About PlainSafetyScore

Our Mission

We believe that workers deserve to know an employer's injury track record before they accept a job. PlainSafetyScore exists because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) collects detailed workplace injury and illness data from hundreds of thousands of employers every year, but that data is buried in raw spreadsheets and technical filing systems that most workers and job seekers will never see. We built PlainSafetyScore to change that.

Our philosophy is to let the data speak. We do not advocate for or against any employer. Instead, we compute standardized safety grades by comparing each employer's injury rate to their industry peers, using the same metrics that OSHA and safety professionals use. This gives workers an objective lens into workplace safety conditions — something that is often invisible until it is too late.

Why we built this: every year, millions of American workers are injured on the job. Many of these injuries are preventable, and patterns of poor safety are often visible in the data long before a serious incident occurs. PlainSafetyScore makes these patterns visible — free, searchable, and designed for workers, job seekers, safety professionals, union representatives, and researchers who care about workplace conditions.

Our Data Sources

All data on PlainSafetyScore comes from two authoritative federal sources. We do not use estimates, employee reviews, or third-party assessments. Our specific data sources are:

• OSHA Injury Tracking Application (ITA), 2016–2024 — The primary dataset. OSHA requires employers with 20 or more employees in high-hazard industries to submit annual Form 300A summaries through the ITA system. Each record includes the establishment name, address, NAICS industry code, number of employees, total hours worked, total injuries and illnesses, days away from work, days of restricted activity, and fatalities. We process nine years of ITA submissions (2016 through 2024), covering hundreds of thousands of employer-year records. Data is published by OSHA at osha.gov.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Injury, Illness, and Fatality (IIF) Survey — Industry-level benchmark rates used as the comparison standard for employer grades. The BLS publishes injury and illness incidence rates by industry sector at both the 2-digit and 4-digit NAICS level. These benchmarks represent the national average injury rates for each industry, which we use to determine whether an individual employer's rate is above, below, or in line with their peers.

How We Process the Data

Our methodology converts raw OSHA filing data into the employer profiles and safety grades you see on PlainSafetyScore. The pipeline involves several steps:

Data acquisition: We download nine annual ZIP files of OSHA ITA submissions (one per year, 2016 through 2024) from OSHA's public data portal. Each file contains CSV records of individual establishment filings with injury counts and hours worked.

Name normalization and deduplication: Employer names are normalized by stripping legal suffixes (LLC, Inc, Corp, LP, etc.) and standardizing punctuation. Records are then deduplicated across years by matching on normalized name, city, and state. This produces a single employer profile that aggregates all available yearly data into a multi-year view.

Rate computation: For each employer, we compute the Total Case Rate (TCR), which is the standard OSHA metric for injury frequency: TCR = (Total Cases / Hours Worked) × 200,000. The factor of 200,000 represents 100 full-time workers at 2,000 hours per year. We also compute the Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred (DART) rate using the same formula.

Safety grading: Each employer's average TCR is compared against the BLS IIF benchmark for their industry sector (2-digit NAICS). The resulting grade reflects how the employer's injury rate compares to their industry peers: A (Excellent, TCR at or below 50% of industry average), B (Good, 50–80%), C (Average, 80–120%), D (Below Average, 120–200%), and F (Poor, above 200% of industry average).

Trend analysis: Multi-year profiles show whether an employer's injury rate is improving (decreasing TCR) or declining (increasing TCR) over the reporting period. We require at least two years of data to include an employer in the database, ensuring statistically meaningful rates.

Data Currency

Workplace injury data has an inherent publication lag. Here is the timeline:

• OSHA ITA submissions: Employers file Form 300A data by March 2 each year for the prior calendar year. OSHA typically releases updated ITA data 12 to 18 months after the filing deadline. Our current database covers filings for calendar years 2016 through 2024.
• BLS IIF benchmarks: Industry-level benchmark rates are published annually by the BLS, typically with a one-year lag. We update benchmarks when new BLS data becomes available.
• Our update schedule: We refresh the database when OSHA releases new annual ITA data. Between releases, employer profiles reflect the most recent available filing years.

Workplace safety conditions can change rapidly due to management changes, new equipment, workforce turnover, or operational shifts. The data on PlainSafetyScore describes historical patterns, not necessarily current conditions. Always supplement this data with direct observation and conversations with current workers.

Editorial Independence

Content on PlainSafetyScore is compiled by our editorial team. Raw data from BLS, DOL, EEOC, and related labor agencies is transformed into readable profiles by our continuous editorial pipeline, validated against the source before publication. The PlainSafetyScore editorial team, is responsible for editorial standards, methodology, and corrections.

We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from employers, agencies, or any labor-market entity. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense, advertisers do not influence which entities we cover or how we present data, and they do not receive preferential placement.

Limitations and Disclaimers

Understanding the boundaries of workplace injury data is essential. Key limitations include:

• Coverage is not universal: OSHA ITA reporting is required only for employers with 20 or more employees in high-hazard industries. Small employers, low-hazard industries, and many service-sector businesses are exempt from electronic filing. The absence of an employer from PlainSafetyScore does not mean they have no injuries — it means they were not required to file ITA data.
• Self-reported data: Injury and illness counts are self-reported by employers. While OSHA audits filings and penalizes fraudulent reporting, research has shown that workplace injuries are systematically underreported in many industries, particularly for musculoskeletal disorders, temporary workers, and fear-of-retaliation environments.
• Establishment vs. company: ITA filings are submitted per establishment (physical location), not per company. A large corporation may have dozens or hundreds of separate establishment filings. Our deduplication matches on name, city, and state, but some establishments may not be correctly linked to their parent company.
• Grades are relative, not absolute: An "A" grade means the employer's injury rate is well below their industry average — it does not mean the workplace is risk-free. Some industries have inherently high injury rates, so even a below-average rate may represent significant risk in absolute terms.
• Historical data only: Safety grades reflect past performance. An employer's current safety practices may be significantly better or worse than what the data shows, particularly after management changes, mergers, or major operational shifts.

Contact

We welcome questions about our data, methodology, safety grading system, or the employer profiles on PlainSafetyScore. If you believe an employer record contains an error, have feedback on our grading approach, or want to understand how a specific score was calculated, please get in touch. We are also happy to hear from workers, union representatives, safety professionals, and researchers who use workplace injury data in their advocacy or research.

Email us at hello@plainsafetyscore.com.