How many people in the United States end up in a hospital emergency department with an injury involving a pen or a pencil, what are the odds of being one of them in a year, and which ages turn up most often? The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) records these injuries case by case in its National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), and its 2025 case data can answer all three, with some arithmetic of our own.
The 2025 answer
By our estimate, about 21,900 people were treated in US hospital emergency departments in 2025 for injuries involving pens or pencils. This figure is ours: we added up CPSC’s 2025 case records for the product, using the weights CPSC attaches to each case.
That makes it an estimate from a national sample of hospitals, not a count of every visit. Like any sample-based estimate, it carries some uncertainty from chance, which is why we round it and call it “about”.
Spread across the US population, about 21,900 works out to about 1 in 15,600 people in 2025 (our arithmetic). For the population, we used the Census Bureau’s estimate of the US resident population on July 1, 2025, the same kind of figure CPSC uses for its own injury rates.
Who is treated
Children and young teens aged 5 to 14 made up nearly half of our 2025 estimate. We give no other age breakdown, because every other age group rests on fewer sample cases.
What the estimate counts
NEISS is a probability sample. Each case carries a statistical weight, and CPSC builds its national estimates by summing those weights. We did the same for every 2025 case that lists pens or pencils as one of its products.
“Involving” is the right word here. A NEISS case can list up to three products, so the same injury can also count under another product. A pen or pencil being recorded in a case does not mean it was the reason for the injury. For scale, CPSC’s own published estimate is that about 1.1 million people were treated in US ERs in 2024 for injuries involving beds, mattresses or pillows.
CPSC’s coding manual gives pens and pencils their own product code, and it files an eraser attached to a pen or pencil under that same code.
The short version
In 2025, about 21,900 people were treated in US hospital emergency departments for injuries involving pens or pencils, by our estimate from CPSC’s case data. That is about 1 in 15,600 people (our arithmetic), and nearly half were aged 5 to 14.
Last checked: 2026-10-20, against CPSC’s NEISS 2025 case data and 2024 coding manual, CPSC’s 2024 NEISS Data Highlights and the Census Bureau’s 2025 population estimates. This article was machine-checked against the sources above and has not been expert-reviewed. Spotted an error or a newer public figure? Please tell us on our contact page with the article link and we will review it.
Sources
- S1 US Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) case data for 2025 (the full public case file), product code for pens and pencils; our weighted sum. Saved copy accessed Oct 20, 2026.
- S2 US Consumer Product Safety Commission, NEISS Coding Manual (January 2024), product code list and eraser note. Saved copy accessed Oct 20, 2026.
- S3 US Consumer Product Safety Commission, “NEISS Data Highlights (Top 20 Product Groups by Age Group), 2024”, footnotes on estimates and rates, and the beds, mattresses and pillows estimate. Saved copy accessed Oct 20, 2026.
- S4 US Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 national population estimates (NST-EST2025-ALLDATA), US resident population, July 1, 2025. https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/datasets/2020-2025/state/totals/NST-EST2025-ALLDATA.csv . Saved copy accessed Oct 20, 2026.