Research—
Workplace amputations fell after 2019 — and never returned to pre-pandemic levels
Federal OSHA logged 27,770 work-related amputations from 2015 to 2025. Reported cases dropped 17.5% in 2020 and have plateaued around 2,400 a year since — below every pre-pandemic year in the record. A decade of the data, year by year.
Federal OSHA has logged 27,770 work-related amputations since employers were first required to report them in 2015. Bucketed by the year each incident occurred, the decade tells a clear story: a stable pre-pandemic baseline, a sharp drop in 2020, and a recovery that stalled well short of where it started.
Reported amputations by year
| Year | Amputation reports | Change vs. prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2,700 | — |
| 2016 | 2,696 | −0.1% |
| 2017 | 2,820 | +4.6% |
| 2018 | 2,870 | +1.8% |
| 2019 | 2,836 | −1.2% |
| 2020 | 2,340 | −17.5% |
| 2021 | 2,286 | −2.3% |
| 2022 | 2,393 | +4.7% |
| 2023 | 2,422 | +1.2% |
| 2024 | 2,425 | +0.1% |
2025 is excluded from the trend above: the file runs only through October 31, 2025, and the 1,982 reports logged in its first ten months are not comparable to full calendar years.
The 2020 cliff — and the plateau that followed
From 2015 through 2019, reported amputations held between 2,696 and 2,870 a year, averaging about 2,784. In 2020 they fell 17.5% — the steepest single-year move in the record — as the pandemic idled factories, construction sites, and the machinery behind most amputation injuries. That is the expected shape of a demand shock.
What is less expected is what did not happen next. Amputation reports never climbed back. The 2022–2024 totals settled around 2,400 a year — roughly 13% below the pre-pandemic average — and 2024's total of 2,425 sits below every single pre-pandemic year in the record, including the lowest (2015's 2,700).
What these numbers can — and can't — tell you
These are counts of reports, not injury rates. A lower number can mean genuinely fewer amputations, but it can also reflect fewer hours worked in hazardous industries, shifts in the workforce, or changes in how diligently employers file the reports OSHA requires. Without an hours-worked or employment denominator, the counts alone can't separate a real safety gain from a reporting or exposure change — a caveat worth keeping in view before reading the post-2020 plateau as pure progress.
Two boundaries also apply to every figure here. Coverage is federal-jurisdiction only — the 22 states that run their own OSHA plans are not included, so this is a large sample of the national picture, not the whole of it. And the reports skew heavily toward one part of the economy: manufacturing alone accounts for 55% of all amputation reports, so year-to-year swings largely track conditions on factory floors.
How this was measured
Each row is a live query against the federal OSHA Severe Injury Reports this site indexes — records employers were legally required to file within 24 hours of a work-related amputation. Reports are grouped by the calendar year of the incident's event date; click any year to see the underlying records. The eleven annual buckets sum to the full 27,770-report total with no records unaccounted for. Figures are current as of the latest data snapshot shown on the home page and will shift slightly as OSHA revises and back-fills the file, particularly for the most recent months.
Search the full archive by employer, hazard, equipment, body part, state, or industry at safetyincidents.org/search.