Calculate Your OSHA Dart Rate!

Last updated: April 2026

Your TRIR tells clients how often incidents happen. Your DART rate tells them how serious those incidents are. A contractor with a TRIR of 3.0 but a DART of 0.5 is having mostly minor recordables. A contractor with a TRIR of 3.0 and a DART of 2.8 is sending people home injured.

DART rate (Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred) measures the number of workplace incidents serious enough to result in lost workdays, restricted duties, or job transfers per 100 full-time workers. It uses the same OSHA 200,000-hour formula as TRIR but counts only the more severe cases.

What Is DART Rate?

DART stands for Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred. The DART rate is a safety metric that specifically measures the incidents serious enough to change a worker's ability to perform their normal job duties.

An incident counts toward your DART rate if the injured or ill employee experienced any of the following:

• Days away from work: The employee missed one or more scheduled workdays
• Restricted work activity: The employee could not perform all their normal job functions
• Job transfer: The employee was moved to a different role because of the injury or illness

An incident that only required medical treatment beyond first aid (for example, stitches or a prescription) but did not result in lost time, restricted duties, or a transfer is recordable under TRIR but does NOT count toward DART.

How to Calculate DART Rate

The DART rate formula is identical to the TRIR formula, but with a narrower numerator:

DART Rate = (Number of DART Cases x 200,000) / Total Hours Worked

The 200,000 represents 100 full-time employees working 40 hours per week for 50 weeks per year, the same normalization factor used by OSHA for all incidence rate calculations.

DART Rate Calculation Example

A contractor with 60 employees worked 124,800 total hours last year. They had 3 incidents that resulted in days away, restricted work, or job transfer.

DART Rate = (3 x 200,000) / 124,800 = 4.81

A DART of 4.81 is well above the national average of 1.4 and would likely trigger flags in prequalification systems.

Step by Step

1. Identify DART cases. Review your OSHA 300 log. Count only the entries in columns H (days away from work), I (job transfer or restriction), or both. Do not count cases where the only outcome was "other recordable cases" (column J).
2. Total your hours worked. Sum all employee hours for the same period, including overtime and temporary workers on your payroll.
3. Apply the formula. Multiply DART cases by 200,000, then divide by total hours worked.

2024 DART Rate Benchmarks

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes DART rates by industry through the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses.

2024 benchmarks (National Safety Council / BLS 2024 data):

• All private industry: 1.4 per 100 FTE (down from 1.5 in 2023)
• Days away from work (DAFW) rate: 0.8 per 100 FTE (down from 0.9 in 2023)

These are the lowest rates on record going back to 2003. For construction specifically, DART rates tend to run slightly above the all-industry average due to the physical nature of the work.

DART Rate vs TRIR

DART and TRIR are frequently confused, but they measure different aspects of your safety performance.

TRIR (Total Recordable Incident Rate) counts every OSHA-recordable case: medical treatment beyond first aid, days away, restricted work, transfers, loss of consciousness, and significant diagnoses.

DART rate counts only the subset of cases where the worker actually lost time, was placed on restricted duty, or was transferred to a different job.

What the gap between them tells you:

• Large gap (TRIR much higher than DART): Most of your incidents are minor, requiring medical treatment but not affecting the worker's ability to do their job. This is a better pattern.
• Small gap (DART close to TRIR): Most of your incidents are severe enough to cause lost time or restrictions. This warrants immediate investigation into root causes.
• DART higher than expected relative to TRIR: Your incidents may not be frequent, but when they do happen, they tend to be serious. Look at the types of tasks and exposures involved.

How to Lower Your DART Rate

Since DART measures severity, lowering it means preventing the kinds of incidents that send people home or put them on restricted duty.

1. Focus prevention on high-severity tasks. Identify the tasks that produce the most days-away or restricted-duty incidents. For most contractors, these involve working at heights, heavy lifting, struck-by hazards, and caught-in/between situations.
2. Build a strong return-to-work program. Modified duty options reduce the number of days-away cases. A worker who returns to light duty the next day is a DART case (restricted work), but the claim cost and recovery time are significantly lower than a full days-away case.
3. Improve incident investigation depth. Shallow root cause analysis leads to surface-level corrective actions that do not prevent recurrence. Track whether the same types of injuries are repeating.
4. Strengthen leading indicators. Inspection completion, corrective action closure, and near-miss reporting all predict where DART incidents will show up. Track these monthly using our safety metrics framework.

How DART Connects to EMR and Prequalification

DART cases drive workers' compensation claims, and claims drive your experience modification rate (EMR). A DART case almost always involves a claim that enters the NCCI system and affects your EMR for the next three years.

On the prequalification side, ISNetworld and Avetta typically request both TRIR and DART for the past three years. Some clients weight DART more heavily than TRIR because it filters out the minor recordables and shows only the incidents that actually affected workers' ability to do their jobs.

Frequently Asked Questions