Analysis & Research

Every OSHARecord report is built on the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) public enforcement record, with raw inspection and citation data drawn from the Enforcement Results Data files. We aggregate citations at the establishment level, then roll those records up to a parent company using the establishment name and federal employer fields recorded in the underlying file.

Industry benchmarks reference the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, which publishes annual incidence rates by NAICS code. Reading citation counts alongside BLS injury rates is the cleanest way to distinguish industries with structurally high hazard exposure from those with elevated enforcement attention.

Our most-read reports look at the worst-rated companies in each industry, the most-cited federal standards each year, the gap between proposed and final penalty amounts after settlement, and the structural differences between federal-OSHA states and the 22 states that operate their own OSHA-approved state plans. Each report is published with the source URL, last-updated date, and the underlying data file's release cycle so readers can verify the numbers.

The reports complement the per-company pages on OSHARecord, which apply the proprietary Workplace Safety Score to every employer in the database. The Safety Score is a 0-100 composite weighted across four factors and translated into A-F grades. Read the full methodology for the exact formula.

OSHA enforcement data is one of the few federal datasets that pairs employer-level identification with hazard-specific citation history. That combination makes it the standard reference for journalists writing about workplace safety, lawyers vetting employer history, researchers studying occupational health, and workers screening prospective employers before accepting an offer. The OSHA Workers' Rights page spells out the underlying federal protections, including the right to file a confidential complaint without retaliation under Section 11(c) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

The data has limits worth knowing about: small farms with fewer than eleven employees are exempt from many federal standards, mining is regulated by MSHA rather than OSHA, and state-plan states report through state systems that may aggregate differently from the federal IMIS file. Our reports flag those limits where they affect the conclusion.

All counts and rankings on OSHARecord blog reports come from the public OSHA IMIS enforcement file, refreshed from the Department of Labor's Enforcement Results Data files. Industry classification follows the NAICS code recorded by OSHA at the time of inspection. Penalty figures reflect final amounts after settlement, not proposed amounts initially issued in the citation. The Workplace Safety Score applies four weighted factors: violation rate versus industry, share of serious-or-willful citations, repeat-citation ratio, and average penalty per inspection. Read the full methodology for the exact formula and edge cases.