OSHA Violation Lookup: How to Search Any Company

A complete, step-by-step guide to finding OSHA inspection records, reading violation reports, understanding risk scores, and checking safety compliance for any company in the United States.

Every year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) conducts tens of thousands of workplace inspections across the United States. The results of these inspections — including violations, penalty amounts, and enforcement actions — are public record. Anyone can look them up.

But knowing where to search and how to interpret the data is the challenge. That's exactly why SVEP Navigator exists: to make OSHA enforcement records accessible, searchable, and understandable — whether you're a worker checking on your employer, a contractor evaluating a new client, or a safety professional auditing compliance.

Here are the most common reasons people look up OSHA violations:

• Workers — checking if their employer has a history of safety violations before accepting a job or filing a complaint
• Contractors & suppliers — vetting partners for safety compliance before entering business relationships
• Safety professionals — benchmarking a facility's violation history against industry standards
• Journalists & researchers — investigating workplace safety trends in specific industries or regions
• Attorneys — building cases related to workplace injuries, wrongful termination, or regulatory non-compliance
• Employers — proactively reviewing their own OSHA history before inspections or audits

SVEP Navigator's homepage features a single, powerful search bar that searches across 2,336,195 facility inspection records. Here's how to use it in three simple steps:

When you click into a facility from the search results, you'll land on a facility detail page — the core of SVEP Navigator. Here's what each section means and how to use it.

Header Section

At the top of every facility report you'll find:

• Company name — the legal entity name as recorded by OSHA
• Full address — the inspected facility location (street, city, state, ZIP)
• Tier classification — a severity badge ranging from Tier 1 Critical to Tier 5 Standard based on the nature of violations

Inspection Summary

Below the header, you'll see an at-a-glance summary of the facility's enforcement history:

Violations List

The main body of the report lists every individual violation, including:

• The OSHA standard cited (e.g., 29 CFR 1926.451 for scaffolding)
• The violation type (willful, serious, repeat, other)
• The initial and current penalty amounts
• The inspection date and case status

You can click on any violation standard to see a dedicated page explaining what that standard requires and how many companies have been cited for it.

Not all OSHA violations are equal. The type of violation tells you how seriously OSHA views the hazard. Here's a breakdown of each classification:

When reviewing a facility report on SVEP Navigator, pay close attention to willful and repeat violations. These indicate the most concerning patterns — either intentional disregard or a failure to learn from past citations.

Beyond raw violation data, SVEP Navigator calculates a composite risk score from 0 to 100 for over 105,000 companies in the CompanyIntel database. This score synthesizes multiple data points into a single metric that indicates overall workplace safety risk.

What Goes Into the Score

• Total penalty amounts — both initial and current, weighted by recency
• Violation severity — willful and repeat violations count more than other types
• Violation frequency — how many inspections resulted in citations, and how recently
• Industry benchmarking — performance compared to the company's industry peers using BLS injury and illness data
• EPA cross-references — additional environmental enforcement data from the EPA ECHO database

Learn the full details on the Methodology page.

Score Ranges

Facility Tier System

Individual facility pages also display a tier classification that categorizes the inspection site by enforcement severity:

A facility classified as Tier 1 Critical has the most severe enforcement history in the database and warrants the closest scrutiny.

Don't have a specific company in mind? You can browse OSHA enforcement data geographically using SVEP Navigator's state pages and city pages.

State Pages

Each of the 50 states has a dedicated enforcement summary page that shows:

• Total inspected facilities in the state
• Combined penalty totals
• Most-cited violation standards
• Top violating companies
• Links to individual city breakdowns

Examples: Texas · California · Florida · Ohio · New York

City Pages

Drill down further with city-level enforcement pages. These show every OSHA-inspected facility in a given city, sorted by penalty amounts and violation counts.

Examples: Houston, TX · Chicago, IL · Los Angeles, CA · Detroit, MI

The CompanyIntel Rankings hub is SVEP Navigator's curated database of 105,000+ companies scored and ranked by workplace safety risk. This is separate from the raw facility search — it aggregates all of a company's facilities nationwide into a single risk profile.

What You'll Find

• National rankings — the overall riskiest companies in the U.S.
• State-level rankings — the riskiest employers in each state (e.g., Texas, California, Ohio)
• Risk scores — every company ranked from 100 (highest risk) to 0 (lowest)
• Total penalties — aggregate fines across all facilities
• Industry classification — NAICS code-based industry categorization

Rankings are updated as new OSHA enforcement data is published. Use them to identify which employers consistently fail safety inspections at a national scale.

SVEP Navigator is the fastest and most comprehensive tool for searching OSHA violations, but it's not the only source. Here's how the main alternatives compare:

Using OSHA.gov Directly

You can search OSHA's own records at osha.gov/ords/imis/establishment.html. The process is more manual:

1. Enter the establishment (company) name
2. Optionally filter by state
3. Click through individual inspection records
4. Violations are listed per inspection — you'll need to piece together the full picture yourself

SVEP Navigator pulls from the same underlying data but presents it in a unified, risk-scored, and searchable format. For most users, starting with SVEP Navigator and cross-referencing with OSHA.gov when needed is the most efficient workflow.

Using EPA ECHO

The EPA ECHO database is useful if you want to see a company's environmental enforcement history alongside OSHA data. It's particularly valuable for companies in manufacturing, chemical, and construction industries where environmental and safety violations often overlap.

SVEP Navigator's CompanyIntel scores already incorporate EPA cross-reference data, so you get this dimension built into the risk score automatically.

Discovering that your employer has a history of OSHA violations — especially willful or repeat ones — can be alarming. Here's what you can do:

Smart employers proactively review their own OSHA enforcement history. Here's how to use SVEP Navigator for self-audit and pre-inspection preparation:

Self-Audit Workflow

1. Search your company on svepnavigator.com — review every facility listed
2. Check your risk score on the CompanyIntel rankings — see how you compare to industry peers
3. Review violation details — identify which standards you've been cited for most frequently
4. Check for repeat patterns — repeat violations carry the highest penalties and signal systemic issues
5. Cross-reference with violation standard pages — understand the specific OSHA requirements you need to meet
6. Browse your state's enforcement page — see how your facility compares to others in the same state

Why This Matters

OSHA inspectors can access the same data that appears on SVEP Navigator — and they do review prior enforcement history before and during inspections. Companies with prior willful or repeat violations are more likely to receive follow-up inspections and face higher penalties if new violations are found.

Regularly monitoring your SVEP Navigator profile and addressing cited standards proactively is one of the most effective ways to reduce enforcement risk and demonstrate good faith compliance.

More guides: All Guides · How to File an OSHA Complaint · Know Your Workplace Safety Rights