Are Forklifts Dangerous?

If forklifts are so dangerous, why do we still use them? Because nothing else moves a pallet as well. They are not going away, so the useful question is how dangerous they are today and what lowers the risk.

The current numbers

These are the National Safety Council’s figures for the United States, taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

• 84 workers died in incidents involving forklifts, order pickers or platform trucks in 2024, up from 67 in 2023. Since 2011 the yearly count has run between 54 and 85.
• 25,110 injuries in 2023 and 2024 were serious enough for days away from work, restricted duty or a job transfer.
• 15,460 of those kept the worker at home. The median time away was 18 days, against 8 days for workplace injuries as a whole.

The way these cases are classified changed in 2023, so the years before it are not an exact match. The picture is still clear: 84 deaths in a year is more than one a week, and a forklift injury keeps a worker off the job more than twice as long as the usual workplace injury.

You may have seen older figures: 85 deaths, 34,900 serious injuries and 61,800 non-serious injuries a year. This post used to quote them too. They come from an OSHA proposal published in 1995 and are averages for the years since 1981. We have replaced them with the current counts above, and removed three other figures we could not trace to a source.

How people get hurt

OSHA’s guidance says forklift overturns are the leading cause of forklift deaths, about a quarter of them, and that most fatalities occur when a worker is crushed by a forklift that has overturned or fallen from a loading dock. The study behind it puts workers on foot who are struck by a forklift next. That study covers 1980 to 1994 and is still what OSHA publishes.

Both come back to the same things: who is driving, what condition the truck is in, and how it is being driven.

Make sure only trained operators drive

OSHA requires the employer to make sure each operator has completed training and evaluation before operating a truck (29 CFR 1910.178(l)(1)). With access control on the truck, each authorized person enters their own code or scans their own card or fob to start it. Nobody else can, and every event the unit records is tied to that operator. More on that in why forklift access control is important.

Check the truck before it goes into service

A truck has to be examined before it is placed in service, at least daily, and it must not be used if the examination shows anything that affects its safety (1910.178(q)(7)). OSHA’s list is a starting point. Work with your safety committee to set what pass and fail look like for each question and each type of equipment in your building, and tell your operators what you expect.

On the SM301 the truck will not start until the operator has completed the check, and a failed question can hold the truck until a supervisor releases it.

Know who was driving, and follow up

Records only help if someone reads them. Keep track of which operator used which truck and when, which checks were done, which questions failed, and what was done to make the truck safe again. With the SM301 and its web portal that is a report you can pull or have emailed to you. Use it to point out specific problems to operators, and to recognize the ones doing it right.

The next step is a one-hour online demo. Book one here.