Older-Adult Fall Deaths by State: What the CDC's 2023 Numbers Show

By MyElderHome · Published November 7, 2026 · Data: CDC National Center for Health Statistics — state table, 2023 final mortality data (NCHS Data Brief No. 532, June 2025); national update, 2024 (MMWR, September 24, 2026). Page updated November 8, 2026.

Every state in the country buries older adults killed by falls — but not at anything like the same rate. In 2023, the most recent year with complete state-by-state data, unintentional falls killed 41,400 Americans age 65 and older. The CDC has since published national figures for 2024 — 43,020 deaths — summarized in the update box below; no official state table for 2024 exists yet. The national death rate was 69.9 per 100,000 older adults. Behind that average sits a spread so wide it is hard to explain away: an older adult in Wisconsin died from a fall at more than five times the rate of an older adult in Alabama.

This is the first MyElderHome data study. We took the state table published by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics — every state, plus the District of Columbia — and put it in one place, with charts, the reasoning behind the numbers, and an honest account of what a family should and should not conclude from their own state's position.

2024 update: the national numbers

The CDC published national fall-death figures for 2024 on September 24, 2026 (MMWR QuickStats, National Center for Health Statistics). The trend has not leveled off:

• 43,020 Americans age 65 and older died from unintentional falls in 2024 — 1,620 more than in 2023. The national crude death rate was 70.3 per 100,000, compared with 69.9 in 2023.
• Men died at a higher rate than women — 74.8 vs. 66.6 per 100,000 — and the rate was higher for men in every age group. (More women died in raw numbers — 22,320 vs. 20,700 — because more women are alive at the oldest ages.)
• Age still dominates. The 2024 rate rose from 19.0 per 100,000 at ages 65–74, to 75.3 at 75–84, to 338.0 at 85 and older — roughly 18 times the youngest group's rate.
• The longer trend is up. On an age-adjusted basis — the measure that accounts for the aging of the population itself — the fall death rate rose 21% between 2018 and 2024, from 64.7 to 78.4 per 100,000 (CDC, Older Adult Falls Data).

Fall death rates rise steeply with age — 2024

Rates are crude (per 100,000 people in each group). Source: CDC/NCHS, MMWR QuickStats, September 24, 2026 (National Vital Statistics System, 2024). Chart: MyElderHome.

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The state table below remains the CDC's 2023 table: NCHS has not published state-level rates for 2024, and we will not estimate them. When an official 2024 state table appears, this page will be updated.

Key findings

• 2024 update: The CDC's newest national figures (September 2026) count 43,020 fall deaths among adults 65+ in 2024 — a crude rate of 70.3 per 100,000 — and an age-adjusted rate up 21% since 2018, from 64.7 to 78.4 per 100,000. State-level 2024 rates have not been published; the state findings below are 2023.
• 41,400 older adults died from unintentional falls in 2023 — a national rate of 69.9 deaths per 100,000 people age 65 and older, according to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS Data Brief No. 532, June 2025). Falls are the leading cause of injury for this age group.
• The highest and lowest states differ more than fivefold. Wisconsin recorded the highest fall death rate in the country at 158.4 per 100,000, followed by Minnesota (132.6), Maine (126.5), Oklahoma (122.2), and Vermont (120.9). Alabama recorded the lowest at 29.5, followed by New Jersey (34.6), California (40.0), Louisiana (45.6), and Georgia (45.9).
• Ten states had rates of 100 or more per 100,000 — every one of them at least 43% above the national rate. At the other end, 21 states and the District of Columbia sat below the national rate, and South Carolina matched it exactly.
• Age swamps geography. Nationally, the fall death rate rose from 19.2 per 100,000 at ages 65–74, to 74.7 at ages 75–84, to 339.5 at 85 and older. And the trend is still climbing: between 2003 and 2023, rates increased in every older age group — among adults 85 and older, the rate doubled for men (178.3 to 373.3) and rose about 2.5 times for women (128.5 to 319.7).
• Men died at higher rates than women — 74.2 per 100,000 compared with 66.3 — overall and in every age group.

The highest and lowest states at a glance

Both charts use the same scale, in deaths per 100,000 adults age 65 and older. The dashed line marks the national rate of 69.9.

Highest 10 states, 2023

Lowest 10 states, 2023

Read the gap carefully: even the "lowest" states on this list lost hundreds of older residents to falls in 2023, and the national rate — the dashed line — sits far above every state in the second chart. There is no state where falls are a small problem.

The full table: fall deaths and death rates by state, 2023

Rates are crude rates — deaths per 100,000 residents age 65 and older, exactly as the National Center for Health Statistics published them — by state of residence. The methodology section below explains why "crude" matters when comparing states. Select a column heading to re-sort the table.

Source: Garnett MF, Weeks JD, Zehner AM. "Unintentional Fall Deaths in Adults Age 65 and Older: United States, 2023." NCHS Data Brief No. 532, June 2025 — data table for Figure 4. Underlying data: National Vital Statistics System mortality file. Unintentional fall deaths are identified by ICD-10 underlying cause-of-death codes W00–W19.

Where Florida lands

Florida recorded 4,045 fall deaths in 2023 — the most of any state, ahead of California (2,523) and Texas (2,192) — largely because so many older adults live there. Its death rate, 82.3 per 100,000, ranked 18th highest of the 51 jurisdictions in the table, about 18% above the national rate of 69.9. In other words: Florida's fall problem is bigger than average even after accounting for its large senior population, and in raw numbers it is the largest in the country. Florida's 2024 state figure has not been published — the CDC's 2024 release is national only — so this section will be updated when official state data appears.

What this means for families

A state rate is not a personal risk score. These numbers describe whole populations. They are shaped by things no family controls — including how old a state's senior population is, which matters a great deal here because the rates are crude: a state where more residents are over 85 will tend to post a higher rate than a state whose seniors are mostly in their late 60s, even if homes in both states are equally safe. The CDC does not claim the ranking tells us why states differ, and neither do we.

What the data does say, plainly: falls are a leading risk everywhere, the risk climbs steeply with age in every state, and it has been climbing for twenty years. The useful response is not to move house or to panic about a ranking — it is to work on the things that decide whether a fall happens and how bad it is when it does:

• Start in the bathroom. It is the room where the site's other guides keep landing, for good reason. Work through the bathroom safety checklist — grab bars, a shower chair that fits, non-slip surfaces, light for the nighttime trip — or score the room first with our bathroom safety score tool.
• If a walker is in the picture, fit it. A walker set at the wrong height quietly works against the person using it. Our guide to choosing walker height walks through the wrist-crease test and the elbow check in about five minutes.
• Plan for the wait after a fall. A fall that leaves someone unable to get up — or unable to reach a phone — is the scenario behind the worst outcomes in this table. That is the case for a medical alert system, and for automatic fall detection in particular when the person lives alone.
• Revisit after any fall, scare, or new medication. Rates rose in every age group over twenty years; a person's own risk changes faster than any state average. One fall — even one with no injury — is the trigger to redo the checklist, not a reason to wait for a second.

If your state sits near the top of the table, treat it as a nudge to do the boring fixes sooner. If it sits near the bottom, the national numbers still apply to the person you love: 41,400 deaths in a single year is not a problem that belongs to other states.

Methodology and sources

Primary source. Every state figure on this page comes from one publication: Garnett MF, Weeks JD, Zehner AM, "Unintentional Fall Deaths in Adults Age 65 and Older: United States, 2023," NCHS Data Brief No. 532 (June 2025), published by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), part of the CDC. The state figures are its data table for Figure 4 (full PDF, DOI: 10.15620/cdc/174601). We transcribed the table as published; nothing was estimated, modeled, or filled in. The 2024 national update comes from: Weeks JD, Garnett MF. "QuickStats: Death Rates from Unintentional Falls Among Adults Aged ≥65 Years, by Sex and Age Group — United States, 2024." MMWR 2026;75(37):579 (DOI: 10.15585/mmwr.mm7537a3), including its supplementary table, and from CDC's Older Adult Falls Data page (age-adjusted trend, NVSS Mortality 2018–2024 via CDC WONDER).

Underlying data. The brief uses the National Vital Statistics System mortality file — the national registry of death certificates — final data for 2023, with trend data back to 2003. An "unintentional fall death" is a death whose underlying cause is coded W00–W19 in the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (falls). Rates are by the decedent's state of residence.

Crude rates, not age-adjusted. The brief's methods state that crude rates were calculated. A crude rate does not adjust for differences in age mix within the 65-and-older population, so states with proportionally more residents in their late 80s and 90s will tend to rank higher. Treat the ranking as a starting point for questions, not a verdict on any state's homes or hospitals.

Two rate types on this page — do not mix them. The state table and the 2024 QuickStats figures are crude rates. The 2018–2024 trend (+21%) is age-adjusted, published by CDC's injury center on a different basis. We label each figure where it appears; the two series should not be compared directly.

Why death rates and not emergency-department visits? Because death rates are the metric the CDC publishes for every state. The CDC does not release a matching state-by-state table of fall-related emergency-department visit rates for older adults, so we did not construct one from other sources. For national context only: CDC researchers estimated that older-adult falls led to about 3.6 million emergency-department visits and 1.2 million hospitalizations in 2022 (Haddad et al., Injury Prevention, via CDC Stacks).

Limitations. (1) The state table is a single year, 2023 — still the most recent state data NCHS has published; the 2024 figures on this page are national only. One unusual year can move a small state. (2) Small-population jurisdictions have small counts — the District of Columbia recorded 56 deaths and Alaska 59 — so their rates are less stable year to year than large states'. (3) Death-certificate coding practices vary, which can shift counts between causes of death at the margins. (4) Rates describe populations, not individuals, and the brief does not test explanations for the state differences.

Re-use. NCHS Data Brief No. 532 is in the public domain, as the brief itself notes; we cite it as the source, and the full table above may be re-used with the same citation.