Introduction Injuries among urban children has become an emerging public health problem in Bangladesh like other low- and middle-income countries due to epidemiological transition. Despite of huge burden, child injuries could not draw the attention of the policy makers over the last few decades to be a national priority agenda in health sector due to lack of reliable data.

Objective Objective of the study was to investigate the epidemiological burden of injuries among urban children in Bangladesh.

Methodology A nationwide cross-sectional survey was conducted between March and June 2016. Multi-stage cluster sampling was used to select required number of households. It uses a complex sampling strategy based on probability-proportional-to-size (PPS) methodologies with separate urban and rural samples. After cleaning and validation, data from 2 99 216 household residents including 1 06 233 urban residents was available for analysis of which 33 578 were children aged 0–17 years. 64 data collectors and 16 supervisors were engaged in the study. Data was collected on tablets using a custom data entry program developed for the survey. Once data was transferred to the server, the data was validated, and exported to SPSS v21 for analysis.

Results Injury was responsible for 27% of all causes of deaths among urban children (157.4/100,000 children per year). Drowning was the leading cause of mortality (46.7%) followed by electrocution (13.3%), road traffic injuries (6.7%) and suicide (6.7%). Injury mortality was significantly higher among boys (218.5/100,000 boys per year) than girls (92.7/100,000 girls per year). Falls (39.5%, cuts (19.7%) and road traffic injuries (13.6%) were the three leading causes of injury morbidity while cuts, burns and road traffic injuries are the main cause of injury related permanent disability.

Conclusion It is the time to act now for developing injury prevention, control and rehabilitation interventions as integral part of developmental efforts in achieving the SDGs targets.