I am curious because I have read the unofficial number of failures during training was at least one a week. With so many thousands of paratroopers involved in D-Day surely the rate of parachute malfunction would have been far higher.
Have these figures ever been calculated?
The rate of malfunctions would be the same, as long as they use the same model of parachute. The numbers would potentially be higher, but that depends on how many drops are happening. If you have the entire division going through training at once, you're going to have a ton of chutes in the air. Even if you spread the jumps out, you still have a few brigades of men jumping daily, which is huge. Jump training requires five jumps to be certified--that's over a single week. Depending on how training was conducted, you could have had nearly an entire division jumping multiple times in a week, which would be more jumps than were executed in Normandy. Having 1/week wouldn't be more than 1 or 2 in the actual jump.
But then it gets very murky. Even if there were significantly more drops on Normandy than there were in a training week, it would be very difficult to determine how many parachutes malfunctioned. It was a hot DZ, which means that all sorts of men were simply never recovered, for whatever reason. The chalks were scattered across multiple DZs, so figuring out who was where was a significant problem. If you had a malfunction, and didn't get your reserve open for whatever reason, unless you hit near someone else, there would be no way of finding out what exactly happened to you. It's not like there would be someone on the ground to track these down immediately after the fact, and captains and lieutenants asking their men if they had a malfunction for their reports isn't a great way to get that data, because you wouldn't get plenty of people who did have malfunctions--they'd just be MIA.
Then there are the types of malfunctions to consider as well. The military used (and still primarily uses) a static line for jumps. There are all sorts of unpleasant ways that they can malfunction. Your static line could disengage early, so you've just got a chute on your back that doesn't open, it could not engage at all and you'd be towed (which is a very not good thing to happen to you), your equipment could get tangled with your line and you'd be towed, your chute could have been rigged wrong and you have a whole category of failures there which can be a variety of bad, your exit could be botched, and that can contribute to a malfunction, etc. Some of these would be categorized as a failure, others wouldn't be. Some of these (like being towed by a piece of equipment, yikes) would be more likely under fire.
Given all of that, it would be very difficult to even begin to catalogue how many parachute malfunctions there were on D-Day -1.