Research on outdoor work.
We build rostering and timesheet software for people who work outside, which meant reading a great deal of data on what happens to them. Most of it turned out to be a scheduling story rather than a safety one: the exposures that hurt Australian outdoor workers are largely created on the day the roster is written.
This is what we found, published in full, with the sources and the caveats attached.
Start wherever you are.
The answer page if you want the numbers, the employer edition if you run a crew, and the technical edition if you assess evidence for a living.
Outdoor work safety in Australia: the 2026 numbers
The short version. 11 questions, 11 direct answers, every figure sourced, ending with whether an employer should be measuring phone use at all.
The State of Outdoor Work in Australia, employer edition
The full report. Who works outside, what kills them, what injures them, how the compliance floor moved in 2026, why every one of those hazards is decided by the roster, and 9 things an employer can do this quarter.
The State of Outdoor Work, technical edition
Method notes, data vintages, meta-analytic effect sizes with confidence intervals, a dated regulatory register, 5 documented evidence gaps and a proposed research agenda.
Australian data counts harm well and counts conditions not at all.
We know how many workers died and how many claims were made. We do not know what the weather was, how many consecutive days anyone had worked, how many people were on foot at the time, or how many near misses came first.
Sources: Safe Work Australia, Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025; serious claims 2023-24 preliminary. The absence of distraction research is documented by the search set out in the technical edition, and should not be read as a claim that no link exists.
How to use it.
- Fatality data is calendar year 2024. Claim counts and frequency rates are financial year 2023-24 preliminary and will be revised upward. Medians are financial year 2022-23. Do not mix the vintages.
- Outdoor work is not a category any Australian statistical agency measures. The workforce figure is an industry-division proxy, and the report says so.
- The research does not claim that phone use causes Australian occupational injuries. It establishes that the mechanisms which do the killing are attention-dependent, that phone use degrades those mechanisms in laboratory and road settings, and that nobody has measured the link in an outdoor work setting. Please preserve that distinction.
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