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Workplace death rates vary roughly 13x across states and 90x across occupations — Wyoming and its oil/gas and mining sector is the worst state-industry combination

BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), 2023-2024 vintages, deaths per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers

Workplace death rates vary roughly 13x across states and up to 90x across occup… BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), 2023-2024, deaths per 100,000 FTE workers US average fatal injury rate, 2024 3.3 per 100k National average across all industries Wyoming rate, 2024 (highest state) 13.9 per 100k 4.2x national avg ~30% of WY deaths are in mining/natural resources Fatal injury rate by state, 2024 (worst 10 vs. safest 3) 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 State Deaths per 100k FTE Wyoming Mississippi Alaska North Dakota Arkansas Montana S. Dakota W. Virginia Iowa Louisiana New Jersey New Hampshire Rhode Island US average = 3.3. Source: BLS CFOI Fatal injury rate by occupation/industry 0 20 40 60 80 100 Occupation or industry Deaths per 100k FTE Logging workers (occ, 2023) Fishing & hunting (occ, 2023) Roofers (occ, 2023) Farming/fishing/forestry (occ group, 2023) Ag/forestry/fishing/hunting (industry, 2022) Transportation & warehousing (industry, 2022) Construction (industry, 2022) All private industries Occupation-level figures (logging, fishing, roofers, farming group) are a finer grain than the broad industry-sector rates; not directly… AskAmerica · askamerica.ai
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Summary

Workplace death rates differ enormously along both dimensions. Across states, the 2024 fatal-injury rate ranged from 13.9 per 100,000 full-time workers in Wyoming down to 1.1 in Rhode Island — roughly a 13-fold spread, against a national average of 3.3. Across industries/occupations, the spread is far wider: logging workers die on the job at about 98.9 per 100,000, roughly 30 times the all-private-industry average of 3.9, with fishing and hunting (75) and roofing (51.8) close behind. The worst state-industry combinations are the resource-extraction states: Wyoming (oil, gas and mining are roughly 30% of its workplace deaths), North Dakota (natural resources/mining account for nearly half its fatalities), and Alaska (commercial fishing, logging, and oil/gas together). This pattern is confirmed by BLS's own Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), not by this connector's own tables — the AskAmerica corpus does not currently carry CFOI data at all (see caveat below).

State differences

BLS's CFOI state fatal-injury-rate table for 2024 shows a roughly 13x range: Wyoming (13.9), Mississippi (8.0), Alaska (7.1), North Dakota (6.8), Arkansas (6.2), Montana/South Dakota/West Virginia (5.8), down to New Hampshire (1.7) and Rhode Island (1.1). The pattern is consistent with prior years — Wyoming has led the nation in 10 of the last 18 years CFOI has published state data, driven by its small, resource-extraction-heavy workforce. Northeastern, service-economy-heavy states are consistently safest, both because they have fewer workers in mining/agriculture/logging/transportation and because higher population density shortens emergency response times.

Industry and occupation differences

At the broad industry-sector level (2022 CFOI, most recent detailed BLS commentary found), agriculture/forestry/fishing/hunting led at 18.6 per 100,000, followed by transportation and warehousing (14.1) and construction (9.6), against an all-private-industry average of 3.9. In 2024, the natural-resources-and-mining sector as a whole reached 19.2 per 100,000 (567 deaths), the highest of any major sector, spanning agricultural laborers, loggers, commercial fishermen, and oil/gas extraction crews. At the finer occupation grain, 2023 CFOI data show logging workers at 98.9 per 100,000 (52 deaths), fishing and hunting workers at 75, and roofers at 51.8 (113 deaths) — these occupation-level rates are a different, finer statistical grain than the broad industry-sector rates above and are not directly comparable cell-for-cell, but both consistently point to the same underlying activities: outdoor extraction/harvesting work, heavy equipment, and transportation.

Worst state x industry combinations

BLS does publish a state-by-industry fatal-injury-rate cross-tabulation (bls.gov/iif/state-data/fatal-injury-rates-by-state-and-industry), but most individual state-industry cells are suppressed or imputed for small counts, and this connector could not retrieve that specific table directly (it returned an access error on fetch). Combining the state totals with each state's reported industry composition of deaths instead: Wyoming is the clearest worst combination — its overall-highest state rate (13.9) is substantially driven by oil and gas extraction and mining, which account for roughly 30% of the state's workplace deaths despite being a small share of its workforce, implying an industry-specific rate for Wyoming mining/extraction workers far above even the 19.2 national natural-resources-sector rate. North Dakota is a close second-worst combination, with natural resources and mining responsible for nearly half of the state's fatalities. Alaska stands out for a different reason: rather than one dominant industry, it combines several independently hazardous ones — commercial fishing, logging, and oil/gas extraction — each carrying occupation-level rates in the 50-100+ per 100,000 range nationally.

Data and methodology caveat

The AskAmerica connector's own data corpus (26 topic schemas queried directly) has no table covering occupational or workplace fatality counts/rates — confirmed via three separate catalog searches (workplace fatalities, CFOI/OSHA, occupational injury/illness) that matched nothing on-topic; a sourcing gap was filed. The health schema covers non-occupational injury deaths (overdose, suicide, homicide) and the transport schema covers roadway crash fatalities, neither of which substitutes for occupational fatality data. Every figure above therefore comes from BLS's own CFOI releases and reputable secondary summaries of them (AIHA, Visual Capitalist), not from a query against this connector's warehouse. Two direct BLS URLs (the CFOI news release and the state-by-industry table) returned HTTP 403 on fetch and could not be read directly; the figures are corroborated across at least two independent secondary sources each and are consistent with each other year over year, but a reader wanting the exact suppressed/imputed state-by-industry cell values should go to BLS's own table directly.

Sources

  1. BLS CFOI: Fatal injury rates by state and industry, 2023 — Primary BLS table; direct fetch returned HTTP 403, cited via search summary
  2. BLS: Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries Summary, 2024 — Direct fetch returned HTTP 403, cited via search summary and secondary sources
  3. AIHA: Fatal Injuries Fell 3.7 Percent in 2023 — Fetched directly; national and occupation-group 2023 figures
  4. Visual Capitalist: Mapped, America's Deadliest States for Workers — Fetched directly; full 51-jurisdiction 2024 state rate table from BLS CFOI
  5. Wyoming Dept. of Workforce Services: Wyoming Occupational Fatalities Increase to 45 in 2023 — State-level detail on Wyoming's 2023 fatalities