A company may describe workplace safety in an annual report using a single companywide injury rate.
OSHA's public data lets someone ask a more specific question. What happened at an individual facility? The agency has posted data for calendar year 2025, including establishment summaries and, for covered sites, available case details, submitted through its Injury Tracking Application. Recent years' releases have each drawn on more than 370,000 annual summary forms and several hundred thousand detailed injury and illness logs, and this year's release follows the same structure. Researchers, workers, journalists and potential customers can examine those records without waiting for a company to publish its own account.
A Companywide Rate Can Hide the Site-Level Picture
The dataset can show where an establishment is located, its submitted injury and illness totals, and, for covered sites, details about individual recorded cases. The electronic reporting rule requires establishments with 100 or more employees in designated high-hazard industries to submit information from Forms 300 and 301. Other covered establishments submit annual Form 300A summaries under separate size and industry criteria.
This creates a different view from a corporate safety metric. A companywide rate can improve while one facility records a recurring type of injury. Conversely, a site's increase in recorded cases may call for closer examination of staffing, hours worked, operations and reporting practices before anyone concludes that conditions worsened.
The detail also makes omissions more visible. An August Reuters investigation found that Taylor Farms, a major produce supplier, had frequently failed to submit required injury logs, including for at least four facilities where workers suffered fatal or otherwise serious injuries. Its finding illustrates a broader question outsiders can now pursue. Do the establishments expected to report actually appear in the public record? A missing entry alone does not establish why a facility is absent, since coverage requirements and filing status have to be checked first.
A Missing Facility in OSHA's Data Is Not Proof of Anything on Its Own
OSHA's downloads are valuable, but they are not a complete ranking of every workplace. Reporting requirements vary by establishment size and industry, and the publicly posted 2025 dataset covers submissions received during the period OSHA specifies. A facility absent from a download cannot automatically be labeled injury-free, noncompliant or unsafe, a distinction the broader industrial safety data problem makes easy to miss. OSHA provides guidance on data quality, representativeness and rate calculations alongside the files.
The number of cases also needs a denominator. Comparing two facilities by raw injury counts without accounting for hours worked can make a larger operation appear worse simply because more people worked there. Even a calculated injury rate cannot, on its own, explain the severity of cases or whether workers feel able to report them.
OSHA withholds worker-identifying information from its public release. That protection does not prevent outsiders from looking for patterns in the available establishment and case data.
EHS Leaders Should Review the Public Version Before Someone Else Does
The most useful preparation is to download the entries for each covered site and compare them with the company's final OSHA logs, annual summaries and internal reporting, an exercise that overlaps closely with the internal record review teams are already running ahead of inspections. Check establishment names and identifiers, case classifications, hours worked and any missing locations, and where figures changed after an initial submission, determine whether the public record reflects the correction.
Then look at what the records suggest across sites. Repeated injury types, a sharp change in days away from work, or a mismatch between an external safety claim and site-level results deserve an operational explanation. That explanation may be a change in work performed, improved reporting or a problem that requires corrective action, and knowing which it is before a customer, worker representative or reporter asks is the whole point of the exercise, an approach the same logic already applies to reading OSHA's own inspection manual before an inspector arrives.
That review should also reach the people writing sustainability disclosures and responding to procurement questionnaires. A corporate safety statement is more useful when the company can explain how it relates to the facilities and cases visible in OSHA's data.
Public injury records cannot tell the whole story of a workplace. They can now give outsiders enough of one to ask detailed questions. The strongest response is an accurate site-level account of the numbers, their limits and the actions taken after an injury.
