TRIR (Total Recordable Incident Rate): how United States employers calculate it

That is the whole calculation. The harder question, and the one this page is really about, is what the answer means. A recordable incident rate measures the output of a recordkeeping process. It tells you how many cases an organization captured and classified as recordable, which is a function of how safe the work was and also of how reliably injuries got reported, how consistently they were assessed against the recording criteria, and how the hours were counted. Those two things are bundled together in a single number, and nothing in the number separates them.

One test follows directly from that, and it is the most useful thing on this page. When a TRIR falls, look at what happened to near miss and first aid volumes over the same period. If those fell too, the likeliest explanation is that less is being reported rather than that less is happening, because safer work does not usually quieten the small events and the serious ones at the same time. A rate that falls while the small events hold up or rise is the one worth believing. This is also why a TRIR is a good instrument for watching one organization over time and a poor instrument for ranking two organizations against each other.

What is TRIR?

TRIR expresses recordable cases at a common scale so that a site with 40 workers and a site with 4,000 can be put on the same axis. It is a rate, not a count: the raw number of injuries at a large employer will almost always exceed the number at a small one, and comparing the counts tells you mainly about headcount.

It is worth being precise about the term’s status. The acronym TRIR does not appear anywhere in the OSHA recordkeeping regulation. Neither does DART, nor the number 200,000, nor the phrase “incidence rate”. 29 CFR Part 1904 tells employers which cases to record and on which forms; it does not tell them to calculate a rate at all. The rate is a convention layered on top of the records, standardized by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for its national survey and adopted from there by employers, contractors and prequalification schemes. That distinction matters: the inputs are regulated, the ratio is not.

What is the TRIR formula?

The formula is:

TRIR = (Total recordable cases x 200,000) / Total hours worked by all employees

BLS states it as “(Number of injuries and illnesses X 200,000) / Employee hours worked = Incidence rate” (BLS, computing incidence rates). Every recordable case counts as one, whatever its severity. A fatality and a cut that needed three stitches each add 1 to the numerator.

Why is the base 200,000 hours?

The 200,000 is not a safety constant. It is a normalization factor chosen so that the result reads as cases per 100 workers per year. BLS describes the base figure as representing “the equivalent of 100 employees working 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year” (BLS). The arithmetic is 100 x 40 x 50 = 200,000.

The useful consequence is one that many explanations skip: because the base equals the annual hours of 100 full-time equivalent workers, a company TRIR and a BLS published rate sit on the same scale. When BLS reports 2.3 cases per 100 full-time equivalent workers, that figure is directly readable against a TRIR of 2.3. A TRIR of 4.0 means, loosely, that if you employed exactly 100 full-time people for a year you would expect to record four cases.

The same base carries across to the DART rate, which is calculated from a subset of the same cases and the same hours, so the two rates can be read side by side without any conversion.

A worked example you can check

Take a single manufacturing establishment for calendar year 2025. It employs 140 people at one location. Its payroll system reports 268,400 hours actually worked across the year, an average of 1,917 hours per person once paid time off is stripped out.

The 300 Log for the year, totaled onto the Form 300A summary, shows:

TRIR = (9 x 200,000) / 268,400 TRIR = 1,800,000 / 268,400 TRIR = 6.71

Now test how stable that is. Suppose one more case is reclassified as recordable during the year-end review required by 29 CFR 1904.32(b)(1), taking the total to 10:

TRIR = (10 x 200,000) / 268,400 = 2,000,000 / 268,400 = 7.45

A single judgment about a single case moved the rate by 0.74, which is roughly a third of the entire published private industry rate for 2024. At a 25-person site working 48,000 hours the effect is starker still: zero recordable cases gives a TRIR of 0.00, and one recordable case gives (1 x 200,000) / 48,000 = 4.17. The rate does not degrade gracefully at small denominators, it jumps.

What counts as a recordable case?

A case goes on the log if it is work-related, is a new case, and meets the recording criteria (29 CFR 1904.4). The general criteria are set out in 29 CFR 1904.7(a), which requires recording if the injury or illness results in “death, days away from work, restricted work or transfer to another job, medical treatment beyond first aid, or loss of consciousness”. A case is also recordable if it involves “a significant injury or illness diagnosed by a physician or other licensed health care professional”, even where none of the other five outcomes follows.

Recordable is not the same as reportable, and mixing the two is the most common way a TRIR numerator goes wrong: recording is the annual log duty, while reporting is the phone call to OSHA within hours of a fatality or a qualifying hospitalization. Our page on recordable versus reportable sets out which duty attaches to which event.

The line that generates the most argument is medical treatment beyond first aid, because the regulation defines first aid as a closed list at 1904.7(b)(5)(ii) and the professional status of whoever provides the treatment is irrelevant to the classification. OSHA is explicit: treatments on that list “are considered first aid regardless of the professional status of the person providing the treatment”, and treatment beyond first aid is medical treatment “even when it is provided by someone other than a physician”. Two organizations applying that list with different levels of rigor will produce different numerators from identical events.

How do you get the inputs off the OSHA 300 Log?

The numerator is not something you count by hand. At the end of the calendar year the employer must review the log, total the columns, and enter the totals along with “the annual average number of employees covered by the OSHA 300 Log, and the total hours worked by all employees covered by the OSHA 300 Log” on the annual summary (29 CFR 1904.32(b)(2)). The numerator for TRIR is columns G, H, I and J added together. The denominator is the hours field on the same form. Both inputs are therefore produced for a legal purpose before anyone computes a rate, which is the reason TRIR is worth trusting at all: it is built from records an executive has to certify as “correct and complete”.

Note that the summary is per establishment, and “establishment” has a technical meaning at 29 CFR 1904.46: a single physical location, or for construction and similar mobile work, the office or terminal from which personnel are based. A group TRIR is an aggregation you build yourself, and how you draw the establishment boundaries changes the answer. Our page on OSHA recordkeeping covers the 300, 300A and 301 forms in detail.

How are hours worked counted?

Hours worked means hours actually worked. BLS is direct about the exclusions: hours worked “should not include any nonwork time, even though paid, such as vacation, sick leave, holidays, etc.” (BLS). Overtime is time actually worked and belongs in the denominator, which means a year of heavy overtime inflates the denominator and suppresses the rate even if nothing about the work got safer.

For staff whose hours are not tracked, BLS allows estimation: where actual hours are unavailable “for employees paid on commission, by salary, or by the mile, etc., hours worked may be estimated on the basis of scheduled hours or 8 hours per workday”. That is a legitimate method and also a soft spot. An organization that estimates generously for its salaried population is quietly enlarging its denominator. Nobody is cheating; the convention simply has slack in it.

What is a good TRIR?

There is no such thing as an official target rate, and any page that gives you one has invented it. What exists is published data on what employers actually reported.

For 2024, BLS estimated the private industry total recordable case rate at 2.3 cases per 100 full-time equivalent workers, down from 2.4 in 2023, in a release dated 22 January 2026 (BLS news release). By sector, the 2024 rates were 2.2 for construction (NAICS 23) and 2.7 for manufacturing (NAICS 31-33) (BLS Table 1).

Those headline numbers are too coarse to benchmark against. A meaningful comparison requires the BLS table row for your specific NAICS code at the level of detail that matches your operations, because the spread within a two-digit sector is far wider than the gap between sectors. The industry tables are published at bls.gov/iif.

Two cautions apply before you read anything into a gap. First, the BLS figures are survey estimates from the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, not a census of every employer’s 300A. Second, the survey’s scope is narrower than American industry as a whole: it excludes the self-employed, federal government workers, private household workers, and farms with 10 or fewer employees (BLS, SOII concepts), so the comparison pool is not everyone.

A related point is worth clearing up, because it is widely stated the wrong way round. Employers whose company-wide peak employment was 10 or fewer, counted as “10 or fewer employees at all times during the last calendar year” rather than by establishment headcount, and establishments in the partially exempt industry list, are relieved of the routine 300 Log duty (29 CFR 1904.1 and 1904.2). They are not outside recordkeeping altogether. Both exemptions fall away if OSHA or BLS informs the employer in writing that it must keep records for a survey year, and the duty to report fatalities and qualifying hospitalizations under 29 CFR 1904.39 survives the exemption in every case. BLS draws its sample from around 230,000 establishments, exempt ones included, which is why the published estimates are broader than the set of employers that keep a log year in and year out.

The limits of TRIR as a measure

TRIR counts cases, not consequences. Severity is invisible to it, which is the gap the DART rate exists to partly fill. It is also a lagging measure: it describes a year that has finished and cannot tell you which of your controls is currently degrading.

The deeper limitation is the one this page opened with. The numerator depends on people reporting injuries and on someone classifying them consistently, and both of those are organizational behaviors rather than physical facts. OSHA legislated against one direction of that pressure: an employer must establish a reporting procedure, and “a procedure is not reasonable if it would deter or discourage a reasonable employee from accurately reporting a workplace injury or illness”, with discrimination against employees who report prohibited outright (29 CFR 1904.35(b)(1)). That rule exists because the pressure is real and well documented, and it is the reason the near miss test at the top of this page is worth more than the movement in the headline number.

There is an external check available. An experience modification rate is computed from claims filed with and valued by an insurer rather than from cases an employer records about itself, which makes it much less exposed to internal reporting behavior. A falling TRIR sitting alongside a rising mod is a combination worth explaining.

None of this makes TRIR a bad measure. It makes it a measure of a system that includes the recordkeeping, and it means the number is most honest when compared against the same organization’s own history under stable definitions.

Related terms

• DART rate: the severity-weighted companion measure, covering cases with days away, restricted work or job transfer.
• Recordable versus reportable: which events go on the log and which have to be phoned in to OSHA.
• Experience modification rate: the insurance-side measure of the same injury history.
• OSHA recordkeeping: the 300 Log, the 300A annual summary and the 301 incident report.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• 29 CFR Part 1904, Recording and Reporting Occupational Injuries and Illnesses
• 29 CFR 1904.1 and 1904.2, Partial exemptions
• 29 CFR 1904.4, Recording criteria
• 29 CFR 1904.7, General recording criteria
• 29 CFR 1904.29, Forms
• 29 CFR 1904.32, Annual summary
• 29 CFR 1904.35, Employee involvement
• 29 CFR 1904.39, Reporting fatalities, hospitalizations, amputations and losses of an eye
• 29 CFR 1904.46, Definitions
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, How to compute a firm’s incidence rate
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Methods, SOII concepts
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer-Reported Workplace Injuries and Illnesses, 2024, released 22 January 2026
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table 1, incidence rates by industry and case type, 2024
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, industry injury and illness tables

Last reviewed: 16 September 2026

About Logincident. Logincident is a data and software company whose configurable platform captures structured evidence at the point an event happens and presents it in dashboards and reports. We are not a law firm or a claims handler, and nothing on this page is legal advice.