Data

Defense Base Act injury and death claims

The Defense Base Act is a United States law requiring insurance for civilian employees working overseas on American military bases or under United States government contracts. When one of those workers is injured or killed, a claim is filed, and the Department of Labor publishes counts of those claims.

Those counts are published in three different shapes: one cumulative report covering September 2001 to September 2024, separate reports for each financial year, and older quarterly snapshots. The earlier years are web pages; the recent years are spreadsheets.

This dataset will stitch every report into one long table, with one row per financial year, country where the injury happened, and claim type.

What it cannot be used to say

• These are claims filed, not injuries or deaths that occurred. The Department of Labor states plainly that the reports do not constitute complete or official casualty statistics.
• The country column records where the injury or death happened, not the worker's nationality. The Department does not publish nationality in these reports.
• Small numbers are hidden. Categories below a threshold are suppressed for privacy, and the threshold changed in the 2024 financial year. The dataset will flag every suppressed cell rather than treat it as zero.
• It covers civilian workers on United States government contracts generally, including logistics, construction, catering and translation as well as security, not only private military and security work.

Contractor census archive

For roughly eighteen years the United States Department of Defense published a quarterly report counting the contractor personnel supporting its operations in the Central Command area, which covers the Middle East, Afghanistan and surrounding countries. Each report breaks the total down by United States citizens, third-country nationals and local nationals, by country group, and by the kind of work being done, including a separate count of armed private security personnel.

The series ended with the report for the second quarter of the 2025 financial year. This dataset will therefore be a finished archive rather than a running tracker: every quarterly report, from the fourth quarter of the 2007 financial year to the end of the series, as one machine-readable file.

Breaks in the series that the file will record

• No contractor data was released for the second, third and fourth quarters of the 2014 financial year.
• Private security contractor counts begin in the first quarter of the 2008 financial year.
• Reporting of Department-funded private security personnel in Iraq stopped after the fourth quarter of the 2013 financial year.
• Syria was added as a reported location in the second quarter of the 2018 financial year, and Israel in the fourth quarter of the 2021 financial year.

What it cannot be used to say

• It counts Department of Defense-funded contractor personnel in one command's area. It is not a count of all contractors working for the United States, and not a count of mercenaries.
• Most of the people counted do support work: supply, construction, maintenance, catering, translation. Armed security personnel are a small share, reported separately.
• The Congressional Research Service compiled parts of this series for Congress, and its report is credited in the documentation and on the Sources page.