How dangerous is Santa's job, really?

Andrew Zonenberg

The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't publish any stats on rooftop holiday gift delivery due to limited data, so this is a bit of an extrapolation.

First, travel between houses. The NTSB has never recorded a fatal accident involving a reindeer-powered flying sleigh. Someone better at stats than me could probably bound the accident rate based on this record, but it's quite low so we'll neglect it.

Next, rooftop delivery.

According to 2022 stats (latest I could find quickly) the USA has ~190K roofers, and had 124 workplace fatalities over the year, a rate of one in 1532 per year.

Assuming the average roofer spends 12 months * 20 work days * 6 hours, or 1440 hours, on roofs in a given year, and assuming accidents are uniformly distributed, this gives a mean time between accidents of roughly 2.2 million hours, or an accident rate of 4.54e-7 per hour.

Suppose 4 billion people globally celebrate Christmas, with 2.5 people per household gives 1.6e9 households. Allocating 2 minutes per household for landing, unloading, boarding, and takeoff gives 5.3e7 minutes of rooftop time every Christmas eve (making heavy use of relativistic time dilation).

Unfortunately, this is 26x the mean time between roofing accidents. So Santa has quite a high chance (>> 50%) of falling off a roof and dying any given Christmas.

When you add in the possibility of getting stuck in a chimney, the cancer risk from inhaling all that soot on the way down, the near-certain diabetes from eating billions of cookies in one night, and more, I'm glad I'm not the one wearing the red suit.