Trampoline Injury Statistics: What the Data Shows and What It Means

What U.S. Trampoline Injury Statistics Show

The current figure for trampoline injuries per year comes from the CPSC's NEISS Data Highlights for Calendar Year 2024. For the product grouping "Trampolines," the report records an estimated 118,179 injuries treated in hospital emergency departments in the United States and territories in 2024. The report attaches a caveat that matters for reading any single number in it: the data system allows up to three products to be recorded for each person's injury, "so a person's injury may be counted in three product groups."

The older figure comes from the CPSC's stand-alone report titled Trampolines, dated September 2000. It states: "In 1999, CPSC estimates that almost 100,000" people were treated in U.S. hospital emergency rooms for injuries associated with trampolines. The report gives the 95% confidence interval for that estimate as 82,300 to 115,400. This is the newest stand-alone CPSC trampoline report found, and its figures are historical. They describe 1999 and the years before it, not trampoline use today.

For someone who was hurt, the headline number establishes two things. Trampoline injuries are tracked at the federal level, in a system run by a federal safety agency. And the scale is large enough that the injury sits in a recognized category, not an unusual one.

The number does not tell you where it was collected, which settings it includes or how it was estimated. Those details decide how much the figure can say about any one injury. The sections below take them in turn.

Purpose

This resource exists to put the federal trampoline injury figures in one place, each with its year, the population it describes and the caveat its report states. People who search for trampoline park injury statistics or backyard trampoline injury rates often find a number repeated with no date and no source. Here, each figure is tied to the CPSC document it comes from, so a reader can see what a number covers before relying on it.

The resource is built from two official CPSC documents and nothing else: the NEISS Data Highlights for calendar year 2024 and the September 2000 CPSC trampoline report. It does not add estimates from private studies, news coverage or industry sources.

A family going through this often already holds records that are far more specific than any statistic: an incident report from a park, photos or video of the trampoline or the scene, emergency department and follow-up medical records, a receipt or order history for a backyard trampoline, the trampoline itself, and the names of people who saw what happened. Statistics describe a population. Those records describe one event.

That is the line this resource cannot cross. It can show how often emergency-department-treated trampoline injuries are estimated to occur and among whom. It cannot settle what happened in a particular accident, who controlled the equipment or the premises, or whether any legal standard was met.

How This Resource Is Built: The Official Sources Behind the Numbers

NEISS is the CPSC's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. According to the 2024 report, NEISS collects injury data associated with consumer products from U.S. hospital emergency departments, using "a national probability sample of hospitals of differing sizes and locations" to produce national estimates. The 2024 estimates were produced from a sample of 100 hospitals, of which 77 reported in 2024, including children's hospitals.

Because NEISS is a sample, each injury case collected carries a statistical weight. The report explains that its estimates are "derived by summing the statistical weights for the appropriate injury cases." The 118,179 figure is therefore an estimate of how many people were treated nationally, projected from the cases the sampled hospitals recorded. It is not a list of 118,179 known injuries.

The 2024 report lays out the trampoline row in columns. Its figures, as the report presents them:

The report also gives estimated rates per 100,000 people, calculated from the Census Bureau's July 1, 2024 resident population estimates: 35.1 for all ages, 141.9 for ages 0–4 and 176.2 for ages 5–14. The report warns that the raw number of cases "should not be used for comparative purposes" because cases carry different weights. The CV, it explains, measures sampling variability: "errors that occur by chance because observations are made only on a population sample."

The September 2000 report is a different kind of document. It is a short safety report on trampolines alone. It states that "Since 1990, CPSC has received reports of 11 deaths relating to trampoline use," that the victims ranged in age from 3 to 43, and that falls from the trampoline were the most frequent cause of death, followed by landing on the neck while attempting somersaults. Those statements describe reports received through 2000 and are historical.

What the Numbers Do and Do Not Tell You About Your Situation

NEISS measures one thing: estimated injuries treated in hospital emergency departments. An injury treated at an urgent care clinic, a pediatrician's office or at home falls outside that count, as does an injury that went untreated or a fall that caused no injury. The estimate is a floor for emergency department visits, not a measure of every trampoline injury.

The three-product caveat also shapes the reading. If a child is hurt in a fall from a trampoline onto another surface, that one injury may be recorded under more than one product group. Adding the trampoline figure to other product figures in the report would double count some people.

Most important for a family after an injury: a national estimate describes a population, and the law asks about one event. Where a claim rests on premises liability, meaning the responsibility of a person or business that owns or controls property to keep it reasonably safe for people lawfully there, the questions are a duty, a breach of that duty, causation and damages. Negligent supervision is a related idea, a claim that someone responsible for watching jumpers did not act with reasonable care. Product liability is the body of law about injuries said to be caused by a product, where the questions include whether the product had a defect and whether that defect caused the injury.

Federal law does define "defect" for the CPSC's reporting purposes. Under 16 C.F.R. § 1115.4, a defect is "a fault, flaw, or irregularity that causes weakness, failure, or inadequacy in form or function," and it can arise in manufacturing, design, materials, packaging, warnings or instructions. That definition guides when firms report information to the Commission. It does not mean any injury in the statistics came from a defect.

An injury, even a severe one, does not prove anyone's fault, and an accident does not prove a product was defective. Whether any of these elements is met depends on the facts: where it happened, who controlled the space and the equipment, what the equipment was, and what took place in the moments before. Those are the facts a conversation with our attorney can cover. The aggregate data cannot.

Why Trampoline Injury Counts Have Changed Over Time

The two federal figures sit 25 years apart: almost 100,000 estimated emergency room visits in 1999 (95% confidence interval 82,300 to 115,400) and 118,179 in 2024. The September 2000 report also records an estimated 37,500 in 1991, with a 95% confidence interval of 23,000 to 52,100, and states that trampoline-related injuries "have almost tripled since 1991."

It is tempting to read a straight line from 1999 to 2024. The documents do not support that. The 2000 report is a stand-alone trampoline report; the 2024 figure comes from the annual NEISS data highlights, which cover hundreds of product groups. The 2024 report describes its own sample of 100 hospitals; the 2000 report does not describe its sample in the excerpt available. The age bands differ too. The 2000 report states that children ages 6 to 14 made up almost two-thirds of emergency room injuries and children under 6 about 15%, while the 2024 report uses bands of 0–4 and 5–14.

A change in the count could reflect more trampolines in use, the growth of commercial parks, changes in how hospitals record products or changes in the sample itself. Neither report says which. The 2000 report does connect rising injuries in the 1990s to rising sales, citing an industry association's estimate of backyard trampoline sales, but that is the report's own explanation for its own period.

For a reader looking for trampoline park injury statistics specifically, this point matters. Neither CPSC source separates park injuries from backyard injuries, so neither can show whether one setting accounts for any part of a change over time. A trend in the national total says nothing about a particular park, product or operator.

What This Data Cannot Determine — and What That Means If You Were Hurt

The NEISS "Trampolines" grouping is broad. It does not distinguish a backyard trampoline from a commercial trampoline park, a school gym or any other setting. A person hurt at a park and a person hurt in a neighbor's yard appear in the same row, even though their legal situations may look nothing alike.

The data also does not record whether anyone was supervising, the condition of the mat, springs, frame, padding or enclosure, how many people were jumping, or whether the equipment met any safety standard. The 2000 report describes changes CPSC staff requested to the voluntary ASTM standard, effective in 1999, including padding over the frame, hooks and springs and warnings against somersaults and multiple jumpers. The statistics do not show whether any injured person's trampoline had those features.

Nor does the data record whether a waiver or release was signed. A waiver or release is a document a participant, or a parent for a child, signs before jumping that tries to give up some legal claims in advance. How courts treat these documents varies by state and turns on the document's wording and the facts. Court decisions involving trampoline park releases have reached different results, which the pages on trampoline park release rulings and participation agreement court rulings describe.

State law also decides most of the other questions that follow an injury. Limitation periods, comparative fault rules and damages rules differ from state to state, and no state's rule applies everywhere. The site's state pages, such as California trampoline injury law, cover a single state's rules from that state's own statutes.

When a family moves from statistics to their own facts, the questions change: the specific setting, the equipment, the supervision, any paperwork signed and the medical course since. A case evaluation with our attorney is a conversation about those details, the ones no national dataset captures.

Methodology

This resource draws only on the two CPSC documents named above. The 2024 figures are reproduced from the trampoline row of the NEISS Data Highlights as that report labels its columns, with the report's definitions of estimated number, raw number, rate and CV. The 2000 figures are reproduced as that report states them and marked historical. Federal law shapes what the CPSC publishes in a recall notice: under 15 U.S.C. § 2064, a notice ordered under that section generally includes, among other items, the number and a description of any injuries or deaths associated with the product. Recall notices are a separate record from NEISS estimates and are not combined with them here.

Interpretation

Read each figure with its year, its population and its caveat. The 2024 estimate covers people treated in U.S. emergency departments in that year, may overlap with other product groups, and carries sampling variability. The age and disposition columns show who was treated and whether they were released or admitted, not why. A 1999 figure is a historical marker, not a current rate.

Limitations

This resource does not determine fault, liability, a deadline or what a case is worth. It does not identify the setting, the equipment, the supervision or any waiver involved in an injury, and it does not explain what caused any individual injury or why counts changed over time.