1 in 120,000. Those are your odds of dying in a fall on stairs in a given year. For elevators it’s about 1 in 11 million, and for escalators about 1 in 100 million.
| Deaths per year (U.S.) | Odds per year | Data period | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stairs and steps | ~2,800 | 1 in 120,000 | 2021 |
| Elevators | ~28 | 1 in 11 million | 1992–2010 average |
| Escalators | ~3 | 1 in 100 million | 1992–2010 average |
Chart: comparison bars on a log scale. Signal color on stairs.
The machine people worry about is the least likely to hurt them. The staircase next to it is the real danger.
Elevators: rare, and mostly not the riders
The best national count comes from CPWR, a construction-safety research center, which combined federal workplace-death records with Consumer Product Safety Commission files. It found elevators and escalators together kill about 31 people a year and seriously injure about 17,000, with elevators responsible for roughly 90% of the deaths and 60% of the serious injuries.
The twist: a big share of those deaths aren’t riders at all. In CPWR’s earlier analysis, people working on or near elevators accounted for almost half of the annual deaths. That includes installers, repair crews, and workers near open shafts. Half of the worker deaths in or near shafts were falls into the shaft.
So for someone simply riding, the odds are closer to 1 in 20–25 million a year. Among passengers who died while not at work, a notable share were young children: 16 of 91 deaths involved kids aged 10 or younger.
Escalators: about three deaths a year
Escalators account for only about a tenth of those deaths, roughly three a year nationally, or about 1 in 100 million. The original Book of Odds put it at 1 in 90 million back in 2009. Fifteen years on, the answer has barely moved.
Injuries are a different story. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has estimated about 6,000 emergency-room visits a year tied to escalators. Two groups dominate:
- Older adults, mostly from trips and falls getting on or off.
- Young children, whose fingers, hands and feet can get caught where the moving steps meet the side panel or comb plate.
Stairs: the everyday danger
Death certificates recorded 2,771 deaths from falls on stairs and steps in 2021, or about 1 in 120,000 a year. The toll has held fairly steady at around 2,500–2,800 a year recently. More than a million people a year are treated in emergency rooms for stair falls.
The famous number, re-checked: you’ll often read that 12,000 Americans die on stairs every year, usually credited to the National Safety Council. That’s more than four times what CDC death-certificate data show. The official count probably runs somewhat low, since many fall deaths are recorded without saying where the fall happened. But we found no published data behind 12,000.
Plague vs. escalators
In recent decades the U.S. has averaged about seven human plague cases a year. That’s about 1 in 49 million, so you’re roughly twice as likely to catch plague as to die on an escalator.
How we calculated: Annual deaths divided by U.S. population. We used Census Bureau estimates (341.8 million in July 2025) for recent data, and about 300 million for the 1992–2010 elevator and escalator averages. Figures are rounded. Elevator and escalator counts come from the most recent national analysis; no federal agency publishes an annual count. The data periods differ, but the gaps between stairs, elevators and escalators are large enough that the ranking holds. Last checked: September 2026.
What changed since 2009: Escalator odds are essentially unchanged (1 in 90 million then, about 1 in 100 million now). New in this version: the worker share of elevator deaths, the stair comparison, and the 12,000 myth.
Sources
CPWR: Deaths and Injuries Involving Elevators or Escalators (2012 update, via CDC) · 2006 edition
CPWR report PDF (CPSC escalator alert annex)
CDC WONDER mortality data, ICD-10 W10 (falls on and from stairs and steps), as tabulated at oddsofdying.com. Replace with a direct CDC WONDER query before publishing.