How Many OSHA Inspections Happen Each Year?

Employers often assume OSHA inspection numbers are large enough that any single workplace's odds of inspection are negligible. The real numbers tell a more specific story — inspection volume has ranged between roughly 21,000 and 41,000 per year over the past decade and a half, concentrated heavily in specific high-hazard industries and driven mostly by complaints, injuries, and referrals rather than random selection.

FY2024 and FY2025 Totals

In FY2024, OSHA conducted 34,625 inspections — 17,455 unprogrammed and 17,170 programmed. In FY2025, that dropped to 30,273 total inspections — 16,311 unprogrammed and 13,962 programmed, a decline of roughly 13% from the prior year.

OSHA also changed how it tracks and weights enforcement activity for FY2025, replacing the previous OSHA Weighting System (OWS) with a new Enforcement Impact Index (EII). This means FY2025 figures aren't a perfectly clean year-over-year comparison with FY2024 and earlier — the underlying counting methodology shifted at the same time the raw numbers declined.

Ten-Year Inspection Trend

*FY2020 and FY2021 reflect the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when inspection activity dropped sharply due to access restrictions and shifted enforcement priorities. Source: OSHA Enforcement Summary data, published annually at osha.gov/enforcement.

The pattern worth noticing: inspection volume held in a fairly narrow band of 31,000–34,600 from FY2016 through FY2024, aside from the pandemic years — then dropped meaningfully in FY2025. Whether that's the start of a new lower baseline or a one-year dip tied to the EII methodology transition isn't yet clear from a single year of data.

Programmed vs. Unprogrammed: What Drives Inspections

Every OSHA inspection falls into one of two categories, and the split matters for understanding your actual risk profile.

Unprogrammed inspections

These are triggered by a specific event: an employee complaint, a workplace injury or fatality, or a referral from another agency (a fire department, a workers' comp board, another OSHA office). Unprogrammed inspections have consistently made up roughly 50-56% of total inspections in most years. This is the category most directly within an employer's control — a workplace with no complaints, no severe injuries, and no referral-triggering incidents largely avoids this inspection pathway. See our full guide to what triggers an inspection.

Programmed inspections

These are proactively scheduled by OSHA based on industry risk profiles and targeted National or Local Emphasis Programs — heat illness, respirable silica, combustible dust, falls in construction, and similar high-hazard focus areas. Programmed inspections are not random; they concentrate on specific industries and specific hazards that OSHA has identified as priorities for that fiscal year. In FY2024, OSHA's Heat National Emphasis Program alone accounted for 2,875 inspections, a 15% increase over FY2023 — reflecting the agency's continued enforcement focus on heat illness even without a final heat standard in place. See our heat illness prevention guide.

Safety vs. Health Inspections

OSHA also separately tracks safety inspections (covering physical hazards — falls, machine guarding, electrical, etc.) versus health inspections (covering exposure-based hazards — chemicals, noise, respiratory hazards). In FY2024, the vast majority of total inspections were safety inspections, with health inspections representing a smaller but still substantial share. Health inspections require more specialized compliance officers and equipment, which has historically constrained how many OSHA can conduct relative to safety inspections — a long-standing agency capacity issue reflected in performance reports year after year.

The Long-Term Picture

Inspection volume was substantially higher in the early 2010s — FY2011 saw 40,614 total inspections, roughly a third more than recent years. The decline since then reflects budget constraints relative to a growing national workforce, not a policy decision to inspect less aggressively. OSHA's own historical framing is that the agency's presence has contributed to dramatic long-term improvement: workplace deaths have fallen nearly 65% and occupational injury and illness rates have dropped 72% since the OSH Act took effect in 1970 — though that trend reflects decades of combined regulatory, technological, and industry practice changes, not inspection volume alone.

What This Means for Employers

The inspection numbers support a specific, actionable conclusion: since roughly half of all inspections are unprogrammed and triggered by complaints, injuries, or referrals, the single highest-leverage way to reduce your inspection risk is preventing the events that trigger unprogrammed inspections in the first place — not trying to avoid detection during a programmed sweep of your industry.

If your industry is currently subject to an active National or Local Emphasis Program — heat, silica, combustible dust, or a sector-specific NEP — your odds of a programmed inspection are meaningfully higher than the base rate implied by total annual inspection counts, since those inspections concentrate resources on a defined subset of employers rather than spreading evenly across the entire economy.