The Cost of a Fall in the UK

Last updated: 11 August 2026 · A fully sourced reference page on what falls cost the NHS and what it costs to prevent them. Every figure links to its original source.

Falls are the most common reason older people are admitted to hospital as an emergency in England. The money spent treating them is far larger than the money spent stopping them happening, and the two sums come out of different budgets held by different parts of the state.

This page sets out both halves of that arithmetic using published figures from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, NICE, the Building Research Establishment and the National Hip Fracture Database. Where we have done our own sums, the inputs are shown so you can check them.

Key Figures at a Glance

• 210,000 emergency hospital admissions in England for falls among people aged 65 and over, 2022/23
• £4.4 billion a year, the estimated UK cost of fragility fractures
• £435 million a year, the estimated cost to the NHS in England of fall hazards in people’s homes
• 1.8 million hospital bed days a year taken up by hip fractures alone
• 20% of hip fracture patients move into long-term care within a year
• Under £500, the average cost of fixing a fall hazard in a home, according to BRE
• £2,300, the average installed price of a straight stairlift in the UK

What Falls Cost

The headline figures come from the government’s own guidance for health professionals, Falls: applying All Our Health, and from NICE’s 2025 falls guideline.

The consequences reach past the hospital bill. OHID puts the increase in one-year mortality after a hip fracture at between 18% and 33%, and reports that around 20% of hip fracture patients enter long-term care within the first year. Our page on care home costs against home adaptations sets out what that move costs a family.

What One Hip Fracture Costs

Neither OHID nor the NHFD publishes a single official cost per hip fracture, but the two datasets can be put together. OHID attributes around £2 billion a year to hip fractures across health and social care, of which £1.1 billion is hospital costs. The NHFD records more than 70,000 hip fractures a year in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Stairlift Guru calculation. The £2bn and £1.1bn figures are UK-wide and the case count covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, so adding Scottish cases would pull the per-fracture figure down, to roughly £26,000 on the wider measure. We have rounded and we treat these as an order of magnitude rather than a precise unit cost.

What Prevention Costs

The Building Research Establishment costed the other side of this in The Cost of Poor Housing by Tenure in England, published in July 2023. BRE found that hazards causing falls in England’s poor housing cost the NHS £401 million a year, an estimate close to the OHID figure of £435 million but arrived at separately.

BRE also costed the repairs. Just over a million properties in England carry a Category 1 fall hazard: more than 680,000 owner-occupied homes, around 251,000 private rented and 80,000 social rented. The average cost of mitigating one of those hazards is under £500, and more than half of the fall-on-stairs hazards in owner-occupied homes could be dealt with for less than that. Rectifying every one of them across all tenures would cost close to £2 billion as a one-off.

The Comparison

Set the two sides against each other and the gap is wide.

Stairlift Guru calculation, based on a per-fracture cost of £26,000 to £28,500.

The same arithmetic works at national scale. BRE’s one-off £2 billion to fix every Category 1 fall hazard in England is about five times the £401 million those hazards are estimated to cost the NHS each year. On those two figures the repair bill would pay for itself in roughly five years, and every year after that is a saving.

Why the Money Does Not Move

If prevention is this much cheaper than treatment, the obvious question is why more of it does not happen. Part of the answer is that the saving and the spending sit in different places.

The bill for a fall lands on the NHS and, when someone cannot go home afterwards, on adult social care. The main route to funding an adaptation that would have prevented it is the Disabled Facilities Grant, which is administered by the housing department of a local council. The assessment that opens the door to it is usually carried out by an occupational therapist working for adult social services.

So the body that pays for the stairlift is rarely the body that avoids the hospital admission. A council weighing its housing budget sees the full cost of the adaptation and none of the saving. That split is one reason waiting times for Disabled Facilities Grants run to months or years in parts of England, even though the case for spending the money is strong when the whole system is counted.

What This Means for a Household

For a family weighing up a stairlift, the national numbers matter less than three practical points.

The financial case does not depend on preventing a hip fracture. A stairlift that lets someone keep using the whole house often delays or avoids a move, and moving is the larger expense either way. Our page on stairlifts against moving house works through those figures.

You may not have to pay the full price. VAT relief takes roughly 17% off for eligible buyers, and a Disabled Facilities Grant can cover the cost in full for households that qualify. Start with how to apply for a stairlift grant.

An occupational therapy assessment is free. It is also the document that carries the most weight in a grant application. What an occupational therapist assesses explains what happens at one.

Method and Limitations

We have kept the sums simple on purpose, and they carry real caveats.

• The per-fracture figures are averages derived from a national total divided by a national case count. They are not a tariff, and the cost of any individual case varies widely.
• The £2bn and £1.1bn cost figures are UK-wide; the 70,000 case count covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Including Scottish cases lowers the per-fracture result.
• OHID’s guidance was last updated in February 2022, so its cost figures predate recent inflation and are likely to understate the position today.
• A stairlift addresses one hazard. It does not prevent falls elsewhere in the home, and no adaptation removes the risk entirely. Strength and balance work, medication reviews and eyesight checks all sit alongside it in NICE guideline NG249.
• BRE’s hazard figures cover England only and describe Category 1 hazards under the Housing Health and Safety Rating System, which is a narrower group than all homes where someone is at risk of falling.

We publish our pricing method in full at how we research stairlift prices.

Using These Figures

Journalists, researchers and companies are welcome to quote this page. Please cite Stairlift Guru and link back, and follow the source links for any figure you intend to publish, since the underlying data is theirs rather than ours. If you need a figure we have not covered, or a regional breakdown, get in touch.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a fall cost the NHS?

There is no single official price for one fall. OHID estimates the annual UK cost of fragility fractures at £4.4 billion, with £2 billion of that from hip fractures and £1.1 billion falling on social care. Set against the 70,000-plus hip fractures recorded each year by the National Hip Fracture Database, that works out at somewhere around £26,000 to £28,500 per hip fracture across health and social care.

How much do falls at home cost specifically?

OHID estimates that fall hazards in people’s homes cost the NHS in England £435 million a year. BRE reached a comparable figure of £401 million a year using a different method, looking only at England’s poor housing.

Is a stairlift cheaper than the cost of a fall?

On the national averages, yes by a wide margin. A new straight stairlift averages £2,300 installed, roughly a twelfth of the health and social care cost of a single hip fracture. That comparison holds at population level. It does not promise that any particular stairlift prevents any particular fall.

Who pays for a stairlift in the UK?

Most households pay privately. Where someone qualifies, a Disabled Facilities Grant of up to £30,000 in England is administered by the local council and can cover the cost. Eligible buyers also pay no VAT, which takes around 17% off the price.

How many older people fall each year?

Around a third of people aged 65 and over, and around half of those aged 80 and over, fall at least once a year. In 2022/23 there were 210,000 emergency hospital admissions in England for falls among the over-65s.

Do home adaptations actually reduce falls?

NICE guideline NG249, published in April 2025, includes home hazard assessment and modification among its recommended measures for people at risk. The strength of the effect depends on the person and the hazard, which is why an occupational therapy assessment comes first.

Sources

• Falls: applying All Our Health, Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, updated 25 February 2022
• Falls: assessment and prevention (NG249), NICE, April 2025
• National Hip Fracture Database annual report 2025, Royal College of Physicians
• The Cost of Poor Housing by Tenure in England, BRE, July 2023
• UK stairs falls statistics, Stairlift Guru
• UK stairlift prices, Stairlift Guru, July 2026

Related Reading

• Stairs falls statistics UK
• Fall prevention tips for older people
• Care home costs against home adaptations
• Disabled Facilities Grant waiting times
• UK ageing in place statistics