State of Lone Worker Safety · FY26
A year of duress alarms, measured.
20,433 real activations. 815 confirmed emergencies - one every 10.7 hours. Every event logged by the Duress monitoring centre from 1 July 2025 – 30 June 2026, published because nobody else in this industry shows their numbers.
When the alarm goes, a human answers in seconds.
Across every activation - real, false, day, night - the median time from alarm to a monitoring operator on the case was 7 seconds. 71.6% were answered inside 10 seconds; 99% inside 52.
Share of activations by time to operator pickup, FY26. Failover-redundancy drills excluded.
The finding that matters
Risk concentrates exactly when nobody is watching.
An alarm raised after hours is roughly twice as likely to be a confirmed emergency as one raised during the working day. The hours when a supervisor-based check-in system is weakest - evenings, nights, weekends - are the hours when the alarm is most likely to be real.
1 in 6 alarms was raised by the system, not the worker.
17.7% of activations were automatic - fall detection, missed check-ins and expired safety timers firing when the worker couldn't, or didn't, press anything.
93% of alarms weren't emergencies. We answered every one anyway.
Of 20,433 activations, 93% resolved as false alarms or could not be verified. That number is the price of the 815 that were real: a monitoring model that screens harder, calls back later, or waits for confirmation is a model that eventually misses one. Median time to a human, false alarm or not: 7 seconds. No other provider in this category publishes this figure.
When alarms actually happen
By hour of day
Activations peak mid-morning and early afternoon - the shape of community visits, store floors and field work. The after-hours tail is smaller but carries double the emergency rate.
By month
Volume grew through the year - June 2026 ran 10% above July 2025 - with the expected summer-holiday dip across December and January.
How these numbers were made
- Source: the complete emergency-event log of the Duress monitoring centre, 1 July 2025 – 30 June 2026. Every activation, no sampling.
- Pickup time is measured from alarm raised to a monitoring operator opening the case.
- Test activations are excluded from activation counts. Internal failover-redundancy drills (identifiable by design as pickups over 60 seconds) are excluded from all figures.
- Customer identities are anonymised; figures are aggregates across all monitored organisations in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
- Figures are point-in-time as at publication and will be refreshed in the FY27 edition.