Falls among older adults in Canada: the statistics, and what they leave out

How many older Canadians fall each year?

Nobody knows. That matters, because a lot of pages quote a precise-sounding figure.

Where "1 in 3" comes from

The one-third figure is a global estimate from the World Health Organization. PHAC quotes it directly: "According to the World Health Organization, about a third of older adults fall each year" (PHAC Surveillance report, 2022). PHAC's own Canadian estimate is different and older: between 20% and 30% of seniors fall each year (Seniors' Falls in Canada: Second Report, 2014).

The newest Canadian data is narrower still, because it counts serious fall injuries, not all falls. In the 2017-18 Canadian Community Health Survey, 5.8% of adults 65+ living in private homes reported a serious injury from a fall in the past 12 months, an estimated 350,000 people, rising from 5.5% at 65-69 to 9.6% at 85+. Of those falls, 61% happened while walking and 39% of the injuries were fractures (PHAC Surveillance report, 2022).

Who is counted and who is not

• Quebec is excluded from national hospitalization counts.
• Emergency department data covers only Ontario and Alberta.
• The self-report survey covers people living in households, not people in long-term care.
• Death counts differ by source. Health Infobase gives 7,621 deaths for 2022, and separately a trend series ending at 7,182 in 2022 that it says excludes Yukon; a PHAC journal paper reports 7,189, also excluding Yukon. Neither source explains the roughly 440-death gap, so we report each figure as its source words it.

Are fall deaths among seniors rising in Canada?

Yes, and faster than the population is aging.

Health Infobase's trend series shows fall deaths among adults 65+ rising 51% in five years, from 4,752 in 2017 to 7,182 in 2022 (Health Infobase, PHAC, 2025).

Hospital admissions rose too, but over a much longer period. A PHAC analysis in the journal Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention in Canada (HPCDP) found fall hospitalizations among adults 65+ grew 53% over 13 years, roughly 3% a year, against about 9% a year for deaths (Yao et al., HPCDP, 2024).

Why the counts go up even when rates are flat

Once you account for the population getting older (an "age-standardized" rate), the hospitalization rate is roughly flat. Most of the growth in hospital counts is simply because there are more older people (Yao et al., HPCDP, 2024). Canada had 8,108,467 people aged 65+ in July 2025, 19.5% of everyone (Statistics Canada, 2025), and the 85+ group, where fall risk is highest, is projected to roughly triple to about 2.5 million by 2046 (Statistics Canada, 2022).

Deaths are a different story. After adjusting for age, the fall death rate still rose 6.8% a year from 2017 to 2019 and 4.1% a year from 2019 to 2022. The authors say more research is needed to explain the gap between death and injury trends (Yao et al., HPCDP, 2024).

What happens after a fall serious enough for hospital?

In 2022/23, 26,848 fall hospitalizations among adults 65+ involved a hip fracture, 34% of the total. Fall-related hospital stays "typically last 9 days longer than an average hospital stay for those over 65 years" (Health Infobase, PHAC, 2025). Hip fracture is the injury that most often changes where a person lives afterward. More than one third of seniors admitted for a fall are discharged to long-term care, almost double the share who lived in that setting before the fall (Seniors' Falls in Canada: Second Report, PHAC, 2014, using 2006-2011 data). That last figure is old and has not been directly updated, so treat it as indicative.

The direct cost of fall injuries among adults 65+ was $5.6 billion in 2018, double the cost for the 25-64 age group (Health Infobase, PHAC, 2025). Parachute's costing of the same year puts falls at all ages at $10.3 billion, "or 35 per cent, of the total cost of injury" (Cost of Injury in Canada, Parachute, 2021). A "$2 billion" figure still circulates online; that is a 2004 estimate quoted in PHAC's 2014 report and is out of date.

Where do most falls happen?

Of fall hospitalizations among adults 65+ (2015/16 to 2019/20 pooled), 52% came from falls in a private residence and 17% from falls in residential care facilities. Falls in residential care were more severe: in 2019/20, 49% involved a hip fracture, compared with 31% for falls at home (PHAC Surveillance report, 2022).

In 2021, nearly 28% of all people aged 85+ lived in collective dwellings such as nursing homes (Statistics Canada, 2022). Of the rest, who lived in private households, 42% lived alone, and among women 85+ it was 53% (Statistics Canada, 2021 Census, 2022). Living alone does not cause falls. It changes what happens after one.

The long lie

The best study on this is not Canadian. A UK study of 110 people over 90 found that 82% of falls happened when the person was alone. Of those who fell, 80% could not get up after at least one fall, and 30% lay on the floor for an hour or more. Long lies were strongly linked to serious injury, hospital admission and moves into long-term care. Call alarms were widely available, but were not used in most long-lie falls (Fleming & Brayne, BMJ, 2008). The study is small, mostly women, and from one English city. There is also no agreed definition of a "long lie": a 2023 scoping review of 22 papers found that duration and location alone are not accepted criteria (Concept of the term long lie: a scoping review, 2023).

Who is most at risk?

Age. Serious fall injury rates rise from 5.5% at 65-69 to 9.6% at 85+ (PHAC Surveillance report, 2022).

Sex. Women made up nearly two thirds of fall hospitalizations (49,919 women vs 28,157 men), and their overall fall death rate was higher (110.7 vs 97.1 per 100,000). But that is partly because women live longer: within each age group men had the higher death rate, 357.8 per 100,000 versus 295.9 at ages 85-89 in 2022 (Health Infobase, PHAC, 2025).

What the numbers do not tell us

• Canada has no national count of all falls, only serious injuries, hospital stays and deaths.
• Quebec is missing from hospital data; ED data covers two provinces.
• The long-lie evidence is small, foreign and without a standard definition.
• No Canadian trial has tested whether a monitoring device reduces falls, hip fractures or deaths. The one Canadian randomized trial (people assigned by chance to get the sensors or not) tested a different outcome: whether passive remote monitoring helped home care clients avoid admission to a higher level of care. It randomized 313 patient-caregiver pairs in Ontario and Nova Scotia and found no statistically significant effect (Donelle et al., JMIR Aging 2025;8:e69107, 2025). Vendors make strong claims. The trial evidence does not yet support them.

What families and operators can do with these numbers

Exercise for strength and balance, medication review, vision checks and removing home hazards are the measures public health agencies recommend. See PHAC's Preventing falls and injuries in older adults and Parachute's fall prevention resources.

If you are considering technology, know what each type does and does not do. Vendor claims below are quoted as the vendor words them, not verified. For more, see Fall detection without a wearable and Senior monitoring devices in Canada, compared.

Disclosure: WalledCare Learn is published by Moneli Automation, maker of WalledCare. Product listings are not paid. See our comparison methodology.

No option here has Canadian trial evidence showing fewer falls or deaths. Choose based on whether the person will actually wear or accept it, where in the home it works, and who will respond to an alert.

This article is general information, not medical advice. If someone has fallen and is injured, cannot get up, or is unresponsive, call 911.