What Is DART Rate and How Do You Calculate It?

The DART rate is a workplace safety metric that counts how many injuries or illnesses per 100 full-time employees were serious enough in a calendar year to cause Days Away from work, Restricted duties, or a job Transfer. You calculate it with a simple formula: multiply your DART case count by 200,000, then divide by the total hours your employees actually worked that year. The 2024 national average across private industry was 1.4, though the number that matters is your industry’s average, since OSHA uses your rate against that benchmark when deciding whom to inspect.¹

What Counts as a DART Case

A recordable injury or illness becomes a DART case when it produces any one of three outcomes:

Days away from work. A healthcare provider recommends the employee stay home for at least one full day beyond the day of injury.
Restricted work activity. The employee stays on the job but cannot perform all normal duties, or works a shortened schedule because of the injury.
Job transfer. The employer moves the employee to a different position to accommodate physical limitations from the injury.

One incident equals one case, even when it involves more than one outcome. An employee who starts on restricted duty and later needs days away still generates a single DART case, not two.

Injuries That Don’t Count

Not every workplace injury feeds into the calculation. The dividing line is whether treatment goes beyond first aid. Injuries requiring only first aid are not OSHA-recordable at all and never enter the count. OSHA defines first aid narrowly through a specific list: nonprescription medications at nonprescription strength, tetanus shots, wound cleaning, bandages, hot or cold therapy, elastic wraps, eye patches, draining blisters, removing splinters with tweezers, and drinking fluids for heat stress.²

Anything not on that list counts as medical treatment and makes the case recordable. Sutures, staples, prescription-strength medications, rigid splints or braces, and physical therapy all cross the line. A recordable case then becomes a DART case only when it also causes time away, restricted work, or a transfer. Plenty of recordable injuries never become DART cases, because the employee gets stitches and returns to full duty the next day.

The DART Rate Formula

The calculation is short:

DART Rate = (Number of DART cases × 200,000) ÷ Total hours worked

The 200,000 is a standardization constant representing 100 employees working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks. It scales every company’s data to the same baseline, so a 15-person shop and a 5,000-employee warehouse produce comparable numbers.³

A worked example: a company records 3 DART cases across a year in which its employees worked 500,000 total hours. The math: (3 × 200,000) ÷ 500,000 = 1.2. That DART rate of 1.2 means the equivalent of 1.2 serious injuries per 100 full-time workers.

Where to Get the Numbers

The DART case count comes from OSHA Form 300, the log of work-related injuries and illnesses.⁴ Column H records cases with days away from work, and Column I records cases with job transfer or restriction.⁵ Add up the check marks in both columns, but count rows, not check marks. A case that has boxes checked in both columns is still one case. Double-counting is the most common mistake.

The denominator requires adding every hour actually worked by every employee during the year: salaried, hourly, part-time, seasonal, and temporary workers all included. Hours paid but not worked, such as vacation, sick leave, and holidays, do not count.⁶ The rate measures exposure to hazards, and people who aren’t at work aren’t exposed.

Counting Days Correctly

Day counting starts the day after the injury or illness onset. The day it happens does not count. You then count every calendar day the employee cannot work normally, including weekends, holidays, and days they were not scheduled to work, as long as the injury is the reason they could not have worked.² This trips up employers who assume a weekend doesn’t count because the employee wasn’t scheduled anyway. It does.

OSHA caps the count at 180 calendar days. If an employee is out longer than that, record 180 and stop tracking. Days of restricted duty and job transfer follow the same rules, with one exception: if you permanently modify the employee’s job to eliminate the restricted functions, you can stop the count when that change becomes permanent.²

DART Rate vs. Total Recordable Incident Rate

The Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) captures every OSHA-recordable injury and illness, including cases that required only medical treatment beyond first aid without any lost time, restriction, or transfer. The DART rate is a subset of TRIR, limited to cases that actually disrupted someone’s ability to do their job. Your DART rate should always be equal to or lower than your TRIR.

If the two numbers are identical or nearly identical, that is a red flag. It means almost every recordable incident at your facility is severe enough to knock someone off their normal duties. A healthy gap between TRIR and DART suggests that while injuries happen, most are minor enough that employees return to full work immediately.

How Your Rate Compares by Industry

The number only means something in context. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes annual incidence rates broken down by industry sector. For 2024, the overall private industry DART rate was 1.4.¹ Sector averages ran well above and well below that number:

Transportation and warehousing: 3.5
Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting: 2.5
Trade, transportation, and utilities: 2.2
Retail trade: 1.8
Manufacturing: 1.7
Construction: 1.3
Information: 0.4
Finance, insurance, and real estate: 0.4

State and local government employers ran higher at 2.1, with local government specifically at 2.3.¹ These benchmarks shift each year, so check the BLS tables for your specific NAICS code rather than relying on broad sector averages.

Why Your Rate Matters to OSHA

OSHA uses DART data to decide which workplaces get inspected through the Site-Specific Targeting (SST) program. The SST plan pulls DART rates from Form 300A submissions and compares each establishment against its industry average. OSHA sets separate DART rate thresholds for manufacturing and non-manufacturing because average rates differ so widely between the two.⁷

Establishments with rates well above their industry average land on the high-rate inspection list. OSHA also flags establishments with DART rates at or above twice the national private-sector average that have been trending upward over multiple years. Inspections under this program are unannounced and involve a review of safety logs, physical conditions, and injury records. OSHA also randomly samples establishments that reported unusually low DART rates to verify data accuracy, and it inspects a sample of employers who failed to submit data at all.⁷ Both high rates and suspiciously low rates draw attention.

1
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Table 1 – Incidence Rates of Nonfatal Occupational Injuries and Illnesses by Industry and Case Types, 2024
2
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. 29 CFR 1904.7 – General Recording Criteria
3
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Clarification on How the Formula Is Used by OSHA to Calculate Incidence Rates
4
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. 29 CFR 1904.29 – Forms
5
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA Forms for Recording Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses
6
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. How Do I Calculate the Total Hours Worked on My Annual Summary
7
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. CPL 02-01-067 – Site-Specific Targeting