Starter guide
OSHA can feel like a lot when nobody has ever walked you through it. It is less than it looks. Here is what actually applies to you, in plain English, with links to OSHA’s own pages so you can check anything yourself.
Step one
OSHA — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — is the federal agency that writes and enforces workplace safety rules. It was created by the OSH Act of 1970 and covers most private employers in the country. Yours is very likely one of them.
An inspector turns up for one of a few reasons: somebody filed a complaint, another agency referred you, something serious happened, or your industry is on OSHA’s list that year for a particular hazard.
Two things catch people out. First, the rules are split by industry. General industry follows 29 CFR 1910; construction follows 29 CFR 1926. If you build, do not assume the construction rules are a lighter version — they are not. Second, an inspector does not need to point at a specific rule to write you up. That is what the General Duty Clause is for.
The catch-all
This is the one to know. It is two sentences long, and everything else in OSHA sits on top of it. Worth reading in the original:
“Each employer shall furnish to each of his employees employment and a place of employment which are free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees” and “shall comply with occupational safety and health standards promulgated under this Act.”
The words that matter are recognized hazards. If a danger is well known in your line of work — or worse, known inside your own company and written down in your own records — OSHA does not need a rule naming it to cite you. Section 5(b) puts a matching duty on employees to follow the rules that apply to their own work.
This is why a safety program built to tick boxes tends to fail an inspection. The question is not whether you covered every item on a list. It is whether you dealt with the hazards any reasonable employer in your industry would have spotted.
The baseline
This is not everything — your industry will add to it. But if any of these are missing, start here.
The framework
This is OSHA’s own framework, and it is the shape an inspector expects to see. Compliance is the floor. A program your people actually use is what keeps you off it.
Programs die at the top or on the floor. Leadership has to pay for it and be seen following it, and the crew needs a way to flag what they spot. A plan written in an office, by people who do not do the job, gets ignored by the people who do.
Walk the site and write down what is really there — job by job, not room by room. This is where job hazard analysis lives. And it is never one and done: new kit, new process, new crew, new hazards.
Get rid of the hazard if you can. Engineer it out if you cannot. Change how the work is done if you still cannot. PPE comes last. Written procedures and maintenance schedules are what stop a fix being a one-off.
Everyone should know the hazards of their own job and the controls that go with them. That includes supervisors — they are usually the ones deciding whether a control gets used on a bad day.
Two different duties
People use these two words to mean the same thing. OSHA does not. They are separate jobs with separate triggers, and the reporting deadlines are short enough to miss without meaning to.
If you have more than 10 employees, you have to log recordable work-related injuries and illnesses on OSHA’s forms and keep them on file. Some low-hazard industries are let off the routine requirement.
This one applies to everyone, including businesses let off the routine logging. The clock starts the moment you find out.
Straight from the source
OSHA’s own pages, always the authority over any summary — including this one. All links open on osha.gov in a new tab.
This page is a plain-language summary for general guidance, not legal advice or a compliance determination. Requirements vary by industry, headcount, and state plan, and they change. OSHA’s published standards govern. If you are unsure whether something is recordable or reportable, call us before the deadline runs.
Free download
Everything above, condensed onto a single sheet: the General Duty Clause, the employer baseline, OSHA’s four program elements, the three recordkeeping forms, and the 8-hour and 24-hour reporting deadlines in type large enough to read across a room.
Two of our consultants spent years inside federal OSHA. They know which of this actually gets looked at.
