Background In the 20 years, with the rapid development of economy in Shenzhen City, mortality model has been changed. However, we are still not sure the change tendency of injury mortality model, proportion of injury related death, and the main leading injury causes (such as road traffic injury, suicide, and fall). The study is aim to figure out these problems, and teen promote scientific advices for injury prevention.

Methods The injury mortality data of 1994–2006 wwre collected from the Funeral Parlour, and other data of 2007–2013 were collected from the death surveillance system in China. The cause of injury related death was coded from V01 to Y99. All the data were cleaning by uniform standards, and analysed by SPSS 20.0.

Results Injury mortality rate has been reduced from 3.19/10000 to 1.30/10000 in the 20 years. Injury ratio of all deaths has decreased from 52.1% in 1994 to 14.8% in 2013. The majority of the injury mortality was man, about 70%. The floating population accounted for about 90% of injury related deaths. Although the ratio of injury death has been descended from 43.5% to 27.9% in 20 years, road traffic injury was the first leading cause of injury related death. Suicide and fall were increased from 6.6% to 27.0%, 8.3% to 11.8% respectively in 20 years.

Conclusions Although the injury mortality has been decreased in the past 20 years, injury is still a public health problem in Shenzhen City. The road traffic injury in Shenzhen was still a main leading injury cause of death. Meanwhile, we should paid more attention on suicide and fall. Only do we change our preventive strategies, injury preventive measures should be more efficient.