Workplace death rates vary roughly 9x across states and 30x across industries — the worst outcomes are narrow combinations like mining/oil extraction in North Dakota and New Mexico, transportation/utilities work in Wyoming, and agriculture across the rural Midwest and Plains

Summary

Workplace death rates differ enormously along both dimensions. By industry, the 2024 national fatal-injury rate ranges from 0.7 per 100,000 full-time-equivalent (FTE) workers in educational/health services to 20.9 in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting -- a roughly 30x spread, with mining/oil-gas extraction (13.8) and transportation/warehousing (12.2) also far above the 3.3 national average. By state, the most recent BLS state-level table (2022) shows overall rates ranging from 1.4 per 100,000 in Rhode Island to 12.7 in Wyoming -- roughly a 9x spread (2024's single-year state summary shows Wyoming even higher, at 13.9). The worst outcomes appear where a dangerous industry is also a disproportionate share of a state's economy: mining/oil-gas extraction in North Dakota (63.7) and New Mexico (51.1), transportation/utilities work in Wyoming (68.4), and agriculture across North Dakota, New York, Missouri, Indiana and Tennessee (36-48) are the deadliest specific state-industry combinations for which BLS publishes a reliable rate.

What the data actually is, and a genuine warehouse gap

The AskAmerica connector (askengine) does not carry BLS's Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) -- confirmed by search_catalog, which returned no fatalities/occupational-injury table (health, crime and transport-fatality tables it did return are unrelated causes of death). This is a genuine coverage gap in the warehouse, not something worked around with a proxy. All figures below were pulled directly from BLS primary tables via web_fetch (BLS's live site returned HTTP 403 to automated fetches, so the Wayback Machine's archived copies of the same BLS pages were used -- the tables are BLS's own published HTML, not a secondary summary).

Industry differences (national, 2024)

National overview: 5,070 fatal work injuries in 2024 (down 4.0% from 5,283 in 2023), overall rate 3.3/100k FTE, the second consecutive annual decline. Transportation incidents remain the single most frequent fatal event (38.2% of all fatalities). By occupation, transportation/material-moving workers had the highest fatality count (1,391) and a rate of 12.5/100k; within farming/fishing/forestry, agricultural workers alone accounted for 151 of the 248 fatalities in that group.

State differences (overall rate, 2022 -- the latest BLS state x industry cross-tab)

Top 10 states by overall fatal injury rate: Wyoming 12.7, North Dakota 9.8, Mississippi 6.9, New Mexico 6.8, West Virginia 6.8, Louisiana 6.4, Arkansas 6.1, South Carolina 6.1, Nebraska 5.8, Tennessee 5.7. Bottom of the range: New Jersey 2.7, Massachusetts 2.4, New York City 2.3, Connecticut 2.0, Rhode Island 1.4. Mean across the 51 published jurisdictions is 4.3, median 3.75 -- the distribution is right-skewed, pulled up by a handful of rural, resource-extraction-heavy states. The 2024 single-year news release (which reports the state summary rate but not the full state x industry cross-tab) confirms Wyoming still leads at 13.9/100k in 2024, so this is a persistent pattern, not a one-year artifact.

Worst state x industry combinations

Combining both dimensions using BLS's 2022 state-by-industry table (the most recent year BLS has published this specific cross-tab; many state-industry cells are suppressed for small sample size, so only cells meeting BLS publication criteria are shown):

One cell -- District of Columbia Construction at 72.0/100k -- is technically higher than everything above but is excluded from this ranking. D.C.'s construction workforce base is small relative to states, so a handful of incidents in a single year produces an extreme, unstable rate; BLS's own limitations note warns state-industry rates are imputed from national average hours and are not directly comparable across states because of differing industry composition and the folding of government workers into industry categories. The pattern that does hold up: the worst combinations are consistently a genuinely hazardous industry (mining/oil-gas, agriculture, or heavy trucking/transportation) concentrated in a state where that industry is a large share of total employment -- North Dakota's oil boom, Wyoming's long-haul trucking and energy transport, and agriculture across the rural Midwest/Plains and even upstate New York.

Caveats

• Vintage mismatch: industry rates are 2024 (most current, national only); the state x industry cross-tab is 2022 (BLS's most recently published version of that specific joint breakdown, released Dec 2023). Overall state rankings are directionally stable across both years (Wyoming and North Dakota top both), but exact combo-level rates for 2023-2024 are not yet published by BLS at this grain.
• Small-cell suppression: many state x industry cells in the table are blank ('-') because BLS did not calculate a rate -- either no data or it didn't meet publication criteria (i.e., too few incidents/workers for a reliable rate). This means many plausible high-risk combinations (e.g., Alaska fishing, Pacific Northwest logging) are not visible in this specific cross-tab even though other BLS/NIOSH occupational sources report those as extremely dangerous by other measures.
• Comparability: state-industry rates should not be compared state-to-state because industry composition and which workers fall into which category differ by state (BLS's own stated limitation).
• Data-source honesty: no number in this report was queried from the AskAmerica warehouse -- that connector has no CFOI table. Every figure was read directly from BLS's own published HTML tables (fetched live where possible, via Wayback Machine archives of the same BLS pages where BLS's live site returned HTTP 403 to automated fetch).