Reporting to OSHA: the 8-hour and 24-hour rules for severe injuries

There are two different OSHA duties that employers routinely confuse: recording injuries on your 300 log, and reporting the most serious events directly to OSHA within a tight deadline. They are not the same, and missing the reporting deadline is its own citable violation. This guide covers the reporting rule (29 CFR 1904.39) — what you must report, how fast, and how.

The two deadlines

The rule sets two clocks, based on severity:

The clock starts when the incident occurs or when you learn of it. For a fatality the event must be reported if it happens within 30 days of the work-related incident; for a hospitalization, amputation or eye loss, within 24 hours of the incident. "In-patient hospitalization" means formal admission — not merely a visit to the emergency room for observation or treatment.

How to report

You have three ways to make the report: call the nearest OSHA area office during business hours, call the 24-hour OSHA hotline at 1-800-321-OSHA (6742), or use the online reporting form at osha.gov/report. You will need to give the business name, the time and location of the incident, the type of event, the number of people affected, a contact person and phone number, and a brief description of what happened.

Who has to report

This reporting duty applies to all employers covered by OSHA — including the small and low-hazard employers who are otherwise exempt from keeping a routine 300 log. That is the trap: a business that correctly believes it does not have to maintain a 300 log can still be required to phone in a fatality or amputation within the deadline. Reporting is universal; recordkeeping is not.

Reporting vs recording

Keep the two duties straight. Reporting is the immediate phone call or online form for the most serious events, on the 8-hour/24-hour clocks, and it applies to everyone. Recording is entering qualifying work-related injuries and illnesses on your OSHA 300 log across the year and posting the 300A summary each February, and it applies only to covered, non-exempt employers. A severe event will usually be both reported and recorded, but plenty of recordable cases are never reportable, and a reportable event at an exempt employer still must be phoned in.

Build it into your incident procedure

Because these deadlines are short and start ticking immediately, the reporting steps belong in your written incident-response procedure, not in someone's memory. A simple rule of thumb built into your written safety program — fatality means call within 8 hours; hospitalization, amputation or eye loss means call within 24 — plus a designated person and the hotline number on hand, is what keeps a terrible day from becoming a terrible day plus a citation.