How OSHA actually calculates penalties

OSHA doesn’t pick a number out of the air. Every penalty follows a formula laid out in the Field Operations Manual, Chapter 6. The formula is public. The inputs are documented. And the results, once you understand the system, are predictable.

This post walks through the actual calculation, step by step, using real enforcement data from FastDOL’s OSHA Citations Q1 2026 dataset (28,827 citations). Where most guides stop at explaining the rules, we’ll show what the rules produce at scale.

The formula in one sentence

OSHA assigns a gravity score based on how bad the injury could be and how likely it is to happen, maps that score to a dollar amount, then reduces the dollar amount based on the employer’s size, safety programs, and violation history.

That’s it. Everything else is detail.

Step 1: Gravity

Gravity is the primary factor in every OSHA penalty. It combines two assessments:

Severity measures the worst reasonably predictable injury. OSHA uses four levels:

• High: death or permanent disability
• Medium: hospitalization or temporary disability
• Low: injury requiring minor treatment, no hospitalization
• Minimal: no medical treatment required (other-than-serious violations only)

Probability measures how likely that injury is to actually occur. OSHA uses two levels:

• Greater probability
• Lesser probability

Compliance officers assess probability based on the number of workers exposed, how often they’re exposed, how close they are to the hazard, and other site-specific conditions. A single unguarded floor opening on a busy construction site gets “greater probability.” The same hazard in a locked storage room accessed once a month gets “lesser.”

Severity times probability equals gravity. The highest gravity, a 10, means high severity (death or permanent disability) and greater probability. That combination drives the penalty toward the statutory maximum.

Step 2: The gravity-based penalty

Once the compliance officer assigns a gravity score, OSHA maps it to a dollar amount called the gravity-based penalty (GBP). For serious violations in 2026, the GBP table looks roughly like this:

The maximum GBP for a serious violation in 2026 is $16,550 per citation. That number is adjusted annually for inflation under the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 2015. In 2015, the maximum was $7,000. It’s more than doubled since.

For willful violations, the range is $11,524 (statutory minimum) to $165,514 (statutory maximum). For repeat violations, the maximum is also $165,514. These numbers are per violation, not per inspection.

Step 3: Reduction factors

After the GBP is set, OSHA applies up to three reductions. These are percentage reductions from the gravity-based amount, and they are cumulative.

Size of employer. This is the largest potential reduction:

Good faith.Up to 25% reduction for employers who demonstrate effective safety and health programs, documented training, and proactive compliance. This is where documentation matters. An employer who can show written safety procedures, recent training records, and hazard assessments gets the reduction. An employer who can’t, doesn’t.

History. Up to 10% reduction for employers with no serious, willful, or repeat violations in the preceding five years.

A small contractor with 20 employees, a documented safety program, and a clean five-year record could theoretically receive up to a 95% reduction from the GBP. In practice, OSHA sets a minimum floor for serious violations (currently around $1,190), so the penalty never reaches zero.

There’s a critical exception: willful and repeat violations are generally not eligible for these reductions. The employer knew about the hazard and either ignored it (willful) or committed the same violation again (repeat). OSHA’s position is that deterrence requires the full penalty.

The Area Director also has discretion to deny reductions entirely in certain cases, including fatality investigations, Severe Violator Enforcement Program (SVEP) cases, and situations where the employer failed to report a recordable injury.

Step 4: Special classifications

Willful violations. The employer knowingly violated the standard or showed plain indifference to employee safety. The minimum penalty is $11,524 and the maximum is $165,514. These are the most serious citations OSHA issues and carry no standard reductions.

Repeat violations.A substantially similar violation within the past five years. Same maximum as willful: $165,514. A company’s first fall protection citation is serious. The same citation five years later is repeat, and the maximum penalty jumps tenfold.

Failure to abate.If an employer doesn’t fix a cited hazard by the abatement deadline, OSHA can assess up to $16,550 per day until the hazard is corrected, capped at 30 times the daily amount ($496,500).

Egregious cases.In the most extreme situations, OSHA applies violation-by-violation penalties, meaning each instance of a hazard is cited separately instead of being grouped. A construction site with 15 workers on an unguarded roof, normally one citation, becomes 15 separate willful citations. The math changes dramatically: 15 × $165,514 = $2.48 million for a single hazard. Egregious cases require approval from the Assistant Secretary of Labor.

What the data shows

The formula is one thing. What it produces at scale is another.

FastDOL’s OSHA Citations Q1 2026 dataset contains 28,827 citations issued between January and March 2026. Here’s how the penalty system actually plays out:

The average serious penalty is far below the maximum. Across 16,920 serious citations in Q1 2026, the average penalty for those assessed (n=11,700) was $4,169. Even at maximum gravity (score of 10), the median serious penalty was $4,965, roughly 30% of the $16,550 maximum. The reduction factors are doing significant work: most employers qualify for size, good faith, or history reductions that pull the assessed amount well below the GBP.

Willful citations cluster at the maximum. The average willful penalty in Q1 2026 was $60,805 across 120 citations. But the distribution is bimodal: many willful citations come in at the full $165,514, while others land in the $10,000–$30,000 range. The lower end typically reflects willful other-than-serious citations or cases where the gravity assessment produced a lower GBP.

Repeat citations carry real escalation.The average repeat penalty ($14,822 across 1,006 citations) is 3.5 times the average serious penalty. This is the escalation mechanism working as designed: an employer’s first trenching violation might cost $4,000. The same violation five years later costs $15,000. And if it’s classified as willful on the third occurrence, $165,514.

Worked example: Revoli Construction

In April 2026, OSHA cited Revoli Construction Co. with 57 violations after a trench collapse killed a worker in Yarmouth, Massachusetts. The penalty breakdown:

The formula is visible in the numbers. Every willful citation is at the statutory maximum: $165,514. No reductions applied. Every willful and repeat citation carries the maximum gravity score of 10.

The repeat citations at $99,300 each reflect OSHA’s repeat penalty scale at high gravity. The serious citations range from $8,512 to $16,550, with the lower amounts reflecting gravity scores below 10 for less immediately dangerous conditions found during the same inspection.

This was the single largest OSHA enforcement action in Q1 2026, accounting for 6.3% of all penalties issued during the quarter across 8,601 employers. Full analysis: Anatomy of a $4.7M OSHA Citation.

What the formula doesn’t capture

The proposed penalty is not the final penalty. Employers have 15 business days to contest citations or request an informal conference with the OSHA Area Director. In informal conferences, penalties are routinely reduced by 30–50% in exchange for prompt abatement and agreement not to contest. If an employer contests, the case goes to the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, which can affirm, reduce, or vacate the penalty.

The “current penalty” field in OSHA’s public enforcement data reflects the post-settlement or post-conference amount. It does not reflect whether the penalty was actually collected. Collection rates, particularly for employers who enter bankruptcy or dissolve after receiving large citations, are not published.

This means the penalties visible in the public record are already reduced from what OSHA initially proposed, which was itself reduced from the statutory maximum via the gravity-based formula. What a worker’s family sees in the enforcement database is the residual of a process designed, at every step, to give the employer the benefit of good behavior.

Data source.The citation-level statistics in this post are drawn from FastDOL’s OSHA Citations Q1 2026 dataset (28,827 rows, CC BY 4.0). The penalty formula is documented in the OSHA Field Operations Manual, Chapter 6. Current maximum penalty amounts are published on OSHA’s penalties page.

References

1. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “Field Operations Manual, Chapter 6: Penalties and Debt Collection.” osha.gov
2. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “OSHA Penalties” (Annual Adjustments to OSHA Civil Penalties). osha.gov
3. Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015, Pub. L. 114-74, § 701.
4. FastDOL, “OSHA Citations Q1 2026” dataset. fastdol.com
5. Ben Turner, “Anatomy of a $4.7M OSHA Citation,” FastDOL, May 2026. fastdol.com