South Dakota workplace safety

How South Dakota Workplaces Compare

South Dakota hosts 1,778 employer establishments currently reporting to OSHA's Injury Tracking Application. These are not small shops: federal rules require ITA submission from workplaces with 250+ employees in any industry, plus workplaces with 20+ employees in the roughly 60 NAICS codes classified as high-hazard (construction, manufacturing, healthcare, warehousing, agriculture, and others). Across this South Dakota cohort, workers have logged 36,517 recordable injuries. The published state average Total Case Rate (TCR) of 6.4 injuries per 100 full-time workers uses the 1,610 establishments with a credible rate (zero-rate and corrupt-hours filings stay in the inventory counts above but are excluded from the average, see methodology).

The state has recorded 23 workplace fatalities in the reporting window, which is tracked separately from non-fatal injury counts because fatal events have their own investigation trail under 29 CFR 1904.39. Reading state-level TCR requires context: the headline figure is driven by a state's industry mix. A state with a heavy construction, logging, or meatpacking footprint will mechanically post higher TCR than a state dominated by finance or professional services, even when individual employers are equally well-managed. That is why the employer table below sorts each establishment by its own TCR and letter grade, against the BLS benchmark for its specific industry, not against the state average.

For jobseekers, relocators, investors, and local safety professionals, state-level pages function as an entry point: use the grade-sorted list to spot the safest and highest-risk employers in South Dakota, then click through to an individual establishment for its year-by-year injury, illness, DART, and fatality trajectory. Compare multiple years before drawing conclusions, a single outlier year can reflect a specific event, whereas a sustained pattern across reporting cycles is a more reliable risk signal. All data comes directly from employer-submitted OSHA Form 300A summaries. State OSHA plans in 22 states operate their own enforcement programs in parallel, but the injury data above is harmonized through the federal ITA system.