Grade F (Failing)

An F grade puts a company in the worst tier of OSHA-cited employers in its industry. Multiple severity drivers are typically active at once: a high willful-or-repeat ratio, large unresolved penalties, or a pattern of citations across multiple sites. Federal OSHA classifies repeat and willful citations as the most serious category, and they signal management awareness of hazards that were not corrected. F-grade employers frequently appear in OSHA's Severe Violator Enforcement Program, which subjects them to mandatory follow-up inspections and enhanced penalty calculations.

1,068 companies (7.3% of the dataset) have earned an F grade. The classification is reserved for the lowest-performing tier across all scoring factors, and it frequently overlaps with employers in OSHA's Severe Violator Enforcement Program.

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 F 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.