Most-cited OSHA standards, ranked

In short

Across the 26 OSHA standards tracked here, inspectors have issued 222,130 citations carrying $956,807,367 in initial penalties. The most-cited is 29 CFR 1926.501 (Fall Protection Competent Person Awareness) with 31,780 citations at an average initial penalty of $7,087 each.

Where each standard is cited most

The ten states with the most citations for each standard, with the average initial penalty in that state.

How these numbers are produced

We pull the full public enforcement dataset from the US Department of Labor, join violations to their inspections, and aggregate by standard ourselves. We do not sample, estimate, or round for effect, and we publish the date of the pull so you can tell how current a figure is.

Counts are citations rather than inspections. A single inspection can produce several citations under the same standard, so these figures describe enforcement activity and not the number of employers inspected. Penalties are initial proposed amounts, which are frequently reduced during settlement, so treat them as an indication of exposure rather than of money collected.

If you believe a number here is wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source. Our editorial and data standards page explains the process in full, and the companion article explains what the ranking actually tells an employer.

Citation count alone doesn't say how much a standard should worry you. Our Compliance Risk Index blends these same citation counts with penalty severity and small-employer exposure into a single, disclosed score.

Every standard in this table links to the course that documents its training requirement, with a dated certificate anyone can verify.