What Happens After a Broken Hip: What the Research Says

Everything below is traced to a named study with a link. Where the research disagrees with a figure that circulates widely, we have used the research. Nothing here is medical advice, and none of it describes what will happen to any particular person.

How common is it?

The CDC reports that nearly 319,000 older Americans are hospitalized for a hip fracture each year. In 2019, falls caused 88 percent of hip fracture emergency department visits and hospitalizations, and 83 percent of hip fracture deaths. Falls are the leading cause of injury for adults 65 and over, both fatal and nonfatal. These figures are on the CDC’s Facts About Falls page.

What does the hospital data show?

The largest recent analysis used the Epic Cosmos dataset, covering 284 million US patients, and identified 1,232,250 hip fracture admissions between January 2019 and December 2024. It was published in the European Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Traumatology in 2026 (PubMed 41493636).

Of those admissions, 3.9 percent of patients died during the hospital stay. The age distribution was heavily weighted to the oldest patients: 39.8 percent were 85 or older, and 87.6 percent were 65 or over.

A separate analysis of US Medicare claims by Rasu and colleagues (BMC Geriatrics, 2020) reported a median hospital length of stay of six days for beneficiaries aged 65 and over. The same paper notes that hip fractures account for roughly half of all hospitalised fragility fracture cases in Americans 65 and over.

What do controlled studies show at one year?

The most useful study on this question is one that compared each patient against somebody similar who had not broken a hip. Leibson and colleagues followed 312 first hip fractures in Olmsted County, Minnesota, matching each one to a control of the same sex and similar age (Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2002). Mean age was 81.

At one year after baseline:

• 20 percent of the hip fracture group had died, against 11 percent of matched controls
• 51 percent were measurably more disabled, against 16 percent of controls

The control group is what makes those numbers meaningful. It separates the effect of the fracture from the effect of simply being 81.

One figure from this study is routinely misreported, so it is worth stating carefully. The paper reports a 64 percent cumulative incidence of first nursing home admission within a year. That figure includes short rehabilitation stays, not only permanent placement, and the same paper reports that among those admitted, the fracture patients were twice as likely as controls to be discharged alive within the year. It does not mean two thirds of people never go home.

How much function comes back?

Dyer and colleagues reviewed 38 studies that followed hip fracture patients from the time of fracture for at least three months (BMC Geriatrics, 2016). Their findings, stated in their own summary:

“The bulk of recovery of walking ability and activities for daily living occurred within 6 months after fracture. Between 40 and 60% of study participants recovered their pre-fracture level of mobility and ability to perform instrumental activities of daily living, while 40–70% regained their level of independence for basic activities of daily living.”

The same review reports that 20 to 60 percent of people who were independent in self-care before the fracture required assistance with some tasks one and two years afterwards, and that in Western nations 10 to 20 percent of hip fracture patients move into residential care following the fracture.

Two things follow from that. Between 40 and 60 percent of people recover their previous mobility, which is a considerably better figure than the one that usually circulates. And most of whatever recovery is going to happen has happened by around six months.

Is the outlook the same for everyone?

No, and the difference runs opposite to what most people assume. Haentjens and colleagues pooled 22 cohorts of women and 17 of men, all aged 50 and over, each compared against age- and sex-matched controls (Annals of Internal Medicine, 2010).

In the first three months after a hip fracture, the relative hazard of death was 5.75 for women and 7.95 for men. The authors’ own conclusion is that “at any given age, excess annual mortality after hip fracture is higher in men than in women.” They also report that relative hazards decreased substantially over time but did not return to the rates seen in matched control groups.

Why is this on a bathroom remodeling website?

Because falls cause the overwhelming majority of hip fractures, and the bathroom is one of the three most common rooms in a house for a fall. A 2020 analysis by Moreland and colleagues (American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine) found the bathroom accounted for 22.7 percent of at-home falls treated in emergency departments, behind the bedroom at 25.0 percent and the stairs at 22.9 percent, in a room a fraction of their size.

That is the whole of the connection, and we are going to leave it there. We cannot claim that remodeling a bathroom changes any outcome on this page, and we are not going to imply it. The strongest evidence on modifying homes to reduce falls, a 2023 Cochrane review by Clemson and colleagues (Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews), found no measured effect on fracture rates at all, and studied professional home assessments rather than any product.

What we can tell you is what a room contains, what it is rated to hold, and what the written standards ask for. Those are checkable. This page exists because the research is public, most of it sits behind journal abstracts nobody reads, and a few widely repeated figures about hip fractures are simply wrong.

Where the numbers come from

National incidence and cause data: CDC, Facts About Falls. Hospital outcomes: Inpatient mortality following hip fracture in the United States, Eur J Orthop Surg Traumatol, 2026, and Rasu RS et al., BMC Geriatrics, 2020. One-year controlled outcomes: Leibson CL et al., J Am Geriatr Soc, 2002. Functional recovery: Dyer SM et al., BMC Geriatrics, 2016. Excess mortality: Haentjens P et al., Annals of Internal Medicine, 2010.