IMCA's 2025 Numbers: Injury Rates Are Improving, But Offshore Fatalities More Than Doubled

The Headline That Undersells the Real Story

IMCA's Safety Statistics Report for 2025, covering 167 contributing member companies and just over 1.02 billion man-hours, shows the Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) improving to 0.27, down from 0.30 in 2024. Total Recordable Injury Rate came in at 0.98 (1.14 offshore-only). Read alone, that's an improving-safety headline. IMCA itself is explicit that it isn't the full picture: fatalities rose from 3 in 2024 to 7 in 2025, four of them offshore. The Fatal Accident Rate more than doubled, from 0.30 to 0.69.

What IMCA Itself Is Warning About

IMCA's own release is unusually direct for an industry statistics report: improving injury-rate metrics, it warns, should not distract the offshore contracting industry from the risks that still claim lives. That's a genuinely important framing point – a falling LTIFR can create a sense that overall risk is trending down, when a smaller number of far more serious events is actually trending in the opposite direction. Named causes among the seven 2025 fatalities include electrocution, a fall from height, and a mooring incident where a rope parted; causes for the remaining fatalities were not detailed in the summary reporting available.

The Other Numbers

The Safety Observation Frequency Rate came in at 387.06 – a measure of how actively companies are logging near-misses and safety observations, not just recordable incidents. A high observation rate alongside a rising fatality rate is worth sitting with: it suggests reporting culture isn't the gap here, since companies are clearly generating observation data. The gap is between what gets observed and what gets acted on before it becomes fatal.