The Roofing Fatality Atlas

Two federal counts, two different populations

A claim about how dangerous roofing is will rest on one of two BLS numbers, and it does not always say which.

Both come from the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), a census rather than a survey, which cross-checks death certificates, workers’ compensation records, OSHA reports and news accounts. The two numbers sort the same deaths in different ways.

The occupation figure counts people whose own job was roofing, under the Standard Occupational Classification code 47-2181. In 2024 that was 104 fatal work injuries.

It includes a roofer employed by a general contractor, a roofer employed by a school district, and a self-employed roofer working alone.

It excludes the laborer, the driver and the office manager who worked at a roofing company and died on the job.

The industry figure counts everyone who died while working for an establishment classified in NAICS 23816, roofing contractors, whatever their own occupation. In 2024 that was 120 fatal work injuries. It includes the laborer, the driver and the office manager. It excludes the roofer employed by the general contractor next door.

The gap between them in 2024 was sixteen deaths, and the direction of the gap is not fixed by anything: in a year when more roofing-company drivers die in road crashes the industry number rises without the occupation number moving at all.

They are not interchangeable, and a page that quotes one and labels it the other is wrong even when both numbers are real. Everything below states which basis it is using.

One more distinction matters. A count of deaths answers “how many people died”. A rate answers “how likely was it”.

Roofing has a small count and a high rate: 104 roofers died in 2024 against 950 truck drivers, and the roofing rate is still the higher of the two.

The rate BLS publishes for roofers is 48.7 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, and the FTE denominator comes from the Current Population Survey, so it does include the self-employed.

Eight years of the industry count, and the hole in it

The published industry series runs 107, 106, 102, 123, 124, 134, 120. The dash is real.

CFOI Table A-1 for reference year 2019 does not carry a row for roofing contractors, or for specialty trade contractors at all; we checked the current and archived HTML editions on September 3, 2026 and the string does not appear.

We have not estimated the missing year and the chart draws it as a hole rather than joining the line across it.

Over the seven years that are published, 816 people died working for roofing contractors. 650 of those deaths, 79.7 percent, were classified as falls, slips and trips. Exposure to harmful substances or environments, which includes both electrocution and heat, is second at 9 to 19 deaths a year.

HyreRoof analysis. BLS publishes an hours-based fatality rate for detailed industries in a spreadsheet we could not retrieve (see Limitations), so we computed our own denominator: deaths divided by QCEW annual average covered employment in NAICS 238160, times 100,000.

On that basis the rate was 54.2 in 2017 and 47.9 in 2024, with a seven-year mean of 52.4. It moved between 47.5 and 56.0 and shows no trend in either direction.

This is an upper bound on a true per-worker rate, because the numerator includes self-employed and unpaid family workers while the QCEW denominator does not, and the roofing trade has a large self-employed population. The number to take from it is the flatness, not the level.

Set that flatness against the growth underneath it. QCEW counted 197,328 covered employees in roofing contracting in 2017 and 250,564 in 2024, a rise of 27.0 percent, across an establishment count that went from 21,874 to 31,562. The industry got substantially bigger and substantially more fragmented, and the death rate per employee did not fall.

What the enforcement record looks like

OSHA publishes a public tool that returns every standard cited against a NAICS code in the most recently completed federal fiscal year.

Run against 238160 for citations issued October 2024 through September 2025, it returns 10,667 citations across 4,281 inspections carrying $46,519,129 in current penalties.

Run against NAICS 23, all of construction, it returns 26,558 citations across 10,794 inspections and $108,935,100.

HyreRoof analysis. Roofing contractors accounted for 39.7 percent of the federal OSHA construction inspections that produced at least one citation, 40.2 percent of the citations and 42.7 percent of the penalty money, from 3.1 percent of construction employment.

That is an over-representation factor of 12.9 on inspections and 13.9 on penalties.

Both the numerator and the denominator of the inspection share are drawn from the same federal jurisdiction, so the comparison inside construction holds even though the absolute inspection count omits the state-plan states entirely.

Inside roofing, the concentration is sharper still. Of the 4,281 roofing inspections that produced a citation, 3,647, 85.2 percent, included a citation under 29 CFR 1926.501, the duty to have fall protection.

Put the other way round: roofing contractors accounted for 54.9 percent of every federal OSHA construction inspection in fiscal 2025 that cited 1926.501 at all. More than half of the federal construction inspections that cited the fall-protection duty were of roofing contractors.

Three more fall standards on the list say the same thing in different registers. Ladders (1926.1053) appear in 1,485 inspections.

Fall protection training (1926.503) appears in 1,304: a citation that means the employer could not show the crew had been taught the system it was supposed to be using.

Fall protection systems criteria (1926.502), which is what you get cited under when the equipment exists but is wrong or wrongly rigged, appears in 314.

Money follows the same shape. HyreRoof analysis: the mean current penalty per cited roofing inspection is $10,866, against $10,092 across construction. Fall protection alone accounts for 58.0 percent of every dollar penalized against roofing contractors in the year.

1,535 severe injuries, and the height they happened at

Since 2015 employers under federal OSHA jurisdiction have been required to report every inpatient hospitalization, amputation and loss of an eye within 24 hours.

OSHA publishes the resulting file with a short narrative and coded event, source, nature and body-part fields.

HyreRoof analysis: of the 105,996 reports in the January 2015 to November 2025 release, 1,535 are in NAICS 238160, 1.4 percent of all severe injuries reported in the US economy, and 8.1 percent of those reported in construction. 1,514 involved a hospitalization and 50 an amputation.

1,212 of the 1,535, 79.0 percent, were falls. That figure was computed independently of the fatality data and lands within a percentage point of the 79.7 percent falls share of the CFOI death series.

Two different federal collections, different definitions, different jurisdictions, and the same answer: in roofing, most of the recorded harm comes from falls.

The height distribution is the part of this file a homeowner can use. Among the 626 reports carrying a specific height band, 493, 78.8 percent, were falls of twenty feet or less, and 177 were from ten feet or less. Only 38 were from over thirty feet.

The most common band in this file is eleven to fifteen feet: about the height of a single-story eave, a garage or a porch roof. OSHA’s fall-protection trigger in residential construction is six feet. The sense that a low roof is a safe roof does not match this record.

The source field adds the second useful finding. 175 of the reports, 11.4 percent, are coded as a fall through a surface or an existing opening rather than off an edge, and 132 name a skylight somewhere in the source description.

OSHA treats a skylight as a hole that needs a cover, screen or guardrail. Ladders are the recorded source in 326 reports, 21.2 percent: part of this risk sits on the ladder, before anyone reaches the roof.

782 of the 1,535 reports, 50.9 percent, are coded as fractures. 56 are coded as exposure to environmental heat.

The nonfatal numbers are falling. The fatal ones are not.

Here the federal collections disagree. We set out the evidence rather than force an answer.

On the nonfatal side, roofing contracting looks much safer than it did ten years ago. Its total recordable case rate was 5.3 per 100 full-time workers in 2014 and 2.4 in 2024, a fall of 54.7 percent.

Its days-away-from-work rate went from 2.3 to 1.1. Over the same eleven years all private industry went from 3.2 to 2.3, a fall of 28.1 percent, and the specialty trades went from 3.8 to 2.3.

In 2014 roofing’s recordable rate was 1.66 times the private-industry average. In 2024 it was 1.04 times it. On this measure, roofing now sits close to the private-industry average.

On the fatal side nothing of the kind happened. The occupation rate is 48.7 per 100,000 FTE. Our derived industry rate has a seven-year mean of 52.4 and ends the series close to where it started.

The count of severe injuries reported to OSHA under a mandatory 24-hour rule has no trend either: 128 in 2015, 118 in 2024, with the highest year in the middle of the series.

HyreRoof analysis. Put the SOII case count against the QCEW headcount and the divergence sharpens.

SOII estimated 9,000 recordable cases in roofing contracting in 2015 and 5,200 in 2024, a fall of 42.2 percent, while QCEW covered employment rose from 177,954 to 250,564, up 40.8 percent.

Cases per 10,000 covered employees therefore fell from about 506 to about 208, a drop of 59.0 percent, in an industry whose fatality rate and mandatory severe-injury reports did not move.

This is editorial inference and we label it as such: the most parsimonious reading is that the collections miss different things, rather than that nonfatal injuries fell by more than half while the fatal risk stayed where it was.

SOII is a survey of employer-kept OSHA logs among establishments that are sampled and respond; CFOI is a census that cross-checks death certificates; the severe injury file is a legal reporting duty with a 24-hour clock. A death or an amputation is hard to leave unrecorded.

A recordable sprain in a nine-person roofing company with no safety officer is not. As the industry fragmented (21,874 establishments in 2017 to 31,562 in 2024) the share of the work being done inside very small employers grew, and very small employers are where recordkeeping is thinnest.

We cannot prove that from these datasets, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What we can say is that the nonfatal series and the fatal series cannot both be describing the same underlying change, and anyone citing the nonfatal improvement as evidence that roofing has become safe is citing the weaker of the two.