The Spanish National Institute for Safety and Health at Work (Instituto Nacional de Seguridad y Salud en el Trabajo, INSST) published a new report on 24 September 2026 on the sociodemographic situation and occupational accidents of young workers in Spain. The study focuses on the 16 to 34 age group and compares it with workers aged 35 and over, with particular attention to differences between men and women within the young workforce.
For the analysis, the INSST combined several data sources: social security registration data, the regular Labour Force Survey (Encuesta de Población Activa, EPA), a separate EPA youth module from 2024, and official records of occupational accidents. This combination is intended to give a more complete picture than accident figures alone, since young people’s contract type, sector and labour market position can be closely linked to their exposure to workplace risks.
Context
Also examined: the INSST indicator “Jóvenes y trabajo” (2024). This related INSST data on the slightly younger 16-to-30 age group shows that contract insecurity decreases sharply with age: among workers aged 16-17 in Spain, 79.7 percent had a temporary contract, compared with 45.9 percent among 18- to 23-year-olds and 27.3 percent among 24- to 30-year-olds. Among the registered serious and fatal occupational accidents in 2024, 151 cases fell in the 18-23 age group and 296 cases in the 24-30 age group, with hospitality and catering among the sectors in which young workers are relatively often involved in serious accidents. These figures cover a slightly different age bracket than the new report (16-34), and should therefore be read as indicative of the broader trend rather than a one-to-one reflection of the new study.
Temporary contracts as a risk factor
The link between temporary work and accident risk is a well-known concern for occupational safety experts across Europe: younger workers more often have short-term contracts, receive less time to become familiar with a given workplace, and are more often employed in physically demanding sectors such as hospitality, construction and logistics. The new INSST report appears intended to support that pattern with more recent and more detailed figures for 2024, including a breakdown by gender, which is less often systematically mapped internationally.
Two documents, one message
The INSST has spread its findings across two publications: a full technical report for those wanting to examine the methodology and detailed tables, and a short “píldora informativa” (information pill) that summarises the main conclusions concisely for policymakers and employers. This two-track approach reflects how the institute often tries to make complex statistics accessible to a wider audience, including labour inspectorates and prevention services that need to translate the figures into concrete workplace policy.
For HSE professionals outside Spain, the report is relevant because the underlying risk factors — inexperience, temporary employment contracts and overrepresentation in physically demanding work — are not uniquely Spanish. Similar patterns have previously been flagged by Eurostat and the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), which structurally identify young workers across the European Union as a higher-risk group. The Spanish report can thus serve as a case study of how a member state is trying to systematically map this issue.
Editorial note: the INSST’s original announcement does not itself contain concrete figures on the numbers or percentages of occupational accidents among young people; these are presented only in the full technical report and the “píldora informativa”. The figures cited in the Context section come from a related, continuously updated INSST indicator covering a slightly different age group (16-30 rather than 16-34) and serve to illustrate the broader trend.
Source: Población trabajadora joven: perfil sociodemográfico y siniestralidad laboral. Datos 2024, 24 September 2026
