TRIR Calculator

What this TRIR calculator does

Total recordable incident rate is the standard way of measuring workplace safety performance in the United States. It converts a raw count of injuries into a rate per 100 full-time workers, so a company of forty and a company of four thousand can be compared on the same scale.

Give this calculator your recordable incidents and your hours worked and it returns the rate, along with a rough band showing whether it sits low, moderate or high.

It matters more than most safety metrics because it is not just internal. Contractors are routinely screened on TRIR in prequalification and bidding, insurers price on it, and under OSHA's electronic recordkeeping rule many establishments must submit their injury data annually, at which point the number becomes public.

Before you use it, there is one thing about the hours field that will produce a badly wrong answer if you get it the wrong way round, so it goes first rather than buried further down.

Read this first: what goes in the hours field

TRIR requires hours actually worked. Not calendar time, not hours paid, not hours scheduled.

The BLS guidance is explicit: hours worked should not include any nonwork time, even though paid, such as vacation, sick leave and holidays. Only time people were actually on the job counts.

The unit dropdown next to the field converts using calendar time. Picking years multiplies by 8,766, which is the number of hours in a calendar year, and picking months multiplies by 730.5. Those conversions are correct as time conversions and wrong as work conversions, because nobody works 8,766 hours a year. A full-time employee works roughly 2,000.

Here is what that does. Suppose you have 100 full-time workers over a year and 5 recordable incidents, and you enter "100" with the unit set to years:

Understated by more than four times, and it moves the verdict from moderate to low. On a number that goes into bid packages and insurance filings, that is not a rounding difference.

So leave the dropdown on hours and enter your actual total hours worked. Take it from payroll or timesheets. If you have salaried staff with no tracked hours, OSHA's guidance is to estimate at 8 hours per workday or use scheduled hours. And include supervised temporary and agency workers whose day to day work you direct, because their hours count toward your rate and so do their injuries.

We are relabelling that dropdown to make the distinction clear.

How to use it

1. Hours worked. Total hours actually worked by everyone, for the period. Leave the unit on hours. See the section above.
2. Number of injuries. Recordable incidents for the same period, which is the count of entries on your OSHA Form 300 log. What counts is below. Zero is accepted and gives a TRIR of zero.

Press Calculate. Press Reset to clear it.

Use a full calendar year wherever you can. TRIR is defined against an annual base, and short periods produce volatile figures: a single incident in a quarter can send the rate to a level that looks alarming and means very little.

The formula, and where 200,000 comes from

TRIR = (recordable incidents × 200,000) ÷ total hours worked

The 200,000 is not arbitrary. It is 100 employees, working 40 hours a week, for 50 weeks a year.

100 × 40 × 50 = 200,000

Which means your TRIR reads as recordable incidents per 100 full-time workers per year. A TRIR of 3.0 says that if you ran a hundred people for a year at your current rate, you would expect three recordable injuries among them.

That framing is worth holding on to, because it makes the number concrete rather than abstract. It also explains why small workplaces see wild swings: with only twenty employees, a single recordable incident produces a TRIR around 5, and having none produces zero. OSHA acknowledges this directly, noting that a single injury has a much greater effect on incidence rates in small establishments than in large ones, and that any analysis has to take that into account.

The same 200,000 base is used for the related rates, so DART, which counts only cases involving days away, restricted work or job transfer, uses an identical formula with a narrower numerator. DART is always equal to or lower than TRIR.

A worked example

A company with 250 employees, 500,000 hours worked in the year, and 3 recordable incidents.

(3 × 200,000) ÷ 500,000 = 600,000 ÷ 500,000 = 1.20

So 1.2 recordable incidents per 100 full-time workers per year.

A few more for scale:

Notice the second row. One incident across exactly 200,000 hours gives a TRIR of exactly 1.00, which is the arithmetic being tidy about its own definition.

What counts as a recordable incident

Getting the numerator right matters as much as the denominator, and the line is narrower than most people assume.

Under OSHA's recordkeeping rules, a work-related injury or illness is recordable if it results in any of the following: death, days away from work, restricted work or transfer to another job, medical treatment beyond first aid, loss of consciousness, or a significant injury or illness diagnosed by a physician or other licensed health care professional.

First aid only cases are not recordable. Cleaning a wound, applying a bandage, using a non-prescription medication at non-prescription strength, giving a tetanus shot, using hot or cold therapy: none of these on their own make a case recordable.

Two edges catch people out, and both push cases into the recordable column that feel trivial.

An over-the-counter medication given at prescription strength counts as medical treatment. So a doctor directing 800 milligrams of ibuprofen makes a minor strain recordable, where advising a standard tablet would not.

Removal of a foreign object from the eye by a health care professional is recordable regardless of how minor the underlying incident was.

Both are correct under the rules and both inflate a rate without reflecting anything much about the workplace. Which is worth knowing before you read too much into a small change in the number.

The practical source is the OSHA Form 300 log itself. Count the entries for the year and that is your numerator.

What a good TRIR looks like

The tool bands the result as low below 3, moderate between 3 and 8, and high above 8. Those are reasonable general markers and they are broad, so here is more context.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes incidence rates by industry each year. Across private industry as a whole the recent figure has been around 2.3 per 100 full-time workers. Construction has been at a similar level, around 2.3 in 2024, which was down from 2.4 the year before and the lowest construction figure on record over more than a decade.

In practice the bar is often set higher than the average. Many general contractors require a TRIR below 2.0 to prequalify, and below 1.0 for high risk work, so a company sitting at the industry average may still fail a screening.

Three things worth remembering when comparing.

Industry is most of the variation. Office based work runs far below heavy construction or meat processing, and that says nothing about either employer's safety culture.

Establishment size matters. BLS publishes rates by size band precisely because small workplaces are statistically noisy.

Compare against your own trend. Three years of direction tells you more than any single year against a national average, because the average is drawn from a very wide mix of employers.

What the number cannot see

TRIR is a lagging indicator. It counts things that already went wrong, which makes it a measure of outcomes rather than of safety.

A workplace with zero recordables and no near-miss reporting, no hazard controls and no training is not safe, it is lucky, and TRIR will describe it identically to a genuinely well run site. Meanwhile a company with excellent reporting culture may show a higher rate simply because it records everything it should.

That last point deserves stating plainly, because it creates a real incentive problem. A number used for prequalification, bidding and bonuses is a number people are motivated to keep low, and one of the ways to keep it low is to be less diligent about recording. Under-recording is both a compliance failure and a safety failure, and the pressure to do it is a direct consequence of how heavily this single figure is weighted.

Two things that address it. Track leading indicators alongside: near misses reported, inspections completed, corrective actions closed, training delivered. These measure what is being done rather than what already happened. And read TRIR next to severity, since a rate of 2.0 made up of minor cases and a rate of 2.0 including an amputation are not the same year.

None of which makes TRIR a bad measure. It is standardised, comparable, and hard to argue with, which is exactly why the whole industry uses it. It is just one number and it works best as part of a set.

Questions people ask

How do I calculate TRIR?

Multiply recordable incidents by 200,000 and divide by total hours worked. Three recordables across 500,000 hours gives a TRIR of 1.20.

Why 200,000?

It represents 100 employees working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks. So the rate reads as recordable incidents per 100 full-time workers per year.

Do I include vacation and sick leave in the hours?

No. Only hours actually worked. Vacation, sick leave, holidays and bereavement leave are excluded even when paid.

Can I use the years option in the dropdown?

Better not to. It converts using calendar hours, which is over four times the hours a person actually works in a year, and it will understate your rate substantially. Leave it on hours.

What is a good TRIR?

Below the average for your industry, which for private industry overall has been around 2.3. Many contractors are required to be below 2.0, and below 1.0 for high risk work.

Are first aid cases recordable?

No. A case becomes recordable at medical treatment beyond first aid, days away, restricted work or job transfer, loss of consciousness, death, or a significant diagnosis by a health care professional.

Do agency workers count?

If you supervise their day to day work, yes. Both their hours and their injuries go into your figures.

We had no incidents. Is a TRIR of zero good?

It is the best possible outcome and it is not the same as being safe, particularly over a short period or in a small workplace. Read it alongside leading indicators.

References

A note on sourcing and dates. The formula, the 200,000 base and the requirement to use hours actually worked rather than hours paid are set out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the sources below. Recordability criteria are defined in OSHA's recordkeeping regulations at 29 CFR Part 1904. Industry incidence rates are published annually by the BLS and the figures quoted here are recent published averages; anyone benchmarking should check the current release for their own industry and establishment size.

1. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Clarification on How the Formula Is Used by OSHA to Calculate Incident Rates, Standard Interpretation, 23 August 2016. https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/2016-08-23
2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, How to Compute Your Firm's Incidence Rate for Safety Management, Appendix C. https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/osh06_appc.pdf
3. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 29 CFR Part 1904, Recording and Reporting Occupational Injuries and Illnesses.