Lost time incident

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Lost time incident: What it means, how to measure it, and how to bring the number down

A lost time incident (LTI) is a work-related injury or illness that stops an employee doing their normal job for at least one full shift or day beyond when it happened. It is one of the most widely used measures of how serious workplace injuries are, because it counts the events that actually take people away from work.

You will see the same idea described in a few different ways. Lost time incident, lost time injury, lost time accident (LTA) and lost time case all point to the same thing – an injury serious enough to cost someone time at work. The label tends to change by country and by industry, not by meaning.

What is a lost time incident?

A lost time incident is any work-related event that results in an employee being unable to carry out their usual duties for one or more full days or shifts after the day of the injury. The time lost can be a single day, several weeks, or in the most serious cases, a permanent inability to return to the role.

It helps to separate two words that get used interchangeably. The incident is the event (the slip, the fall, the contact with machinery). The injury is the harm that follows. A lost time incident is simply an incident where the resulting injury is bad enough to keep someone off work. In day-to-day reporting, most teams use the terms as one and the same.

Because it measures real time away from work, the lost time incident is treated as a core safety key performance indicator (KPI). It feeds two of the most common safety metrics: the lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) and the lost time incident rate (LTIR).

Lost time incident vs lost time injury vs lost time accident

These three terms describe the same event. The difference is regional convention, not definition.

In the UK, a lost time incident sits close to the RIDDOR ‘over-seven-day’ injury – a work injury that leaves someone unable to do their normal work for more than seven consecutive days. Those are legally reportable to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Not every lost time incident is RIDDOR-reportable, but every over-seven-day injury is a lost time incident.

What counts as a lost time incident, and what doesn’t?

For an event to count as a lost time incident, three things usually need to be true:

• The injury or illness is work-related
• The employee cannot perform their normal duties as a result
• They are absent for at least one full day or shift beyond the day of the injury

The following are not normally counted as lost time incidents:

• Injuries that need first aid only and the person carries on working
• Cases where the worker returns the same day with no further time lost
• Injuries that happen off the clock or while commuting (this varies by location)
• Restricted or light duties with no full day lost – these fall under broader measures such as DART (Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred), not lost time on its own

This is why a near miss or close call is never a lost time incident. By definition, no one was hurt. Near misses still matter enormously, but as an early warning, not as a lost time figure.

Examples of lost time incidents

Lost time incidents tend to follow the same small set of causes year after year. According to HSE statistics for 2024/25, slips, trips and falls on the same level account for around 30% of non-fatal workplace injuries in Great Britain, handling, lifting or carrying for 17%, and falls from height for 8%.

Typical examples include:

• A worker slips on an unmarked wet floor, fractures a wrist, and is signed off for two weeks
• An employee strains their back lifting a heavy load without help and cannot return for several shifts
• A technician is struck by a falling object, suffers concussion, and is told to rest for a week
• A burn from hot equipment keeps an operator off the line while it heals

In each case, the common thread is the same – a work-related injury that costs time on the job. A small burn treated with a plaster, where the person keeps working, would not count.

How to calculate the lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR)

The lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) tells you how often lost time incidents happen, scaled to the hours your people actually worked. That makes it possible to compare sites, teams and time periods fairly, even when the headcount changes.

The UK and international formula (per million hours worked):

LTIFR = (Number of lost time injuries × 1,000,000) ÷ Total hours worked

Worked example: A company records 3 lost time injuries across 600,000 hours worked in a year.

LTIFR = (3 × 1,000,000) ÷ 600,000 = 5.0. That means roughly 5 lost time injuries for every million hours worked.

The US/OSHA version uses a different multiplier (200,000, which represents 100 employees working a full year):

LTIR = (Number of lost time incidents × 200,000) ÷ Total hours worked

The same 3 incidents across 600,000 hours would give an LTIR of 1.0. The number looks different only because of the multiplier – the underlying performance is identical. Always state which multiplier you are using when you report, so the figure can’t be misinterpreted.

What is a ‘good’ lost time injury frequency rate?

There is no single ‘good’ number, because ‘safe’ looks very different in an office than it does on a construction site. A good rate is one that is low for your industry and trending down over time.

As a rough guide, commonly cited industry averages put higher-risk sectors such as construction and warehousing well above lower-risk sectors such as professional services. Use published benchmarks as context, not a target. The more useful question is whether your own rate is falling year on year.

View the latest HSE statistics (GB) and Bureau of Labor statistics (US) for the most up-to-date information for your organisation’s particular sector.

Lost time incident vs other safety metrics

Lost time is one measure among several. Knowing how it differs from the others stops you double-counting or comparing the wrong things.

Lost time incidents are deliberately strict. They only count when work is genuinely disrupted, which makes them hard to over-report and useful as a clean signal of serious harm.

Why do lost time incidents matter?

The cost of lost time incidents is human and financial. Across Great Britain, work-related ill health and injury led to an estimated 40.1 million working days lost in 2024/25, at an estimated cost of £22.9 billion a year, according to the HSE. For any single business, each lost time incident means a person hurt, a role to cover, an investigation to run, and often higher insurance costs and harder conversations with clients and regulators.

There is also a reporting gap worth knowing about. In 2024/25, around 680,000 workers self-reported a non-fatal injury, while employers formally reported just 59,219 under RIDDOR. That distance between what happens and what gets recorded is exactly where risk hides, and it is the strongest argument for making reporting quick and accessible.

Why lost time incidents alone won’t keep people safe

Here is the catch with lost time as a measure – it is a lagging indicator. It tells you what has already gone wrong. By the time a lost time incident appears in your figures, someone has already been hurt.

A low number is reassuring, but it is not the same as a safe workplace. It can simply mean you have been lucky, or that minor events are going unreported. To actually drive the number down, you need to pair it with leading indicators – the proactive signals that show where harm is building before it lands:

• Near misses and hazards reported by the frontline
• Inspections and audits completed on time
• Corrective actions closed, not just raised
• Training completion and worker engagement levels

When you track both leading and lagging indicators, lost time stops being a scoreboard you read after the fact and becomes something you can influence in advance.

How to reduce lost time incidents

Bringing lost time down can be achieved through a steady, proactive system. The teams that succeed tend to follow the same pattern:

• Make reporting effortless. Capture every hazard, near miss, accident, and injury in the moment, from a phone, even when offline. The more you see, the earlier you can act.
• Investigate the root cause, not just the event. Use structured root cause analysis so you fix the underlying condition, not the symptom.
• Close the loop on actions. Assign corrective and preventive actions, set owners and deadlines, and track them to completion.
• Assess risk before work starts. Keep risk assessments live and current, and update them when the work changes.
• Engage the frontline. People report when reporting is easy and they see something change as a result. Feedback loops build trust and lift reporting rates.
• Watch the leading indicators. Use safety intelligence dashboards to spot trends early and direct your effort where risk is rising.

How does Notify help you reduce lost time incidents?

Notify is a health and safety software solution, built to move teams from reactive reporting to proactive intervention. Frontline workers can report hazards, near misses, injuries, and more in seconds from any device. Managers get real-time alerts for major incidents and RIDDOR-reportable events. Safety leaders get dashboards that turn that data into trends, KPIs, and clear next steps.

The results are measurable. After moving to Notify, Menzies Distribution Solutions drove a 40% reduction in Lost Time Accidents and RIDDOR-reportable incidents, and City Plumbing Supplies saw a 75% reduction in manual handling incidents.

If reducing lost time is your goal this year, the fastest place to start is more complete data that shows you what is happening on the ground, so you can prioritise time and resource into prevention.

Book a demo to see how Notify can help you cut lost time incidents today.