The short answer
Under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013, the responsible person — usually the employer — must report to the enforcing authority any work-related accident that kills someone, causes a worker one of the listed specified injuries, leaves a worker unable to do their normal work for more than seven consecutive days, or sends a member of the public straight from the scene to hospital for treatment; plus diagnosed cases of eight categories of occupational disease, and the dangerous occurrences listed in Schedule 2 of the Regulations. Deaths, specified injuries, non-worker hospital cases and dangerous occurrences must be notified without delay and the report received within 10 days; over-seven-day injuries within 15 days; diseases as soon as the diagnosis is received.
Reporting is online at hse.gov.uk, with a telephone service kept for fatal and specified injuries only. Every reportable event, and every injury that keeps a worker off normal duties for more than three days, must be recorded, and HSE's guidance is that the record must be kept for three years. The single most useful distinction on this page is the last one: an over-three-day injury is recorded, an over-seven-day injury is reported, and confusing the two produces both over-reporting and — far more often — the late report that becomes its own offence.
How this page is sourced
Every category, deadline and rule below is taken from the Health and Safety Executive's RIDDOR guidance at hse.gov.uk — the pages on types of reportable incidents, specified injuries, occupational diseases, dangerous occurrences, when to report, who should report, how to report, what records to keep and exemptions — together with HSE's leaflet INDG453 and its health and social care information sheet HSIS1, all read in September 2026. RIDDOR 2013 applies in Great Britain; Northern Ireland has its own regulations. Confirm anything you are about to rely on against hse.gov.uk, which is updated as the guidance changes.
What RIDDOR is, and who has to report
RIDDOR is the law that requires employers, and other people in control of work premises, to report and keep records of work-related deaths, certain serious injuries, diagnosed cases of certain occupational diseases and certain dangerous occurrences. Its purpose, in HSE's words, is "to inform the relevant enforcing authority that a work-related accident or incident has happened", so that HSE or the local authority can decide whether to investigate. The current Regulations came into force on 1 October 2013, replacing the older "major injury" list with a shorter list of specified injuries and 47 industrial diseases with eight categories.
Only the responsible person reports. HSE lists three: employers, in relation to their workers; some self-employed people; and those in control of work premises when a reportable accident or event has occurred there. An employer must report events involving its employees wherever they are working. A person in control of premises must report work-related deaths, injuries to members of the public and to self-employed people on the premises, and dangerous occurrences that happen there. Injured people, members of the public and others without RIDDOR duties should not use the reporting system — if they are concerned an incident has not been reported, HSE's route is to raise a concern with HSE instead.
Special cases have their own responsible person: the mine manager for a mine, the quarry operator for a quarry, the pipeline operator for a dangerous occurrence at a pipeline, the diving contractor for a diving project, and the duty holder under the offshore installations regulations for most offshore incidents. Employment agencies are dealt with in the questions at the end.
Two tests before the categories: work-related, and an accident
A RIDDOR report is required only when an accident is work-related and it results in a reportable injury. Both tests come first, and both are narrower than people assume. An accident, for RIDDOR, is "a separate, identifiable, unintended incident which causes physical injury". Acts of non-consensual violence to people at work are specifically included. Injuries without an identifiable external event — "feeling a sharp pain" — are not accidents, and gradual, cumulative exposures such as repetitive lifting are not classed as accidents either; those fall, if anywhere, under the disease categories.
"Work-related" means arising out of or in connection with work, and HSE is explicit that it does not depend on blame: an accident may be reportable even where no health and safety law was broken and nobody was at fault. Nor is an accident work-related simply because it happened on work premises. The test is whether the work played a role — the way the work was organised, supervised or performed; any machinery, plant, substances or equipment used; or the condition of the workplace, from the fabric of the building to the state of floors, stairs and lighting. If none of those factors is involved, a report is unlikely to be required.
Some events are exempt even when they would otherwise qualify: accidents during medical or dental treatment or examination; accidents involving a moving vehicle on a public road, unless they involve loading or unloading, work alongside the road such as maintenance, an escape of a substance from the vehicle, or a train; and accidents to members of the armed forces on duty. Reports are also not required where they would duplicate reporting under other regimes such as the Nuclear Installations Act, the Ionising Radiations Regulations or the aviation accident regulations.
What must be reported
Seven categories, each with its own test. The first four are injuries; then diseases, dangerous occurrences and gas incidents. The lists below are HSE's own wording, lightly compressed.
The death of any person
With the exception of suicides, the death of any person must be reported if it resulted from a work-related accident — including deaths of people who are not your workers. If a person suffers a reportable work-related injury and dies from it within one year (365 days), the death must be reported as a work-related fatality even though the injury was already reported. There is no requirement to report the death of a self-employed person on premises where they are the sole owner or occupier.
Specified injuries to workers
Regulation 4 lists the specified injuries. They are reportable when they happen to a worker as a result of a work-related accident:
- Fractures, other than to fingers, thumbs and toes — a break, crack or chip, reportable when diagnosed or confirmed by a doctor, including on a fit note, or where a doctor considers a fracture likely without an X-ray. Self-diagnosed "suspected fractures" are not.
- Amputation of an arm, hand, finger, thumb, leg, foot or toe — traumatic at the time, or surgical afterwards as a result of the injuries.
- Any injury likely to lead to permanent blinding or reduction in sight in one or both eyes, reportable when a doctor diagnoses that the effects are likely to be permanent.
- Any crush injury to the head or torso causing damage to the brain or internal organs in the chest or abdomen.
- Serious burns, including scalding, which cover more than 10% of the body or cause significant damage to the eyes, respiratory system or other vital organs — whatever caused them, including chemical and radiological burns. Smoke inhalation damage is not included.
- Any scalping requiring hospital treatment — traumatic separation of skin from the head, for example hair caught in machinery. Lacerations without separation, and hair-pulling, are not.
- Any loss of consciousness caused by head injury or asphyxia, however long it lasts. Fainting from feeling unwell is not reportable.
- Any other injury arising from working in an enclosed space which leads to hypothermia or heat-induced illness, or requires resuscitation or admittance to hospital for more than 24 hours.
Over-seven-day incapacitation of a worker
A work-related accident must be reported where it results in an employee or self-employed person being away from work, or unable to do their normal work duties, for more than seven consecutive days as a result of their injury. The seven days do not include the day of the accident but do include weekends and rest days, and days the person would not normally have been expected to work must still be counted. Where the injury or condition does not become apparent until later, it must be reported as soon as it has prevented the person doing their normal duties for more than seven consecutive days.
Non-fatal accidents to people who are not at work
An accident to a member of the public or anyone else not at work — a customer, a visitor, a volunteer — is reportable if it involved a work activity, it resulted in an injury, and the person was taken directly from the scene to hospital for treatment to that injury. Examinations and diagnostic tests such as X-rays do not count as treatment; a dressing, stitches, a plaster cast or surgery do. There is no need to report someone taken to hospital purely as a precaution when no injury is apparent. If the accident occurred at a hospital, the responsible person at the hospital reports it only if it is a specified injury.
Occupational diseases
Employers and self-employed people must report diagnoses of the listed diseases where they are likely to have been caused or made worse by the person's work — and only once a doctor has made a written diagnosis, which the employee must provide to the employer (a self-employed person needs only a doctor's verbal diagnosis). The eight categories under regulations 8 and 9 are:
- Carpal tunnel syndrome, where the work involves regular use of hand-held percussive or vibrating power tools — not typing.
- Cramp of the hand or forearm, chronic, where the work involves prolonged periods of repetitive movement of the fingers, hand or arm.
- Occupational dermatitis, where the work involves significant or regular exposure to a known skin sensitiser or irritant.
- Hand-arm vibration syndrome, where the work involves regular use of percussive or vibrating power tools, or holding materials that vibrate while being processed.
- Occupational asthma, where the work involves significant or regular exposure to a known respiratory sensitiser.
- Tendonitis or tenosynovitis of the hand or forearm, where the work is physically demanding and involves frequent, repetitive movements.
- Any occupational cancer, where there is an established causal link between the cancer and a work exposure to a known carcinogen or mutagen — mesothelioma in a person occupationally exposed to asbestos, for example.
- Any disease attributed to an occupational exposure to a biological agent, whether from an identifiable incident such as a needlestick or animal bite, or an unidentified one such as legionella exposure during maintenance. Community infections such as colds and flu are generally not reportable.
Dangerous occurrences
Dangerous occurrences are specified incidents with a high potential to cause death or serious injury, listed in Schedule 2 of the Regulations — HSE's leaflet describes them as "specified 'near-miss' events" and counts 27 categories relevant to most workplaces, with further categories for mines, quarries, offshore workplaces and transport systems. No injury is required. Examples from the general list: the collapse, overturning or failure of a load-bearing part of lifting equipment; the failure of a pressure system with the potential to cause death; unintentional contact between plant and an uninsulated overhead line above 200 volts, or an electrical discharge from close proximity; an electrical short circuit or overload causing fire or explosion that puts the equipment out of use for more than 24 hours or could have caused death; a release or escape of a biological agent likely to cause severe infection; the complete or partial collapse of a substantial part of a scaffold more than five metres high; the unintentional collapse of a structure involving a fall of more than five tonnes of material, or of any falsework; and a fire or explosion causing work to be suspended for more than 24 hours.
HSE's own framing is worth quoting because it removes the usual excuse for not reporting: "Reporting dangerous occurrences does not require complex analysis. It is more about making a reasonable judgement on whether the incident caused a real risk of harm." Read the Schedule 2 guidance for your sector rather than working from a memory of it.
Gas incidents
Distributors, fillers, importers and suppliers of flammable gas must report incidents in connection with that gas where someone has died, lost consciousness or been taken to hospital for treatment, and Gas Safe registered engineers must report gas appliances or fittings they consider dangerous enough that people could die, lose consciousness or need hospital treatment because of their design, construction, installation, modification or servicing. Both have their own online forms.
The deadlines
There are three clocks. For deaths, specified injuries to workers, non-worker hospital cases and dangerous occurrences, the responsible person must notify the enforcing authority without delay, and HSE states that the report must be received within 10 days of the incident. For over-seven-day incapacitation, the report must be made within 15 days of the accident. For occupational diseases, including cancers and diseases from biological agents, the report is made as soon as the responsible person receives a diagnosis.
Without delay, report received within 10 days: death; specified injury to a worker; non-worker taken to hospital for treatment; dangerous occurrence.
Within 15 days of the accident: over-seven-day incapacitation of a worker. The seven days are counted first, so in practice the decision to report is often made on day eight and the report on day nine.
On receipt of the diagnosis: occupational disease, occupational cancer, disease from a biological agent. The clock does not start at the first symptom; it starts when a doctor's written diagnosis reaches the employer.
"Without delay" is the operative phrase for the serious end. Ten days is the backstop for the report being received, not a period you are entitled to use. For a death or a serious accident, HSE has an out-of-hours duty officer, and the expectation is a phone call, not a form filed the following week.
Reportable versus recordable
Not every recordable injury is reportable, and the gap between the two is where most confusion sits. An accident that leaves a worker away from work or unable to do their normal duties for more than three consecutive days must be recorded — but HSE is explicit that you do not need to report it; recording it in your accident book, which employers must keep under social security law, is enough. Only when the incapacitation passes seven consecutive days does it become reportable, within 15 days of the accident.
So an injury that keeps someone off for five days is an accident-book entry; the same injury that keeps them off for nine is a RIDDOR report. The counting rules are the same for both — the day of the accident is excluded, weekends and rest days are included — which means a system that records the accident on day one and reviews the absence on day eight will catch every over-seven-day case without reporting any that fall short. A system that decides on day one whether to report will get it wrong in both directions.
The decision most often missed
The over-seven-day category is decided by a calendar, not by the incident. Deaths, specified injuries and dangerous occurrences announce themselves on the day. A worker who went home with a sore back and never came back to normal duties is only discovered by someone watching absence records against the accident record. Organisations whose incident register and absence records live in different places are the ones that report late — and a late report is a separate breach from whatever caused the injury.
Two other things are recordable but not reportable: first-aid treatment for minor injuries, which belongs in the accident book; and near misses that are not Schedule 2 dangerous occurrences, which the Regulations do not touch but which any competent safety system records for its own purposes.
How to report
Online, through the forms at hse.gov.uk/riddor, is the standard route for everything. The responsible person completes the appropriate form — report of an injury, report of a dangerous occurrence, report of a case of disease, report of a flammable gas incident, or report of a dangerous gas fitting — and it is submitted directly to the RIDDOR database, with the option to download a copy for your records. HSE's advice is to read the relevant guidance first so that you pick the right form. A telephone service on 0345 300 9923 is kept for fatal accidents and accidents resulting in specified injuries to workers only.
Two practical points. The confirmation screen after submission shows the RIDDOR reference number and offers a PDF copy of the form; save it, because it is the simplest way of meeting the record-keeping requirement below, and you will need the reference number for any amendment. And amendments go through a duplicate form: if a reported injury later results in a fatality, or other details change, you can call the Incident Contact Centre for fatal or major injuries, or submit a duplicate form online with "Amendment to Incident Reference Number" and the original number at the start of the description box. You will not receive confirmation of a telephone amendment; a note is added to the record.
Offshore incidents are reported through the Report of an Oil and Gas Incident form to the offshore regulator, incidents at nuclear sites go to the Office for Nuclear Regulation, and incidents on the railway and other relevant transport systems go to the Office of Rail and Road. HSE's guidance also notes that information in a RIDDOR report is not passed to your insurer — tell them separately.
Records: what to keep, and for three years
You must keep a record of any reportable injury, over-seven-day injury, disease or dangerous occurrence, and of any other occupational accident that results in a worker being incapacitated for more than three consecutive days. HSE's guidance for employers is that the record must be kept for three years. If you keep the PDF copy of the online form, that is the record. If you do not, the record must include the date and method of reporting; the date, time and place of the event; the personal details of those involved; and a brief description of the nature of the event or disease.
Employers who must keep an accident book under social security law can use it for injury records, but HSE notes that a separate method is needed for cases of disease. Whatever the method, RIDDOR records must be produced when asked for by HSE, local authority or ORR inspectors — and in practice an inspector following up a report asks for far more than the record itself: the risk assessment for the task, the training records of the people involved, the maintenance history of any equipment, and what was done about the last similar event.
Three years is a minimum, and it is the wrong number to build a system around. A report of a fatality, a claim, or an HSE investigation can run for longer than that; the sensible policy is to keep anything attached to a reported event permanently, and to treat the three years as the floor for everything else.
Common mistakes
Almost all of them come from applying the wrong test. The pattern is consistent enough to list against the rule each one breaks.
- Reporting over-three-day injuries. They are recordable, not reportable. Over-reporting is not an offence, but it wastes the regulator's time and trains your own people to stop reading the categories.
- Missing over-seven-day injuries. The reverse, and far more common, because nobody reconciles the accident record with the absence record on day eight.
- Counting the seven days wrong. Excluding weekends, or including the day of the accident. Both are contrary to HSE's guidance and both change the answer.
- Waiting for the investigation. The serious categories are notified without delay on the facts as known. Deciding to investigate first is how a 10-day backstop is missed.
- Treating "taken to hospital" as the test for workers. For workers, the test is the specified-injury list or seven days' incapacitation. Hospital attendance is the test only for people who are not at work.
- Not reporting because nobody was hurt. Dangerous occurrences require no injury. A scaffold collapse with everyone at lunch is still reportable.
- Not reporting because nobody was to blame. Work-relatedness does not depend on fault. An accident with no breach of the law can still be reportable.
- The wrong responsible person, or none. Agency workers, self-employed contractors and shared sites produce gaps where each party assumes the other reported. Decide it in the contract, before the event.
- Reporting a disease on symptoms. The trigger is a doctor's written diagnosis given to the employer, and the report is made when it is received — not before, and not months after.
- Losing the reference number. Without it, amending a report — including one that became a fatality — means starting from the beginning.
Where we come in
Teammate App is our product, so treat this section as what it is. RIDDOR turns on a small number of things a system either does or does not do: it records every accident on the day, holds the incapacitation dates against the same record so that the over-seven-day threshold is visible on day eight, keeps the RIDDOR reference and the PDF with the incident, links the investigation and corrective actions to it, and retains all of it for longer than three years. That is what our platform is built to hold — 15 modules across incidents, risk, audits, actions, training, contractors, assets and documents, aligned to ISO 45001, 9001 and 14001, on web, iOS and Android, and working offline. Our own information security management system is certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 by Telarc under JAS-ANZ accreditation, and customer data is hosted in Australia on AWS Sydney.
What software cannot do is make the report. The responsible person submits it to HSE, the category decision is a human one made on the facts, and no product can tell you whether a doctor is likely to confirm a fracture. A records system makes the over-seven-day case impossible to miss and the three-year record impossible to lose. The decision, and the duty, are still yours.
Questions we get asked
Do I have to report a near miss under RIDDOR?
Only if it is one of the dangerous occurrences listed in Schedule 2 of the Regulations. RIDDOR does not have a general near-miss category: a dangerous occurrence is a specified event with a high potential to cause death or serious injury — the collapse or overturning of lifting equipment, a scaffold more than five metres high collapsing, unintentional contact with an overhead power line above 200 volts, an electrical short circuit causing fire or explosion that puts equipment out of use for more than 24 hours, an accidental release of a biological agent likely to cause severe infection, and so on. HSE lists 27 categories that apply to most workplaces, with more for mines, quarries, offshore workplaces and transport systems. A near miss outside those categories is not reportable, though it is worth recording internally, and HSE's own advice is that deciding whether to report one does not require complex analysis — it is a reasonable judgement about whether the incident caused a real risk of harm.
How do I count the seven days for an over-seven-day injury?
Count consecutive days starting the day after the accident. HSE's guidance is that the seven-day period does not include the day of the accident, but does include weekends and rest days — and days the person would not normally have been expected to work still count. So a worker injured on a Friday who cannot do their normal duties on Saturday, Sunday and the following Monday to Friday has been incapacitated for seven consecutive days; if they are still unable to work on the second Saturday, it is more than seven, and the accident becomes reportable. The report must be made within 15 days of the accident. Where the injury does not become apparent until later, it becomes reportable as soon as it has prevented the worker from doing their normal duties for more than seven consecutive days. An injury that causes more than three but not more than seven days' incapacitation is recordable but not reportable.
Who reports an injury to an agency worker or a self-employed contractor?
Whoever is the responsible person for that worker in that situation, which depends on the employment relationship. HSE's guidance is that in many cases the employment agency is the legal employer and carries the same duty to report as any other employer. Where the worker is self-employed and injured on someone else's premises, the person in control of the premises is responsible for reporting a specified or over-seven-day injury, and HSE advises the self-employed person to make sure they know about it. A self-employed person injured on their own premises, or in domestic premises, reports it themselves, as they do a work-related disease a doctor has diagnosed. HSE's advice to agencies is to make sure responsibility is clearly assigned based on the facts and understood by the host business and the worker before anything happens — not after.
A member of the public was taken to hospital as a precaution but was not injured. Do I report it?
No. An accident to someone who is not at work — a customer, a visitor, a volunteer — is reportable only if it arose from a work activity, it resulted in an injury, and the person was taken directly from the scene to hospital for treatment to that injury. HSE is explicit that there is no need to report incidents where people are taken to hospital purely as a precaution when no injury is apparent, and that examinations and diagnostic tests such as X-rays do not count as treatment. Treatment does include having a dressing applied, stitches, a plaster cast or surgery. If the accident happened at a hospital, the responsible person there reports it only if it is a specified injury.
What if I do not yet know how serious the injury is?
You are not required to make a precautionary report of a specified injury. HSE's guidance for cases where the extent of an injury is unclear — an eye injury whose seriousness has not been determined, a limb still being treated that may need surgical amputation — is that there is no requirement to report a specified injury until it has been confirmed, and that the accident will very likely need reporting anyway because the person will be incapacitated for more than seven days. Once a specified injury is confirmed, notify or update the enforcing authority as soon as possible. Keep in mind the separate rule that a fracture is reportable when a doctor diagnoses or confirms it, including on a fit note, or considers a fracture likely even without an X-ray; a self-diagnosed suspected fracture is not.
Does RIDDOR apply in Northern Ireland?
Not the 2013 Regulations. RIDDOR 2013 applies in Great Britain — England, Scotland and Wales — and reports go to HSE or the local authority. Northern Ireland has its own Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (Northern Ireland) 1997, enforced by the Health and Safety Executive for Northern Ireland, and the categories differ: the NI regulations still use the older 'major injury' classification and require over-three-day injuries to be reported, not merely recorded. If you operate in both, run two procedures rather than assuming the GB rules travel.
Written by the Teammate App team. This is general guidance on the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 as they apply in Great Britain and is not legal advice. The categories, definitions, deadlines, reporting routes, record-keeping requirements and exemptions above are taken from the Health and Safety Executive's RIDDOR guidance pages at hse.gov.uk, its leaflet INDG453 "Reporting accidents and incidents at work" and its information sheet HSIS1, all read in September 2026; the Northern Ireland position is taken from the Health and Safety Executive for Northern Ireland. Teammate App has no affiliation with HSE and nothing here is endorsed by it. Guidance changes — confirm current requirements at hse.gov.uk before acting on anything on this page. Teammate App is our own product and is identified as such above.