Repeat Violations

Repeat citations apply when an employer has been previously cited for the same or substantially similar hazard within the prior five years. The repeat designation does not require willfulness — only that OSHA already cited the same condition once and had to come back. Repeat citations carry the same maximum per-citation penalty as willful citations under federal OSHA, and they are one of the strongest signals in the entire enforcement record because they document a hazard that survived an initial citation cycle.

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.

Repeat citations identify 2,441 employers who were cited for the same hazard a second time within five years. Across this group, 3,244 repeat citations have been issued — each one indicating that an initial citation did not result in lasting abatement of the underlying condition.

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, a repeat citation indicates that an OSHA inspector found the same hazard a second time within five years — meaning the employer's response to the original citation did not produce lasting abatement. Repeat citations are not always willful (the standard requires only that the same hazard recurred), but they are a strong signal that the company's safety program may not be capable of sustaining corrections after enforcement attention ends.

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.