TRIR and DART Rates Explained: A Plain-English Guide for Small Employers

If you have ever bid on a contract, applied for a new insurance policy, or been asked to fill out a safety prequalification questionnaire, you have probably been asked for your TRIR and DART rates. These two numbers are the universal shorthand for how safe — or unsafe — your workplace is relative to everyone else in your industry.

The formulas are not complicated, but the details matter. A miscounted case or an incorrect hours figure can inflate your rate, costing you real money in higher premiums or lost bids — and for a small employer, a single case moves the rate by whole points. This guide walks through both calculations step by step, shows exactly which 300 Log cases belong in each numerator, explains how OSHA says to figure the hours, and works a full example from log to rate.

The Two Rates in One Sentence

TRIR counts every OSHA-recordable case. DART counts only the recordable cases that took someone off their normal work — days away, restricted duty, or a job transfer. Both are expressed per 100 full-time-equivalent workers per year, so a 10-person shop and a 10,000-employee manufacturer are measured on the same scale.

DART is always less than or equal to TRIR, because every DART case is also a recordable case. The gap between them is your column J — cases that needed medical treatment beyond first aid, involved loss of consciousness, or met another recording criterion but did not cost any days.

What Is TRIR?

TRIR stands for Total Recordable Incident Rate. It measures the total number of OSHA-recordable injuries and illnesses your company experienced per 100 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers over a given period, typically one calendar year.

The formula, as OSHA prints it on the "Calculating Injury and Illness Incidence Rates" page of its recordkeeping forms package:

OSHA explains the constant on the same page: "The 200,000 figure in the formula represents the number of hours 100 employees working 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year would work, and provides the standard base for calculating incidence rates." The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses the identical base in its own methodology — "40 hours per week multiplied by 50 weeks — the base of hours commonly regarded as worked by 100 full-time employees during a calendar year" — which is why your number is directly comparable to the published industry averages.

Worked Example

Suppose your company had 4 recordable cases last year and your employees worked a combined total of 250,000 hours. Your TRIR would be: (4 × 200,000) ÷ 250,000 = 3.2. That means for every 100 full-time workers, you would expect about 3.2 recordable cases per year.

Which Cases Go in the Numerator

Only OSHA-recordable injuries and illnesses belong in the TRIR numerator. A case is recordable if it is work-related and results in death, days away from work, restricted work or job transfer, medical treatment beyond first aid, or loss of consciousness — or if it is a significant injury or illness diagnosed by a physician or other licensed health care professional (29 CFR 1904.7(a)).

First-aid-only cases — cleaning a wound, applying a bandage, using a non-prescription medication at non-prescription strength — do not count. Including them will inflate your rate unnecessarily. If you are unsure where a borderline case falls, the first-aid vs. medical-treatment line is the test to apply before the case ever reaches your rate math.

What Is DART?

DART stands for Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred. It is the subset of recordable cases where the employee missed at least a day of work, was kept from one or more routine job functions or a full shift, or was moved to a different job because of the injury or illness.

OSHA defines the numerator by 300A column, again on the forms-package page:

BLS states the same thing in words in its 2024 injury and illness release: "Cases involving days away from work, job transfer, or restriction (DART) are the sum of cases with days away from work (DAFW) and cases involving only days of job transfer or restriction (DJTR)."

Worked Example

Using the same company from above: of your 4 recordable cases, 2 involved days away from work and 1 involved restricted duty. That gives you 3 DART cases. Your DART rate would be: (3 × 200,000) ÷ 250,000 = 2.4.

What Makes a Case a DART Case

Because DART is defined by columns H and I, the question "is this a DART case?" is really "does this case get a check in H or I on the log?" — and 29 CFR 1904.7 answers that precisely. The rules that decide it most often:

• Days away start the day after. "You begin counting days away on the day after the injury occurred or the illness began" (1904.7(b)(3)(i)). A worker sent home two hours into the shift on the day of injury and back at full duty the next morning has no days away — and, because the day of injury is excluded from restricted-day counting too (below), no DART case at all unless a physician or other licensed health care professional recommended otherwise.
• A partial shift is a restricted day. "A partial day of work is recorded as a day of job transfer or restriction for recordkeeping purposes, except for the day on which the injury occurred or the illness began" (1904.7(b)(4)(v)).
• Restriction means routine functions or the full shift. Restricted work occurs when the employer or a physician or other licensed health care professional keeps the employee "from performing one or more of the routine functions of his or her job, or from working the full workday" (1904.7(b)(4)(i)). Routine functions are "those work activities the employee regularly performs at least once per week" (1904.7(b)(4)(ii)). A restriction that only touches something the employee does once a month is not restricted work.
• Day-of-injury-only restrictions do not count. If the restriction or transfer applies "only for the day on which the injury occurred or the illness began," it is not recorded as restricted work (1904.7(b)(4)(iii)).
• Producing less is not restriction. If the worker "produces fewer goods or services … but otherwise performs all of the routine functions," it is not a restricted work case (1904.7(b)(4)(vi)).
• A physician's recommendation counts even if ignored. Days away recommended by a physician or other licensed health care professional must be recorded "whether the injured or ill employee follows the … recommendation or not" (1904.7(b)(3)(ii)); the same holds for a recommended restriction the employee works through (1904.7(b)(4)(viii)).
• Vague "light duty" notes get resolved with two questions. Can the employee do all routine job functions, and work the full normal shift? If both answers are yes, no restriction; if either is no, it is a restricted work case; if you cannot get an answer, record it as restricted (1904.7(b)(4)(vii)).
• One case, one column. A case with days away goes in H. Column I is for a case that "involves restricted work or job transfer but does not involve death or days away from work" (1904.7(b)(4)). So a strain that costs three days away and then two weeks of light duty is one DART case, checked in H, with the day counts entered in both K and L — it is never counted twice.

The day counts (calendar days, the 180-day cap, cases that cross a year end) do not change the rate — a case is one case whether it cost two days or two hundred — but they are what your 300A and any "severity" question will ask for. The days-away and restricted-day counting rules have their own guide.

How to Calculate Your DART Rate, Step by Step

1. Pull the 300 Log for the establishment and year. Rates are computed per establishment per calendar year, the same scope as the 300A. If you have several establishments and a client wants a company-wide rate, add the cases and add the hours across establishments — never average the rates.
2. Confirm every entry is actually recordable and classified in exactly one of columns G, H, I, or J, at the most serious outcome the case reached. If a case got worse after you logged it — a medical-treatment case that later cost days away — the log entry must be updated to H before you count.
3. Count the checks in column H, then in column I. Their sum is your DART case count. (On the 300A, that is the "Total number of cases with days away from work" plus the "Total number of cases with job transfer or restriction.")
4. Get total hours worked by all employees for the year, following OSHA's worksheet rules in the next section. Not payroll hours.
5. Multiply the case count by 200,000 and divide by the hours. Round to one decimal place — the convention BLS uses in its published tables, and what every questionnaire expects.

The TRIR calculation is steps 1, 2, 4, 5 with the count from step 3 replaced by the total across all four columns (or H + I + J for a nonfatal, BLS-comparable count).

A Full Example: From the 300 Log to Both Rates

Acme Millwork, a single-establishment cabinet shop with 48 employees, logged four recordable cases in the year:

Total hours worked, from the payroll system with paid time off stripped out: 96,000.

• TRIR = (4 × 200,000) ÷ 96,000 = 8.3
• DART = (2 × 200,000) ÷ 96,000 = 4.2 (cases 2 and 3)

Case 2 is counted once, in H, even though it produced both days away (column K: 6) and restricted days (column L: 15). Case 3 is a DART case although nobody missed a day — a transfer to a different job for part or all of a shift is column I. Cases 1 and 4 separate the two rates: they are recordable, so they are in TRIR, but they cost no days, so they are not in DART.

Notice the scale. At 96,000 hours, each case is worth 200,000 ÷ 96,000 ≈ 2.1 rate points. Acme's TRIR of 8.3 against a 2024 manufacturing average of 2.7 (BLS Table 1) is not evidence that Acme is three times as dangerous as the industry; it is what four cases look like at 48 employees. That is the small-employer problem, and it is why the industry benchmark post spends a section on it.

Getting the Hours Right

The most common source of error in rate calculations is the total hours worked figure — and it is the one input OSHA spells out in detail. Its "Worksheet to Help You Fill Out the Summary," printed in the forms package, says:

Include hours worked by salaried, hourly, part-time, and seasonal workers, as well as hours worked by other workers subject to day-to-day supervision by your establishment (e.g., temporary help service workers). Do not include vacation, sick leave, holidays, or any other non-work time, even if employees were paid for it. If your establishment keeps records of only the hours paid, or if you have employees who are not paid by the hour, please estimate the hours that the employees actually worked.

Three things in that paragraph trip people up:

• Temp-agency workers you supervise day to day are in your hours — because their injuries are on your log. Counting their cases but not their hours overstates your rate; the reverse understates it.
• Salaried and exempt staff need an estimate, not a zero. OSHA's optional worksheet does it this way: number of full-time employees × work hours for a full-time employee in a year (2,000 is the usual figure — 40 hours × 50 weeks), then add overtime and the hours of part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers, and round up to the next whole number.
• Payroll hours are not hours worked. Payroll typically includes paid holidays, vacation, and sick time, which overcount your denominator and make your rates look better than they are.

The same worksheet is where the 300A's "annual average number of employees" comes from, and it is a pay-period average, not a year-end headcount — the 300A guide walks through that formula. The headcount does not enter the rate formula at all; only hours do.

Rates for a Quarter, a Project, or a Rolling Year

The formula does not care what period you use, as long as the cases and the hours cover the same period. A quarterly DART rate is the quarter's H + I cases × 200,000 ÷ the quarter's hours — it comes out on the same per-100-FTE scale as an annual rate, so it can be compared with BLS figures, but it is far noisier: one case in a 24,000-hour quarter is 8.3 points on its own. Rolling 12-month rates (the last four quarters' cases over the last four quarters' hours) smooth that out and are what many prequalification systems actually want. Whatever you report, say the period and the hours next to the rate.

How Do You Compare? Industry Benchmarks from BLS

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes injury and illness incidence rates annually through its Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses. The most recent data, released in January 2026, covers calendar year 2024: private industry employers reported 2.5 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses, and the overall total recordable case rate was 2.3 cases per 100 full-time equivalent workers.

But the overall number obscures wide variation by industry. Here are some representative TRIR benchmarks from the 2024 data (BLS Table 1, total recordable cases per 100 full-time workers) to give you a sense of where you might stand (for the full industry-by-industry table with DART rates, see the 2024 BLS benchmarks by NAICS):

• Healthcare and social assistance: 3.4 per 100 FTE
• Manufacturing: 2.7 per 100 FTE
• Construction: 2.2 per 100 FTE
• Retail trade: 3.0 per 100 FTE
• Information sector: 0.7 per 100 FTE (lowest among major sectors)
• All private industry combined: 2.3 per 100 FTE

If your rate is above your industry average, it does not necessarily mean your workplace is unsafe — it could reflect more honest reporting, or simply the small-denominator effect above. But it will raise questions from insurers and clients. If your rate is significantly below average, make sure you are not under-reporting. OSHA takes under-reporting seriously, and the penalties can be far worse than the higher rate would have been.

Who Uses Which Rate — and One Thing They Don't

Your TRIR and DART rates are not just numbers on a form.

General contractors and prequalification platforms ask for three to five years of TRIR and DART, usually alongside your EMR and your fatality count, and many set a ceiling — above it, a subcontractor is not considered without a written explanation. The ceiling varies by client; ask for it rather than assuming.

OSHA uses DART directly. Its Site-Specific Targeting program builds its programmed-inspection lists from the DART rates in the Form 300A data employers submit electronically — high rates, upward-trending rates, and a sample of suspiciously low ones. Your submitted 300A is your DART rate as OSHA sees it.

Your workers' compensation insurer does not use either rate to set your premium. This is the most common misconception in the questionnaire world. Your experience modification factor (EMR or mod) comes from the rating bureau — NCCI in most states — and, in NCCI's own words, it is "based on individual payroll and loss records": your actual claim costs over usually the latest three available years compared with employers in the same classification. A recordable case with no claim does not move your mod; a large claim from a case that was first-aid-only under OSHA's rules does. TRIR and the mod tend to move together because they measure overlapping events, but they are computed from different records by different people, and a good TRIR does not buy you a lower mod.

The Mistakes That Distort Small-Employer Rates

• Counting first-aid cases. Anything that never reached the log cannot be in the numerator.
• Missing the upgrade. A column J case that later cost days away must be moved to H on the log — and that changes DART, not just TRIR.
• Double-counting a case in H and I. One case, one column; the day counts in K and L are where both outcomes show up.
• Using payroll hours, or headcount × 2,080. OSHA's base is 2,000 hours per full-time employee, and only for the estimate — actual hours worked when you have them.
• Leaving out supervised temps' hours while counting their cases, or the reverse.
• Mixing establishments. Per-establishment rates for per-establishment questions; combined cases over combined hours for a company-wide one.
• Reporting a rate without its period and hours. A 0.0 on 9,000 hours and a 0.0 on 900,000 hours are not the same statement.

Tracking Your Rates Over Time

A single year's rate can be misleading, especially for small employers. If you have 20 employees and one recordable case, your TRIR is 5.0 on roughly 40,000 hours — alarming next to a company with 2,000 employees and the same one case. That is why trending matters more than any single data point. Track your TRIR and DART quarterly and annually. Look for patterns: are cases clustering in a particular department, season, or job function? Are your rates improving or deteriorating year over year?

This kind of trend analysis is exactly what OSHA expects at the advanced level of the Safety Champions Program, and it is what insurers and sophisticated clients want to see when they ask about your safety performance. A company that can show three years of declining rates — with the hours beside each — tells a much stronger story than one that simply reports last year's number.

Common Questions

What is a good DART rate?

Lower than your industry's published BLS rate for the same year, on a full year of real hours. There is no universal threshold; a "good" rate for a roofing contractor and a software firm are different numbers. Look up your NAICS code's 2024 rate and compare like with like — and if you are small, compare the trend, not one year.

Is the DART rate always lower than TRIR?

Equal or lower, never higher. Every DART case is a recordable case; the difference is the column J cases that cost no days.

Does a restricted-duty case with no days away count in DART?

Yes. Column I — job transfer or restriction with no days away — is half of the DART definition. Restriction means the employee could not do one or more routine job functions or work a full shift, for at least one day beyond the day of injury.

Does a fatality count in DART?

No. A death is column G; DART sums columns H and I. It counts in your total recordable cases.

Do I need to submit my rates to OSHA?

You submit the 300A data (case counts, days, hours, average employment) if your establishment meets the electronic-submission criteria; OSHA computes the rate from what you submit. The 300A form itself has no rate field. Where that submission sits among the rest of the year's duties is laid out in the full list of OSHA recordkeeping requirements for small employers.

What is LTIR, and is it the same as DART?

LTIR (lost-time incident rate) is an industry term, not an OSHA or BLS one. Most requesters mean days-away cases only (column H), which makes it smaller than DART. Because definitions vary, quote the column you used.

Run the Numbers, Then Keep Running Them

LogStead calculates your TRIR and DART rates automatically from your recorded cases and hours worked — column classification comes straight from the log entry, so a case upgraded from medical treatment to days away moves from one rate to the other without anyone re-adding a spreadsheet — and tracks them over time so you can spot trends without rebuilding the math every quarter. But whether you use a tool or our free TRIR/DART rate calculator, the important thing is to actually run the numbers regularly, with the right hours, and act on what they tell you.