RIDDOR reporting: what’s reportable, the deadlines, and the common mistakes

Recordable, reportable, and the difference that actually matters

The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 (RIDDOR) don't treat every workplace injury the same way. Understanding which category an incident falls into is the whole game — get it wrong in either direction and you either fail a genuine legal duty or bury a routine injury in unnecessary HSE paperwork.

Specified injuries include fractures (other than to fingers, thumbs and toes), amputations, permanent loss of sight, crush injuries to the head or torso, serious burns, and any injury requiring resuscitation or 24+ hours of hospital admission, among others. Dangerous occurrences are near-misses that could have caused serious harm even though nobody was hurt — a scaffold collapse, an unintended electrical short causing fire or explosion, a lifting equipment failure — and they're reportable regardless of whether an injury actually resulted.

The "incapacitation" test, precisely

The over-7-day and over-3-day categories both hinge on the worker being unable to carry out their normal work duties — not simply being off sick, and not necessarily being off work at all if they're at work but genuinely unable to do their normal role. Common misunderstandings:

• The day of the accident itself doesn't count toward the 7 or 3 days — the clock starts the day after.
• "Normal duties" means the worker's actual job, not any duties at all — someone sat at a desk doing paperwork instead of their usual manual role because of an injury is still incapacitated for RIDDOR purposes.
• Weekends and rest days count toward the day total if the person would otherwise have been unable to work.
• The over-3-day category applies to employees and those working under their control; it doesn't apply to members of the public or self-employed people not under the reporting organisation's control in the same way — different, narrower rules apply to non-workers.

Who has the duty to report

The duty sits with the "responsible person" — typically the employer, but for certain premises (e.g. where a self-employed person is injured while working under someone else's control, such as a contractor on a client's site) the duty can shift to whoever is in control of the premises where the incident happened. This catches organisations out on multi-employer sites: assuming an incident is "the contractor's problem to report" when the RIDDOR duty may actually sit with the site controller.

Members of the public

An injury to a non-worker (a visitor, patient, customer, member of the public) is reportable only if it results from a work activity and the person is taken directly from the scene to hospital for treatment — not simply attending A&E later under their own steam. This threshold is narrower than most people assume, and over-reporting minor public injuries "to be safe" is common but not what the regulations actually require.

Why the category matters practically

Beyond the legal duty itself, the category drives what happens next inside the organisation. A reportable RIDDOR event should trigger a higher tier of internal response — root cause investigation, corrective action, and visibility to whoever is accountable for health and safety performance — than a routine over-3-day recordable injury, which still needs proper investigation but not necessarily the same escalation. Treating every recordable injury with RIDDOR-level urgency burns out a safety team's attention on the wrong things; treating a genuine RIDDOR event as routine is the failure that actually gets an accountable officer in serious difficulty when it surfaces later, whether through an HSE inspection or a claim.

Building a defensible incident pipeline

A workable process makes the reportable/recordable decision at the point the incident is first logged, not days later when memory of exact circumstances has faded and the 10 or 15-day clock is already running down. That means the initial capture — what happened, how bad, where — needs to gather enough detail (injury type, whether hospital treatment was needed, days of incapacitation once known) to apply the decision rules immediately, flag the correct deadline, and surface anything approaching or past that deadline before it becomes a missed statutory duty rather than after. This is the specific gap AssureIQ's incident log is built to close — RIDDOR decision support applied the moment an event is captured, feeding the same pipeline that tracks corrective actions and any statutory notification still outstanding.

Common mistakes

1. Treating "off sick" as automatically RIDDOR-reportable, when the test is inability to do normal duties, assessed day by day.
2. Missing that the day of the accident doesn't count toward the 7 or 3-day threshold.
3. Assuming a contractor incident on your site is automatically the contractor's reporting duty, when site control can shift it to you.
4. Over-reporting minor public injuries that don't meet the "taken directly to hospital" threshold.
5. Discovering an over-7-day incapacitation only after the 15-day window has effectively closed, because nobody was tracking incapacitation days from the accident date.
6. Treating a dangerous occurrence (no injury) as not reportable, when near-misses of the right severity are reportable regardless of harm caused.

This guide is general information, not legal, tax or compliance advice. Rules change — always check the current official guidance for your situation.