RIDDOR Reporting Explained: What UK Employers Must Report — and the Deadlines

If you employ people in the UK, RIDDOR is one of the few pieces of health and safety law that turns a bad day into a legal obligation with a deadline attached. Get it right and it is a routine form. Get it wrong — report late, report the wrong thing, or fail to report at all — and you are exposed to enforcement action from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). This guide breaks down exactly what RIDDOR requires, in plain English.

What is RIDDOR?

RIDDOR stands for the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013. It places a legal duty on certain people to report — and keep records of — specific workplace incidents to the relevant enforcing authority, usually the HSE or your local authority. It is the mechanism that turns what happened on site into the national picture of workplace risk. RIDDOR 2013 is the version currently in force; you can read the official guidance on the HSE's RIDDOR pages.

Who has to report? The "responsible person"

RIDDOR duties fall on the responsible person — not on the injured worker, and not on a member of the public who was hurt. The responsible person is usually one of:

• Employers — responsible for reporting incidents involving their employees, wherever they are working.
• The self-employed — responsible for reporting certain incidents involving themselves.
• People in control of work premises — responsible where the incident happens at premises under their control.

For a dispersed field workforce, that "wherever they are working" clause matters: an engineer injured on a customer's site three counties away is still your responsibility to report.

What's reportable under RIDDOR?

Not every accident is reportable, and this is where most confusion starts. RIDDOR covers seven broad categories.

Deaths

Any work-related death — of a worker or a non-worker — arising from a work-related accident, including a death caused by an act of violence to a worker. Suicides and deaths from natural causes are generally outside RIDDOR.

Specified injuries to workers

"Specified injuries" are the serious injuries listed in the regulations. They include:

• Fractures, other than to fingers, thumbs and toes
• Amputation of an arm, hand, finger, thumb, leg, foot or toe
• Any injury likely to cause permanent loss of, or reduction in, sight
• A crush injury to the head or torso causing damage to the brain or internal organs
• Serious burns covering more than 10% of the body, or affecting the eyes, respiratory system or other vital organs
• Any scalping requiring hospital treatment
• Loss of consciousness caused by head injury or asphyxia
• Any injury from working in an enclosed space leading to hypothermia, heat illness, or requiring resuscitation or 24+ hours in hospital

Over-seven-day injuries

If a worker is incapacitated — away from work or unable to perform their normal duties — for more than seven consecutive days as a result of a workplace accident, that is reportable. The seven days do not include the day of the accident, but they do include weekends and rest days.

Injuries to members of the public

Where a work-related accident injures a member of the public and they are taken directly from the scene to hospital for treatment, it is reportable. A diagnostic test such as an X-ray does not, on its own, count as "treatment".

Occupational diseases

Following a written diagnosis, certain work-related diseases are reportable, including carpal tunnel syndrome, hand-arm vibration syndrome (HAVS), occupational dermatitis, occupational asthma, tendonitis or tenosynovitis of the hand or forearm, occupational cancer, and disease from exposure to a biological agent.

Dangerous occurrences

These are specified near-miss events with a high potential to cause death or serious injury, listed in Schedule 2 of the regulations — they are reportable even when nobody is hurt. Examples include:

• Collapse or failure of lifting equipment
• Failure of a pressure system
• Plant or equipment contacting overhead power lines
• Collapse of scaffolding over five metres high
• An electrical short circuit or overload causing a fire or explosion
• Accidental release of a substance that could cause injury to health

Gas incidents

Suppliers of flammable gas must report incidents involving death, loss of consciousness or hospital treatment connected with the gas, and Gas Safe registered engineers must report dangerous gas fittings.

RIDDOR reporting deadlines — the clock that catches people out

Each category has its own deadline, and the clock usually starts on the date of the incident:

• Deaths, specified injuries and dangerous occurrences: notify the HSE without delay (by phone or online), then ensure a report is received within 10 days of the incident.
• Over-seven-day injuries: report within 15 days of the accident.
• Occupational diseases: report as soon as you receive the written diagnosis.
• Over-three-day injuries: do not report — but you must record them.

The 15-day over-seven-day deadline is the silent trap. A worker is hurt, takes a few days off, and the case looks minor — then the absence quietly rolls past seven days while nobody is watching the calendar. By the time anyone notices, the reporting window is already running.

How to make a RIDDOR report

Most reports are made through the HSE's online RIDDOR forms, with separate forms for injuries, dangerous occurrences, diseases and gas incidents. A telephone line (0345 300 9923) is reserved for fatal and specified-injury incidents only — everything else goes online. When you submit, you receive a confirmation and a reference number; keep it.

Keeping records

You must keep a record of every reportable incident and every over-three-day injury for at least three years. A record should capture 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 what happened. Because those records contain personal data, store them in line with your GDPR obligations.

What happens if you don't report?

Failing to report a reportable incident is a criminal offence under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, with penalties strengthened by the Health and Safety (Offences) Act 2008. Serious breaches can carry an unlimited fine and, in the most serious cases, imprisonment of up to two years. Under section 37 of the 1974 Act, directors and managers can be prosecuted personally where an offence results from their consent, connivance or neglect. Enforcement often targets a pattern of non-compliance — but a missed fatality report is a category of its own.

The real problem isn't the rules — it's the data

Read the regulations and RIDDOR is clear enough. What breaks compliance in practice is the gap between an incident happening on a remote site and the office finding out about it in time to act. Paper forms get left in vans. Details fade. Absence isn't tracked against the seven-day line. The information you need to decide whether something is reportable — and to prove you reported it — simply isn't captured cleanly.

That is exactly the gap jobsafe is built to close. Incidents are captured at the point they happen, with photos, GPS and a timestamp, even offline — and every action is held in an immutable audit trail you can put in front of an HSE inspector or your insurer. If you are also working on getting ahead of incidents before they become RIDDOR reports, our guide to near miss reporting is the natural next read.

Staying audit-ready

RIDDOR compliance is not really about knowing the rules — most safety managers already do. It is about having a fast, reliable way to capture every incident, flag the ones that cross a reporting threshold, hit the deadline, and prove all of it after the fact. Build that into how your teams already work and RIDDOR stops being a risk and becomes routine.

Want to see how jobsafe handles incident capture and audit trails across a dispersed field team? Take a look at how it works, or call us on 0333 8000 883.