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 monitoring centre that answers Duress alarms, 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.
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 didn't end up needing emergency services. We answered every one anyway.
Of 20,433 activations, 93% resolved as false alarms, or de-escalated with an operator on the line without needing emergency services - real enough to raise an alarm, resolved without escalation. 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.
Faster answers, more real emergencies caught.
Same methodology run over the prior year (FY25: 1 July 2024 – 30 June 2025). The operators got two seconds faster while confirmed emergencies rose 39% - and the after-hours risk skew held at 34% in both years, which is what makes it a pattern rather than a quirk.
FY26 introduced systematic use of the "de-escalated" outcome (512 events vs 11 in FY25), so part of the confirmed-emergency growth reflects finer-grained classification of live incidents, not only more emergencies.
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.
Sunday is the most dangerous day of the week.
Share of activations confirmed as real emergencies, by day raised. Weekdays sit in a tight band; the weekend climbs, and Sunday roughly doubles it - the same shape as the after-hours skew, for the same reason: risk peaks when supervision is thinnest.
Confirmed-emergency rate by day of week, FY26. The weekend-over-weekday pattern also held in FY25 under identical rules.
Confirmation rate on Australia's 8 national public holidays, against a 4.1% everyday baseline. A modest sample, so read it as direction rather than a precise multiple - but the direction matches Sundays and after-hours exactly.
Every industry has its own rhythm of risk.
Activations classified by organisation type. Sector figures are rates, so no individual customer or region is identifiable - and each sector is compared with its own baseline, because the interesting question is not which industry is safest, it is when your industry's risk peaks.
Retail
41.8% of activations · 3.8% raised automatically- Evening trade (6pm to 9pm) confirms at 7.4%, well over double the 3.0% morning rate
- After midnight is the highest-risk window: 8.4%
- The holiday quarter (November to January) sustained the year's highest retail confirmation rates, around 6%
- 96% of retail alarms are a worker deliberately pressing a trigger - the risk is a person in front of you
Community services
22.6% of activations · 26.6% raised automatically- Between 9pm and midnight, 16.7% of activations are confirmed emergencies - one in six
- Sundays confirm at 14.3%, several times the weekday rate
- After hours overall: 10.1% vs 5.4% in business hours
Government
11.8% of activations · 37% raised automatically- The heaviest users of automatic protection: 37% of activations are timers, check-ins and fall detection
- Usage is overwhelmingly precautionary - alarms mostly confirm safe outcomes, which is what a working check-in culture looks like
Healthcare
10.6% of activations · 8.6% raised automatically- Activation volume follows the shape of clinic hours and community visits, peaking mid-morning to mid-afternoon
- Sits between retail's press-the-button profile and the community sector's timer-led profile
A false alarm costs 90 seconds. That's the whole premium.
Median operator time from case open to case close, by outcome. Answering every alarm - and 93% resolve as false alarms or de-escalations - costs a minute and a half of trained attention each. A real emergency runs nine minutes of live response. That asymmetry is why screening harder to avoid false alarms is a bad trade: the cost of answering everything is small, and the cost of missing the real one is not.
How these numbers were made
- Source: the complete emergency-event log of the accredited monitoring centre that answers Duress alarms, 1 July 2025 – 30 June 2026. Every activation, no sampling.
- Pickup time is measured from alarm raised to a monitoring operator opening the case.
- Customer identities are anonymised; figures are aggregates across all monitored organisations in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
- Industry figures classify activations by organisation type and are published as rates only, so no individual customer or region is identifiable. Internal test organisations are excluded from sector cuts.
- Year-on-year comparatives use the equivalent FY25 export (1 July 2024 – 30 June 2025) processed with identical rules.
- Figures are point-in-time as at publication and will be refreshed in the FY27 edition.
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Duress, State of Lone Worker Safety FY26 (2026-07-22). 20,433 monitored duress activations, 815 confirmed emergencies, 7-second median operator pickup. https://www.duress.com/en-nz/resources/lone-worker-safety-report-2026/
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A year of duress alarms, measured: 20,433 real activations, 815 confirmed emergencies, a 7-second median operator pickup. Published with full methodology - including the false-alarm rate nobody else prints. https://www.duress.com/en-nz/resources/lone-worker-safety-report-2026/Share on LinkedIn