Companies with OSHA Fines Over $1M

Cumulative penalties exceeding $1 million identify the 41 employers with the heaviest cumulative OSHA exposure in the federal record. This is the catastrophic-fine tier — almost every company at this level has either been the subject of a fatality investigation, faced enhanced enforcement under OSHA's Severe Violator Enforcement Program, or accumulated dozens of distinct citations across years of inspection activity at multiple worksites. Penalties at this scale frequently include willful classifications, where OSHA has documented that management knew about a hazard and chose not to fix it.

The 41 employers in this fine range have accumulated $90.6M in final penalties combined, averaging $2.2M per company. That average reflects total cumulative enforcement exposure, not the cost of any single citation — most employers in the dataset accumulate penalties gradually across multiple inspections rather than from a single catastrophic case.

For full penalty schedules, the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) publishes the controlling per-citation maximums, and the Enforcement Results Data files are the primary public source for final penalty history.

OSHA's penalty calculation begins with the gravity-based penalty for each citation, adjusted for the size of the employer, evidence of good-faith compliance, and the employer's prior citation history. Willful and repeat citations carry substantially higher per-citation maximums than serious or other-than-serious citations. For a willful citation, the maximum is more than $160,000 (adjusted annually for inflation), and the minimum is several thousand dollars even after good-faith reductions.

Final penalty amounts often differ from the proposed amounts on the original citation. Employers can request informal conferences with the regional OSHA office to negotiate reductions in exchange for verifiable abatement plans, accept a settlement agreement, or formally contest the citation before the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. The penalty figures on this page reflect the final amounts after all settlement and contest activity.

For workers and job seekers, an employer in the Over $1M cumulative penalty range carries the highest enforcement exposure in the federal record. Reaching this tier almost always involves either fatality investigations, willful citations, or repeated egregious violations. Anyone considering a role at one of these employers should ask hiring managers point-blank what changed after the most recent citation closed, and whether the company is currently in OSHA's Severe Violator Enforcement Program.

Workers retain the full set of federal protections regardless of an employer's penalty history. They can file confidential complaints at osha.gov/workers/file-complaint, request an inspection, and refuse imminent-danger work without retaliation under Section 11(c) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The OSHA Workers' Rights page spells out the full set of protections. Industry-level injury benchmarks come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses.

Penalty figures on this page come from OSHA's public Integrated Management Information System (IMIS) enforcement file, refreshed from the Department of Labor's Enforcement Results Data files. We aggregate the final penalty field at the establishment level, then roll those records up to the parent company. Companies are placed into a single fine-range tier based on their cumulative final penalty across all citations in the dataset.

The Workplace Safety Score shown on linked company pages 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.