What Is TRIR? How to Calculate Your Total Recordable Incident Rate

TRIR — Total Recordable Incident Rate — is the single number that procurement teams, insurers, and regulators ask for first. But calculating it correctly requires more than plugging numbers into a formula. You need to know what OSHA counts as recordable, which hours to include, and how to interpret the result.

TRIR = (Number of OSHA-recordable cases × 200,000) ÷ Total hours worked by all employees. The 200,000 constant represents 100 full-time equivalent workers working 2,000 hours each per year. This normalises every worksite to the same scale.

• A recordable case is any work-related injury or illness requiring medical treatment beyond first aid, resulting in days away from work, restricted work, job transfer, loss of consciousness, or death (OSHA 29 CFR 1904.7).
• Hours worked include all employees — full-time, part-time, temporary, and contractor hours if you supervise them day-to-day.
• Do NOT include: commuting (unless in company vehicle), eating/drinking, or personal tasks unrelated to work.

Let us walk through an example. A manufacturing site with 250 employees working 500,000 hours in a year reports 4 recordable injuries. TRIR = (4 × 200,000) ÷ 500,000 = 1.6. This means 1.6 recordable injuries per 100 FTE per year. The industry average for manufacturing is around 3.3 (BLS 2024), so 1.6 is above average.

If you are comparing TRIR across companies, make sure they use the same definition of recordable. Some global firms use their own stricter internal criteria, inflating their TRIR relative to OSHA-only reporting. Always ask: calculated per OSHA or per internal policy?

The fastest way to get clean TRIR data is to capture incidents in a system that classifies OSHA recordability at the point of entry — before the incident even reaches the safety manager. See our [glossary entry on TRIR](/glossary/trir) for the full regulatory context and related metrics like LTIR and DART.