Electrocutions and electric shocks were the leading cause of fatal and major powered access incidents in 2025, ahead of falls from the platform and overturns. Twenty-eight reports from six countries, including 20 fatalities. Seventy-one percent of those reports came from the United States.
The figures are from IPAF’s Global Safety Report 2026, launched by webinar on 2 September and covering ten years of data from 2016 to 2025.
The direction of travel is good. The category leader isn’t.
Overall volume fell. There were 170 fatal or major incident reports in 2025 against 201 in 2024, down 15%, and 76 fatalities against 100, down 24%. People involved fell 9% to 192, across reports from 25 countries.
Construction sites accounted for 37% of incidents, followed by an “other” category at 14%, arboriculture at 13% and rental activity at 13%. Machine mix was dominated by category 3b self-propelled boom lifts at 26% and category 3a mobile vertical machines, meaning scissor lifts and vertical personnel platforms, at 25%.
Year-over-year movements by category: falls from platform up 14% in reports but down 24% in fatalities; entrapment down 68% and 63%; overturns down 58% and 53%; struck-by-falling-object up 20% in reports but down 50% in fatalities. Two went the wrong way. Hit by a vehicle or machine rose 125% in fatalities. Mast climbing work platforms and construction hoists saw reports rise 200% and fatalities rise 700%, to eight deaths.
Why the US share is the story
Twenty deaths worldwide from a hazard that’s addressable entirely at the planning stage. Minimum approach distance, utility locates, spotter discipline, de-energize or insulate. None of that is exotic and none of it is a machine design problem, which means it lands on whoever wrote the lift plan.
Brian Parker, IPAF’s head of safety and technical, called the 24% fatality reduction encouraging while warning against complacency, naming electrocutions, falls from platform, overturns and the MCWP and hoist increase as where attention has to stay.
Read the percentages carefully
This is voluntary self-reporting by IPAF members into the organization’s Accident Reporting Portal. It isn’t a census, it isn’t a probability sample, and it isn’t comparable to OSHA fatality data. So the 71% US share at least partly measures who reports rather than where people die: a country with better reporting discipline will look more dangerous than one with worse.
The eye-catching swings are the bigger trap. A 700% increase in MCWP and hoist fatalities is eight deaths. A 125% increase in hit-by-vehicle fatalities is a handful of cases. Off bases that small, a single bad job moves the percentage by triple digits. IPAF also publishes counts rather than a rate, with no denominator of machine-hours, so a 15% drop in reports could be a 15% drop in reporting.
Treat the ten-year direction as signal and any single year-over-year percentage as noise. The one figure that survives all of that scrutiny is the American share of a preventable electrical fatality category, because reporting bias doesn’t manufacture twenty bodies. Roof steel work at height is where a lot of this exposure sits: Valencia’s Nou Mestalla had installed 30 pillars and 21 compression rings by January 2026.