Grade B (Good)

A B grade reflects solid above-average performance against industry peers. Most enforcement signals are clean, with citations limited to isolated cases rather than a systemic pattern. B-grade employers usually have at least one citation on file but no willful or repeat citations, and their violation rate per inspection runs meaningfully below the industry average. For job seekers, a B grade is generally reassuring — it suggests baseline OSHA expectations are being met without dramatic outliers.

1,660 companies (11.3% of the dataset) have earned a B grade. That share is consistent with the right tail of a roughly normal distribution of safety performance — solidly above average but not exceptional.

The U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) publishes the controlling standards, and the Enforcement Results Data files are the primary public source for the underlying citation history that feeds the grade.

The Workplace Safety Score is a 0-100 composite weighted across four factors: violation rate versus the industry average (40%), share of citations classified as serious or willful (25%), repeat-citation ratio (20%), and average penalty per inspection versus the industry baseline (15%). Each factor is normalized so that companies in inherently risky sectors (construction, manufacturing, warehousing, healthcare) are compared against their actual peers rather than against low-hazard office work.

Letter grades are assigned by score band: A for the highest tier, B for above-average, C for industry-average, D for below-average, and F for the worst-performing tier. Read the full methodology for the exact formula, score bands, and edge cases.

For workers, an B grade means baseline OSHA expectations are likely being met: training programs exist, PPE is provided, and serious hazards are identified and abated. None of that guarantees a specific job site is safe, but it shifts the prior. Anyone offered a role should still ask about the hazard-specific programs that drive most OSHA citations — fall protection, machine guarding, lockout/tagout, hazard communication, and respiratory protection — and whether they have access to the company's written safety plans.

Workers retain the full set of federal protections regardless of their employer's safety grade. 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, and industry-level injury benchmarks come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses.

Counts 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 citations at the establishment level using the federal employer identifier, then roll those records up to the parent company. Industry classification follows the NAICS code recorded by OSHA at the time of inspection.

The Workplace Safety Score is intentionally a proprietary composite — there is no official OSHA letter grade. The four factors and their weights are designed to reward companies with low citation density relative to industry peers and to penalize patterns of severity rather than isolated incidents. Read the full methodology for the exact formula and edge cases.