Grade D (Below Average)

A D grade signals below-average performance against industry peers. Repeat citations, serious violations, or above-average penalty totals are pulling the grade down. The classification does not necessarily mean every D-grade company is dangerous — large multi-site employers in inherently risky industries (warehousing, construction, manufacturing) can land at D simply because their citation volume scales with their workforce. The cleaner signals are the willful and repeat citation counts, which indicate management awareness of unfixed hazards.

3,299 companies (22.5% of the dataset) carry a D grade. That share reflects the left tail of the distribution — employers whose enforcement record is meaningfully below industry peers across at least two of the four scoring factors.

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, a D grade is a serious caution flag. The lower-tier classification, combined with the willful and repeat citation counts on the underlying company pages, suggests that OSHA has documented hazards capable of causing death or serious physical harm and, in at least some cases, found that management knew about them. Workers can file a confidential complaint at osha.gov/workers/file-complaint, request an inspection, and exercise their right to refuse imminent-danger work without retaliation under Section 11(c) of the OSH Act.

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.