OSHA penalties and citations

The amounts, as they stand now

Two things about that table are easy to miss. Failure to abate is per day, so a three-week delay on a $16,550 item is arithmetic nobody wants to do. And willful sits at exactly ten times serious.

States that operate their own Occupational Safety and Health Plans are required to adopt maximum penalty levels at least as effective as federal OSHA’s. State Plans are not required to impose monetary penalties on state and local government employers.

What each class means

• Serious — there is a substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result, and the employer knew or should have known of the hazard. “Should have known” is doing most of the work in that sentence.
• Other-than-serious — a violation with a direct relationship to safety and health, but unlikely to cause death or serious harm. Recordkeeping gaps land here.
• Willful — intentional disregard of, or plain indifference to, the requirement. A hazard documented on your own inspection sheet and left open is the shape of evidence this classification is built from.
• Repeated — a substantially similar violation previously cited and final. It travels between your own sites, which is why a citation at one job matters at every job.
• Failure to abate — the condition from a previous citation still exists past the abatement date.

What gets cited on construction sites

Federal OSHA’s most frequently cited standards in fiscal year 2024, in order: fall protection general requirements (1926.501), hazard communication (1910.1200), control of hazardous energy (1910.147), ladders (1926.1053), respiratory protection (1910.134), powered industrial trucks (1910.178), fall protection training (1926.503), scaffolding (1926.451), eye and face protection in construction (1926.102) and machine guarding (1910.212).

Five of the ten are construction standards, and the top one and the seventh are the same subject seen twice — the system and the training for it. That pairing is worth reading as a warning: a compliant guardrail and no training record is still two citations.

What the duty actually requires is in OSHA fall protection requirements.

The abatement clock and the contest window

A citation carries an abatement date. From receipt you have 15 working days to file a Notice of Contest, and that window is unforgiving — miss it and the citation and penalty become a final order not subject to review.

Before contesting, ask for an informal conference with the Area Director. It is quick, it costs nothing, and it is where most penalty reductions and abatement-date extensions actually happen. Contesting is the tool for when you disagree with the citation itself, not with the amount.

Whatever you do about the paper, abate the hazard immediately. Failure to abate is charged per day, and the abatement is the only part of this that stops someone getting hurt.

Clock