Puerto Rico, Workplace Violations

Puerto Rico sits in the middle of the OSHA enforcement footprint nationally, with 719 citations across 714 inspections. Mid-volume states typically reflect a balanced industrial mix — a few high-citation sectors anchor the totals, and a long tail of smaller employers contributes the rest.

The most-cited industries in Puerto Rico are Transportation and Warehousing (323), Retail Trade (100), Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services (70). That mix usually maps directly to the state's underlying labor market — citation volume tracks workforce size combined with hazard exposure, so heavy presence of construction, manufacturing, or transportation/warehousing in a state's economy generally translates into elevated OSHA citation counts in those sectors.

For broader workplace-injury context, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses publishes annual incidence rates by NAICS code. Construction, agriculture, and transportation/warehousing carry structurally higher injury rates than retail or professional services, and OSHA inspector activity tracks that hazard distribution.

Puerto Rico operates an OSHA-approved state plan, which means inspections in this state are conducted by Puerto Rico state officers rather than federal OSHA compliance officers. State plans must be at least as effective as federal OSHA, but enforcement priorities, citation rates, and penalty structures often diverge from the federal baseline. State-plan states typically run more inspections per capita than federal-OSHA states and may cite a wider range of standards.

The U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) enforces more than 200 specific standards covering fall protection, hazard communication, machine guarding, lockout/tagout, respiratory protection, and dozens of other risk areas. State-plan states adopt those standards or equivalent state versions, and the Enforcement Results Data files consolidate inspection results into a single public dataset.

United Parcel Service, INC. leads the Puerto Rico citation list with 147 violations on file, followed by Us Postal Service and Dhl Supply Chain. The top employers usually share a common profile: large multi-site footprints in inherently hazardous sectors, where any sufficiently large workforce will accumulate citations over time. The willful and repeat counts on the underlying company pages are the cleanest way to distinguish scale-driven citation volume from genuine systemic safety problems.

OSHARecord assigns each employer a Workplace Safety Score (0-100, A-F) that benchmarks the company against its industry rather than against companies in unrelated sectors. The score weights violation rate (40%), severity ratio (25%), repeat ratio (20%), and average penalty per inspection (15%) so that high-volume employers in inherently risky industries are not penalized for citation counts that match the underlying hazard exposure of their work.

Workers in Puerto Rico retain the full set of federal protections under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, including the right to a safe workplace, the right to know about hazards, the right to training in a language they understand, the right to copies of medical records and exposure monitoring results, and the right to refuse imminent-danger work without retaliation. Confidential complaints can be filed at osha.gov/workers/file-complaint or by calling 1-800-321-OSHA. The OSHA Workers' Rights page spells out the full set of protections under Section 11(c) of the OSH Act.

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 recorded site-state field, then roll those records up to a parent company. Industry classification follows the NAICS code recorded by OSHA at the time of inspection.

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.