Data · Boating accidents
Boating accidents by state and year
How many recreational boating incidents were reported to the Coast Guard in each state each year, how many were fatal, how many people died or were hurt and how much property was damaged. The figures are the Coast Guard's own, and each state's numbers are checked against the later reports that repeat them.
What is in this dataset?
Recreational boating incidents reported to the U.S. Coast Guard, for the nation and for each state, DC and territory in each year from 2019 to 2024: incidents, fatal incidents, incidents with a non-fatal injury, property-damage-only incidents, deaths, people injured and property damage in dollars. The Coast Guard called these accidents until its 2024 report and now calls them incidents. Incidents offshore (Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf) are in the national record only. Each year comes from that year's Coast Guard report.
Use it to size boating-injury demand by state: where incidents, deaths and injuries concentrate, how the count changed since 2019 and how much damage follows, as context for boating, maritime-injury and wrongful-death work. Agents can look up a state, compare several, or search by year or place.
- Records
- 342
- Look up by
- 57
- state
- Primary-source records
- 342
The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.
Where does the data come from?
The Coast Guard publishes a Recreational Boating Statistics report each year as a PDF. Table 30 of each report (incident, casualty and damage data by state for that year) is read as numbers, and the later five-year summary tables are used to check it: for every state and year the incidents, fatal incidents and deaths in Table 30 equal the same cells in the later reports. A gate re-downloads every report, compares the parsed tables with the saved ones and ties the national totals to the reports' own totals.
- Period covered
- January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2024
- Places
- The whole US and states
- How often we refresh it
- Once a year
- Records read
- October 30, 2026
Official sources
- U.S. Coast Guard, Office of Auxiliary and Boating Safety, by official PDF files. A work of the U.S. government (17 U.S.C. 105), published as public PDF reports on uscgboating.org with no login or access restriction.
The sources the records cite most
What does a record look like?
-
Florida, 2019: the Coast Guard counted 679 recreational boating incidents, 55 of them fatal, with 62 deaths, 421 injured and $9,232,016 in property damage.
Status P · checked October 30, 2026 · source: USCG Recreational Boating Statistics, Table 30 (incident, casualty and damage data by state)
-
Texas, 2019: the Coast Guard counted 184 recreational boating incidents, 38 of them fatal, with 43 deaths, 122 injured and $2,012,209 in property damage.
Status P · checked October 30, 2026 · source: USCG Recreational Boating Statistics, Table 30 (incident, casualty and damage data by state)
-
United States, 2019: the Coast Guard counted 4,168 recreational boating incidents, 556 of them fatal, with 613 deaths, 2,559 injured and $55,320,226 in property damage.
Status P · checked October 30, 2026 · source: USCG Recreational Boating Statistics, Table 30 (incident, casualty and damage data by state)
The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.
What each of the 14 main columns means
jurisdiction- Two-letter state or territory code, or US
level- state or us
year- Calendar year of the report
status- P: the Coast Guard's own published figure
value- Incidents (the same as incidents)
incidents- Recreational boating incidents reported to the Coast Guard
fatal_incidents- Incidents with at least one death
injury_incidents- Incidents with a non-fatal injury and no death
property_damage_incidents- Incidents with property damage only
deaths- Deaths
injured- People injured
damages_usd- Property damage in dollars (rounded)
incidents_outside_states- US records: incidents offshore, counted in the US total only
deaths_outside_states- US records: deaths in those incidents
How do I use it in my own tools?
boating_lookup- For one two-letter state or territory code, or US: boating incidents, fatal incidents, deaths, injuries and damage for each year from 2019 to 2024.
boating_compare- The records of up to 10 states or territories (or US) side by side: incidents, deaths, injuries and damage by year.
boating_search- Records whose text matches the words given, such as a year ("2024") or a state name.
How to cite this dataset
You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.
- Version
- 1.0.0, released October 30, 2026
- Every version
- 10.5281/zenodo.23792746 (always points to the newest)
- License
- CC BY 4.0
Download the data
- CSV: boating-accidents.csv 188 KB · one row per record (columns in README.txt)
- JSON: boating-accidents.json 449 KB · every record with its sources
Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.
Suggested citation
Probative. (2026). Recreational boating accidents by state and year: incidents, deaths, injuries and damage (U.S. Coast Guard), 2019 to 2024 (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23792748
Credit line for a chart, table or article
Source: Probative, Recreational boating accidents by state and year: incidents, deaths, injuries and damage (U.S. Coast Guard), 2019 to 2024, version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23792748, licensed CC BY 4.0.
Add to a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)
Not legal advice. These are counts of incidents reported to the U.S. Coast Guard under state and federal reporting rules, not findings of fault; many incidents are never reported, so the counts are a floor. Claims and deadlines for a boating injury are for your own counsel.
What changed recently?
- 2026-10-30 · U.S. Coast Guard recreational boating incidents by state and year, 2019 to 2024: in 2024 the Coast Guard counted 3,887 incidents and 556 deaths. (source)
The full log is in changes.json.
What are the limits?
- The Coast Guard calls these incidents (accidents before its 2024 report). An incident is a reportable event: a death, an injury needing more than first aid, or damage above a set amount. It says nothing about who was at fault.
- Many incidents are never reported, so the counts are a floor. Reporting rules and habits differ by state.
- Incidents offshore (the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Gulf) are in the national record only, so the states do not add up to the national count.
- Damage is the reported property damage in dollars. It is an estimate made at the time of the report.
- Counts are not rates: they do not adjust for how many boats or boaters a state has.
- Records older than 400 days since their last check are marked
stalein the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.
Found a wrong value? Report an error with the record id and the source that shows the right value.
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