Hip fracture has never been studied before, either in Morocco or in the adjacent countries of the south bank of the Mediterranean Sea. The aim of this study was to investigate the incidence rate of hip fracture in 2002 in Rabat Province, a large area in the northwest of The Kingdom of Morocco, by the use of register information and medical records collected from the five public hospitals of the region. The hip fracture data were restricted to cervical or trochanteric types. There was a total of 150 hip fractures (83 in women and 67 in men) in the over-50-year-old population in the Province of Rabat during 2002. The age-adjusted 1-year cumulative incidence of hip fracture was 52.1/100,000 [95% confidence interval (CI) 40.9-63.3/100,000] in women and 43.7/100,000 (95% CI 33.3-52.2/100,000) in men. The standardized incidence rate against the 1985 US population was 80.7/100,000 (95% CI 78.5-93.0/100,000) for women and 58.5/100,000 (95% CI 47.9-68.1/100,000) for men. The mean (standard deviation) age of patients with a hip fracture was 70.7 (9.4) years for women and 70.4 (10.0) years for men. The overall female-to-male ratio of hip fracture was 1.19 for age-adjusted hip fracture incidence and 1.30 for standardized incidence. A marked increase in incidence rate was found for both men and women with increasing age, becoming exponential after the age of 50 years. The mean age for hip fracture was 70.7 (9.4) years in women and 70.4 (10.0) years in men (P > 0.05). Women had a cervical-to-trochanteric ratio of 0.97 compared to men, at 1.03. The characteristics of hip fractures described in this study suggest that fragility fractures occur in North Africa, although substantially less frequently than in most European, North American and Asian countries but more frequently than sub-Saharan African countries, in agreement with the north-south gradient observed in the epidemiology of osteoporosis. The low incidence of hip fragility fracture rate is most likely the result of reduced longevity in Morocco.