Global Maritime Safety Statistics
Real, verified figures from the bodies that actually investigate and regulate maritime safety — IMCA, TSB Canada, ABS, MAIB and AMSA, with more added as new reports are verified. Every number here was read from the primary report, not estimated or copied from a headline.
Last updated 15 August 2026 · 5 sources tracked
Injury rates are improving, but fatalities more than doubled — IMCA's own release warns the improving injury-rate headline is masking that risk.
Fatalities hit a 10-year low, but fishing vessels remain the single highest-risk vessel category — and total accidents rose year-over-year.
Fire safety dominates detentions by a wide margin, and ABS explicitly links detention risk to equipment readiness, procedural discipline and crew familiarity — not vessel age.
Fishing fatalities remain at a historic low, but MAIB's own assessment is blunt: merchant-vessel collisions and groundings "show no sign of reducing."
AMSA's own report cautions against reading the year-over-year drop at face value — it's mostly a classification change. Passenger vessels remain wildly overrepresented relative to their share of the fleet.
What This Means for Training Focus
- Fishing vessels remain the highest-risk vessel category by accident share (TSB Canada) — stability, overloading, and cold-water survival training deserve continued, not reduced, weight in a fishing-vessel training curriculum.
- Fire safety is the dominant PSC detention theme (ABS) — drills and routine checks matter more than equipment age; training that closes the gap between documented procedure and what actually happens during an inspection walk-round has the most leverage here.
- Offshore/DP-sector fatalities are rising even as injury rates improve (IMCA) — a real, current argument for scenario-based decision training that specifically targets the moment an "everyday" task (a lift, a mooring operation, a console input) turns serious, not just general safety awareness.
- Crew familiarity, not just certification, is repeatedly named as the real variable across every source above — this is precisely the gap Crew Connect's real-incident Decision Simulator training is built to close, and the reason this page exists: the statistics point directly at where realistic, scenario-based training earns its keep.
This page is a living reference, not a one-off snapshot — updated whenever a new annual or quarterly report from a tracked source is fetched, read in full, and verified, following the same primary-source standard as every incident write-up on this site. Note on ATSB: unlike MAIB, AMSA and TSB Canada, ATSB does not appear to publish a standalone marine-specific safety statistics report — marine data is folded into its combined cross-modal Annual Report without an isolable marine figure. We're not publishing an estimated ATSB number here rather than guess at one; this will be revisited if a genuine marine-specific ATSB publication is found.
See how Crew Connect trains for the risks these numbers show
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