURCES:
2018 BLS Injuries_ Illnesses_ and Fatalities
2019 BLS Occupational Employment
2018 ACS microdata
Explore the data
If you’re interested in learning more about the data, we’ve included
the full data below, first with the salary-colored lines and second in a table with a little more information.
Explore jobs by cause
Use the filters below to explore the data.
Show the cause of the incident rather than the injury
View as
Reported incidents
02004006008001,000
Median salary
$0$50K$100K$150K$200K
Percentage with a bachelor's degree
0%20%40%60%80%100%
Career
Select any row to see in-depth career details at Ididio.
There are almost 900 SOC job classifications, and injury data are reported for fewer than half. We presume the the other half of jobs simply reported no incidents. We do not report data for on-the-job fatalities because those, fortunately, are rare and vary quite a bit from year-to-year.
Our primary data source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities. We’re reporting the rates by nature and cause from their SOII data, and the rates represent how many workers out of 10,000 reported issues. In the original data, some natures and causes are broken out a bit more. We chose the most frequent injuries to show here, and combine the remaining with their pre-existing “other” category.
Some jobs report very different numbers of injuries by cause versus by nature, which means that our top-ten list is quite different depending on the viewpoint. This is simply a reality of the data as it is collected.
We pull the salary information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Statistics program, and to determine the salary colors we calculated
the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles of the list of all reported
median salaries from all BLS SOC job classifications reported. The salary comparisons
are for all jobs, and not just those reporting injuries.
The education attained for each job is calculated by aggregating person-level American Community Survey data. This data is calculated for slightly larger
groupings of jobs in some causes, as education attained is not available
at the SOC classification level.
SOURCES:
