Is COVID-19 OSHA recordable in 2026? The March 2026 enforcement policy, explained

An employee tests positive for COVID-19 three days after two coworkers on the same small crew did. She's out sick for a week and a half. In 2024, the recordkeeping analysis was settled: run the three-part COVID test OSHA published in May 2020, conclude the case is probably work-related, count the days away, enter it on the 300 Log as a respiratory illness. In mid-2026, the same facts get a different answer — not because the regulation changed, but because on March 31, 2026, OSHA formally stopped enforcing it for COVID-19.

That distinction — the rule didn't change, the enforcement did — is the whole story, and it's the part that headlines compress into mush. This post walks through what the recordkeeping rule says about COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses, what the March 2026 enforcement policy actually does, the healthcare wrinkle underneath it, and the practical question the policy leaves on your desk: now that recording COVID is optional in enforcement terms, should you keep doing it?

The rule as written: COVID was never "just the flu"

Start with the regulation, because it's still on the books. Part 1904 has a short list of work-relatedness exceptions, and one of them — 29 CFR 1904.5(b)(2)(viii) — is the one everyone reaches for with contagious illness. It says a case is not work-related if:

"The illness is the common cold or flu (Note: contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, brucellosis, hepatitis A, or plague are considered work-related if the employee is infected at work)."

Read the note as carefully as the exception. The carve-out is for the common cold and seasonal flu, and nothing else. Contagious diseases outside that narrow pair are work-related if the employee caught them at work. OSHA's position from the beginning of the pandemic was that COVID-19 sits outside the cold/flu exception — it's a distinct respiratory illness, not a cold, not the flu — so the general recordability framework applied to it like any other illness.

That position was operationalized in OSHA's May 19, 2020 enforcement guidance, which set out a three-part test. A COVID-19 case was recordable if:

1. It was a confirmed case of COVID-19 (a positive test, per the CDC's definition);
2. It was work-related as defined by 1904.5 — the employee caught it at work rather than in the community; and
3. It met one or more of the general recording criteria in 1904.7 — days away, medical treatment beyond first aid, death, and the rest.

The hard part was always prong 2. Community spread made "where did they catch it?" genuinely unknowable in most cases, so the 2020 guidance told employers to make a reasonable, good-faith inquiry rather than an epidemiological investigation — weigh things like a cluster of cases on one crew, a close workplace contact who was positive, or the absence of any other likely exposure. A single case with no workplace link usually stayed off the log; three positives on the same five-person shift usually went on it.

What changed on March 31, 2026

On March 31, 2026, OSHA published an updated enforcement policy for recording and reporting COVID-19 cases. The operative language is short: OSHA is exercising its enforcement discretion not to cite employers for violations of Part 1904 for failure to record COVID-19 cases or to report COVID-19 fatalities and in-patient hospitalizations. The memo's stated logic is alignment: this brings COVID-19 enforcement in line with how Part 1904 already treats the common cold and flu under 1904.5(b)(2)(viii).

In practical terms, as of March 31, 2026:

• You will not be cited for leaving a COVID-19 case off your 300 Log — even a confirmed, clearly work-related case that kept an employee out for two weeks.
• You will not be cited for not reporting a COVID-19 in-patient hospitalization or fatality under the severe-injury reporting rule.
• The policy replaced the narrower enforcement stay OSHA had announced on February 5, 2025 (more on that below).

How we got here: the two-year unwind

The March 2026 policy is the last step in a sequence, and knowing the sequence helps you trust the current state:

• January 15, 2025 — OSHA terminated its rulemaking for a permanent COVID-19 standard for healthcare, saying the public health emergency was over and any remaining hazard would be better handled in a broader infectious-disease rulemaking.
• February 5, 2025 — OSHA announced an enforcement stay of the last surviving pieces of the healthcare COVID-19 Emergency Temporary Standard: the COVID-19 log at 29 CFR 1910.502(q)(2)(ii) and (q)(3)(ii)–(iv), and COVID-19 reporting under 1910.502(r). Importantly, that stay explicitly preserved Part 1904 — general recordkeeping duties for COVID were still enforced at that point.
• July 1, 2025 — OSHA proposed a rule to remove those remaining subpart U recordkeeping and reporting provisions from the CFR entirely, with the rest of the healthcare ETS to follow. As of this writing, that removal has been proposed but we have not seen a final rule.
• March 31, 2026 — the enforcement discretion described above extended the retreat from the healthcare-specific standard to Part 1904 itself, for every covered employer.

If you run a healthcare establishment, the net of all this is that the separate "COVID-19 log" you may have maintained under the ETS has been unenforced since February 2025, and your Part 1904 obligations for COVID now sit under the same March 2026 discretion as everyone else's.

One caveat that survives the whole sequence: state plans. Roughly half the states run their own OSHA-approved programs, and several wrote their own COVID rules during the pandemic — California's non-emergency COVID-19 standard is the best-known example. Federal enforcement discretion does not automatically bind a state plan's enforcement of its own rules. If you're in a state-plan state, check your state agency's current position before assuming the federal posture is the whole answer.

So should you still record COVID cases?

The enforcement policy makes recording COVID effectively voluntary at the federal level. That turns a compliance question into a judgment call, and it's worth making deliberately rather than case-by-case. The considerations cut both ways.

Reasons to stop recording: every case you enter on the 300 Log flows into your 300A totals, and from there into your TRIR and DART rates — the numbers insurers, customers, and prequalification services actually look at. Recording cases OSHA does not require inflates those rates against employers who take the discretion. The cold/flu comparison is instructive: nobody logs seasonal flu, and after March 2026, COVID sits in the same enforcement bucket.

Reasons to keep recording: internal consistency and signal. If your log has tracked COVID clusters since 2020, the data may still be useful to you as a leading indicator of workplace transmission, and an abrupt stop mid-year makes year-over-year comparisons messy. Some employers also face contractual or insurer reporting obligations that reference "OSHA recordable" definitions frozen at an earlier point in time — read those documents before changing course.

Whichever way you land, write it down. "As of [date], per OSHA's March 31, 2026 enforcement policy, we no longer enter COVID-19 cases on the 300 Log" is one sentence in your recordkeeping procedure, and it answers the question an auditor, a new HR hire, or a curious employee will eventually ask. A mid-year policy change with no paper trail looks like sloppiness; the same change with a dated note looks like what it is — a considered response to a changed federal posture.

The trap: "respiratory illness" is not one category

Here's where the headlines do real damage. "OSHA stops requiring COVID recording" is true — and if it slides into "respiratory illnesses aren't recordable anymore," it becomes expensively false. The 300 Log's own illness columns tell you why: column (3) exists specifically for respiratory conditions, and the March 2026 policy touches exactly one disease.

Sort respiratory cases into three buckets:

• The common cold and seasonal flu — never recordable as work-related, by the explicit text of 1904.5(b)(2)(viii). This was true in 2019 and it's true now.
• COVID-19 — technically still recordable under the rule as written, but covered by the March 2026 enforcement discretion. Effectively optional at the federal level.
• Everything else respiratory — fully recordable, exactly as before. This bucket is big and it has two very different halves:
  • Contagious diseases caught at work. The note in (viii) is still law: tuberculosis contracted from a coworker or patient is work-related. So are other workplace-transmitted infections outside the cold/flu pair. The March 2026 memo is about COVID-19; it does not extend to TB or anything else.
  • Respiratory conditions the work itself causes. Occupational asthma from isocyanates, silicosis, chemical pneumonitis from a chlorine release, a reactive-airway flare from a solvent exposure — these were never within a mile of the cold/flu exception. They run through the ordinary decision tree: work-related by the geographic presumption or direct causation, recordable if they meet a 1904.7 criterion, entered with the illness column (3) box checked.

If an employee inhales something on your floor and ends up on prescription steroids, the March 2026 COVID policy has nothing to say about it. That case goes on the log.

If you do record a COVID case: the privacy question

For employers who keep recording — and for anyone maintaining pre-2026 logs — one mechanical detail worth restating. COVID-19 is an illness, which means it can qualify as a privacy concern case under category (vi) of 1904.29(b)(7): "other illnesses, if the employee voluntarily requests that his or her name not be entered on the log." Unlike the five automatic privacy categories, this one runs on the employee's own request — you don't ask, but if they independently ask, you honor it: "privacy case" in the name column, real name on the confidential list. A COVID entry with a suppressed name handled that way is exactly what the rule contemplates.

The bottom line

Is COVID-19 OSHA recordable in 2026? On paper, yes — the regulation never changed. In enforcement reality, no — since March 31, 2026, OSHA treats it like the cold and flu and will not cite you for leaving it off the log or for not reporting a COVID hospitalization or fatality. The cold and flu themselves were never recordable. Every other respiratory case — TB caught at work, occupational asthma, a chemical exposure that puts someone on breathing treatments — is as recordable as it ever was, and that's the distinction that will separate clean logs from cited ones as the headlines fade.

LogStead's recordability wizard walks each case through the current Part 1904 framework — work-relatedness, the exceptions, the recording criteria — and documents the reasoning on the case record, so a determination made in July is defensible in an audit two years later. The 300 Log, 300A totals, and illness-column classifications are generated from the same entries, which means a deliberate policy choice about COVID recording flows through your rates consistently instead of by accident. You can test a scenario right now with the free recordability checker.