Editorial & Corrections Policy

PlainSafetyScore assigns a plain-language A–F safety grade to 497,821 U.S. employers using workplace-injury records the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) collects through its Injury Tracking Application (ITA), covering the 2016 through 2024 reporting years. This page explains how those grades and the figures behind them are produced, what standards they are held to, and how to report a grade or number that looks wrong so we can fix it at the source.

How these pages are produced

Every injury count, total case rate (TCR), and DART rate on PlainSafetyScore originates in OSHA's Form 300A Injury Tracking Application public data. We download the raw establishment records from OSHA, load them through a documented, version-controlled data pipeline, and render them into employer, industry, and state pages using shared templates. No data page is hand-written, and no rate or grade is typed in by an editor. Each number you see is computed from the official OSHA source record by a deterministic pipeline and read directly from our database at request time.

Our editorial team is responsible for the parts a pipeline cannot decide on its own: which datasets to use, how each metric is defined and labeled, how the grade is calculated from an employer's injury rate relative to its industry peers, how implausible or missing source values are handled, which guides and explainers we write, and what we will not publish. The pipeline then applies those rules uniformly across every employer, so the standard that governs one safety grade governs all of them.

Sourcing standards

We publish only data that comes from official government sources, and we name the source on every page. Our data is:

• OSHA Injury Tracking Application (ITA), Form 300A: establishment-level summaries of work-related injuries and illnesses that larger employers and high-hazard industries are required to submit annually. It is the source for the injury counts, hours worked, total case rate, and DART rate behind every employer grade.
• BLS Injury, Illness, and Fatality (IIF) program: the Bureau of Labor Statistics benchmark rates used to put an employer's recordable-injury rate in the context of its industry, attributed where it appears.

We do not scrape third-party safety-rating sites, we do not republish self-reported or crowd-sourced safety claims, and we do not generate any injury data ourselves. Where a value is derived from the official data (for example, an industry-relative grade or a state-average total case rate), the page links to our methodology, which sets out exactly how it is calculated.

Accuracy and validation

Because the numbers are computed straight from OSHA's self-reported Form 300A filings, the most common limitation is the source data itself rather than a transcription error. Some establishments file incomplete hours-worked figures, which can make a raw injury rate appear physically impossible; our pipeline applies systematic plausibility checks before a value is published. It excludes establishment-years whose reported rate is mathematically impossible, recomputes employer, industry, and state rollups from the valid records only, and shows an employer as not yet rated rather than inventing a grade when its filings are too sparse or corrupted to grade reliably.

When we find that a displayed number or grade is wrong, we fix the cause, not the symptom. We trace the value back to the data layer, correct the derivation or filtering rule there, and regenerate the affected pages, so the same class of error is resolved everywhere at once rather than patched on a single page.

Editorial independence

PlainSafetyScore does not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any employer or organization in exchange for how a safety grade is presented. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising. Advertisers have no influence over which employers we cover, how a grade is computed, or how any page ranks. A safety grade is a transparent summary of an employer's reported OSHA injury record relative to its industry — not a verdict on whether any specific workplace is safe today.

Update schedule

OSHA publishes new Injury Tracking Application data on a rolling annual basis as employers file their prior-year summaries. We refresh our database after each release and re-stamp the affected pages so the published date reflects when the data genuinely changed. Because injury reporting always lags the present, the reporting-year range named on every page — 2016 through 2024 — is the primary tool for judging how current a grade is, and is explained in our methodology.

Corrections process

If a grade or figure looks wrong, please tell us. We treat data-error reports as a priority and follow the same process every time:

1. Report. Use the contact page with the page URL and the value you are questioning.
2. Verify. We check the value against the official OSHA source record for that establishment, industry, or state.
3. Fix at the source. If the figure is wrong on our side, we correct the underlying data or derivation rule and regenerate every page it affects.
4. Note it. If the figure is correct but reflects a known reporting limitation — a sparse filing, a suppressed value, or an under-reported establishment — we explain the caveat rather than silently changing it.

Some apparent errors trace back to the employer's own OSHA filing. When that is the case, we will tell you so and, where possible, point you to the official OSHA Injury Tracking Application data so you can verify it directly.

Contact

Questions about our standards, methodology, or a specific grade are welcome through our contact page. For more on what the data covers and how it is processed, see our About page and methodology. For how to use a safety grade responsibly when making employment or safety decisions, see our disclaimer.