Other Violations

Other-than-serious citations apply when a violation has a direct relationship to safety and health but does not meet the substantial-probability threshold for a serious classification. These are typically paperwork, training documentation, or recordkeeping issues rather than active hazards. Penalty maximums are substantially lower than the serious tier, and OSHA inspectors often classify a citation as other-than-serious when the underlying issue is real but the actual injury risk is low.

For full definitions and the controlling penalty schedule, the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) publishes the underlying standards, and the Enforcement Results Data files are the primary public source for citation history.

Other-than-serious citations cover 21,478 citations across 12,037 employers. The classification is the lowest tier in OSHA's hierarchy, capturing safety-related issues without the substantial-probability-of-major-harm threshold that triggers a serious classification.

Industry-level injury benchmarks for the underlying hazards come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, which publishes annual incidence rates by NAICS code. Reading citation severity alongside BLS injury rates is the cleanest way to interpret whether a citation pattern reflects underlying hazard exposure or elevated enforcement attention.

For workers, other-than-serious citations are the least concerning tier — usually paperwork, training documentation, or recordkeeping issues without active major-harm hazards. They are still worth tracking in aggregate, since a high count of other-than-serious citations can indicate that safety programs are not consistently documented or audited, even if no single citation reflects a high-severity hazard.

Workers retain the full set of federal protections regardless of an employer's citation 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.

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. Citations are aggregated by the violation classification recorded by the inspecting compliance officer at the time of the case. We do not reclassify citations or apply our own scoring to this severity page — the numbers are raw counts from the federal record.

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.