The Madrid-based National Institute for Safety and Health at Work (INSST) in Spain published the report “Actividades prioritarias en función de la siniestralidad. Datos 2025” (Priority activities based on accident figures, 2025 data) on 8 October 2026. The document identifies economic activities where preventive measures should take priority, based on the extent to which they contribute to occupational accidents.
Methodology: two parameters per sector
INSST ranks activities at the two-digit level of the Spanish business classification CNAE (Clasificación Nacional de Actividades Económicas, Spain’s national classification of economic activities), using two parameters: the incidence of occupational accidents involving sick leave during work, expressed as the number of accidents per 100,000 employees, and the number of employees insured against occupational accidents in that activity. An accident is attributed to the activity of the company with which the affected employee is registered.
Based on this, activities are divided into quartile matrices for three variables: the total number of accidents, the number of serious and fatal accidents, and the size of the insured workforce. Activities that score high in these matrices on both accident incidence and number of employees are identified as priorities for prevention. The data is further broken down by gender.
Construction, agriculture and transport lead in serious accidents
According to the summary INSST published with the 2025 edition, priority activities for all accidents involving sick leave include, among others, the food industry, building construction, specialised construction work, and residential care services. For serious and fatal accidents, priority activities include agriculture, livestock farming and hunting and related services, building construction, specialised construction work, and land and pipeline transport.
This picture is consistent with the previous edition. When presenting the 2024 data in August 2025, INSST already named construction, transport, and agriculture, livestock farming and hunting as the economic activities with the highest risk of serious and fatal occupational accidents. The report is part of a long-running series: INSST’s document page offers editions with data going back to 2007. By updating the ranking each time, prevention efforts can focus on the activities where the most recent figures show the greatest risks.
Context
Using sector-level accident figures to target prevention and oversight is also common outside Spain, including at EU level. According to Eurostat, the European Union recorded a total of 3,367 fatal occupational accidents in 2024, 45 more than a year earlier, while the number of non-fatal accidents involving at least four days of sick leave fell by 1.5 percent to 2.78 million. There were 1.65 deaths per 100,000 persons in employment; that rate has stayed below 2 since 2016. Both the EU-wide figures and the Spanish sector data show that accident risks vary strongly by industry, and that targeted prevention in the highest-risk sectors can have the greatest effect.
Source: Actividades prioritarias en función de la siniestralidad. Datos 2025, 8 October 2026
Additional research: INSST, Píldora informativa: Actividades prioritarias en función de la siniestralidad. Datos 2025; INSST, press release on Datos 2024 (28 August 2025); Eurostat, Accidents at work statistics (2024 data)
