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, producing a state average Total Case Rate (TCR) of 12.0 injuries per 100 full-time workers per year during 2016–2024.

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.