Tracking and monitoring workplace safety metrics is essential to protect employees and maintain compliance. Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred (DART), and Lost Workday Incident Rate (LWIR) are some of the most widely used metrics in any H&S program. They provide clear insight into incident management and its impact, letting your team evaluate progress and achieve continuous improvement.
The Importance of Health & Safety Metrics
Capturing health and safety metrics helps your team transform incident data into actionable insights. Instead of only seeing isolated events, you can identify patterns that highlight systemic risks. The right metrics can let you benchmark performance, allocate resources, and demonstrate your commitment to worker safety.
TRIR, DART, and LWIR are prime examples. They draw from incident data that your team should already have on hand from your required OSHA 300 logs. Taking this data concerning the number, severity, and outcome of work-related injuries and incidents and calculating TRIR, DART, and LWIR provides an intuitive and quantifiable metric to evaluate the impact of incidents within your organization.
Alongside enabling continuous improvement, these metrics also help demonstrate your organization’s commitment to health and safety. Metrics like TRIR, DART, and LWIR can play an important role in contractor evaluations and safety reviews. Low incident rates can make your organization more competitive and avoid a negative perception among stakeholders and the public.
What Is Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR)?
The Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) measures the frequency of OSHA recordable incidents, standardized per 100 full-time employees. Normalizing incident rate against hours worked enables meaningful comparisons across different timeframes and other organizations in your industry, regardless of workforce size or operational structure.
The Department of Labor publishes injury and incident data, including TRIR values. In 2023, the average TRIR across all industries, including private, state, and local government, was 2.7 per 100 full-time workers, and specific values are available for individual industries.
How Do You Calculate Total Recordable Incident Rate?
To calculate TRIR, take the total number of recordable incidents, multiply it by 200,000, and divide it by total hours worked. The 200,000 normalizes the value against 100 employees working 40 hours per week, 50 weeks annually. The total hours worked is the sum of all hours actually worked within your organization, including contractors, excluding vacation and sick leave.
What Is a Recordable Incident?
OSHA recordable incidents include those that result in one or more of the following: medical treatment beyond first aid, one or more days away from work, restricted work or transfer to another job, diagnosis of a significant injury or illness, loss of consciousness, or death. Any incident recorded in your OSHA 300 log should be included in TRIR calculations.
TRIR serves as an effective benchmark for contractor prequalification, insurer evaluations, and regulator oversight. However, TRIR also has limitations. It treats minor and severe incidents identically, fails to capture near misses, and is particularly volatile in small workforces.
What Is Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred (DART)?
The Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred (DART) rate is a metric that narrows the focus to the incidents with the greatest operational impact. It captures cases resulting in time away from work, restrictions on duties, or reassignment to alternative roles. DART complements TRIR by emphasizing disruptive events that directly affect productivity and workforce availability.
How Do You Calculate Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred?
To calculate DART, take the total number of incidents that resulted in days away, restricted, or transferred, multiply by 200,000, and divide by total hours worked. This provides a rate normalized to 100 full-time employees.
The Department of Labor reports a 2023 DART rate across all industries, including private, state, and local government, of 1.5 per 100 full-time employees. You can see that this is a lower value than the 2.7 TRIR rate, which also includes less severe incidents.
What Is Lost Workday Incident Rate (LWIR)?
The Lost Workday Incident Rate (LWIR) measures the frequency of work-related incidents that lead to lost workdays (beyond the day of the injury), normalized to a standard workforce. It has become less common in favor of DART in most industries, but it can still provide valuable insights.
How Do You Calculate Lost Workday Incident Rate?
To calculate LWIR, sum the total number of lost workdays (days the employee could not work) due to injury or illness, multiply by 200,000, then divide by total hours worked. This provides a value normalized to 100 full-time employees.
Because LWIR counts actual days lost (rather than just incident occurrence), it gives a more nuanced view of severity than TRIR, and it complements DART by focusing purely on lost-time impact. However, in organizations with low frequencies of lost-day events or small operations, LWIR can swing dramatically from one period to the next.
Taking the Right Approach to Incident Metrics
Calculating accurate metrics like TRIR, DART, and LWIR requires capturing incident data in the first place. ERA’s Incident Management System provides simple workflows to log any type of incident, with dynamic smart forms that capture all required data. Not only does this provide the foundation for metrics and analysis, but it also streamlines your OSHA incident reporting.
ERA’s software automatically calculates TRIR, DART, and other metrics based on your incident logs. You can also generate a wide range of built-in and custom reports to gain further insight. Rolling averages for TRIR, DART, and LWIR are particularly useful when evaluating performance and can be viewed graphically to understand these metrics at a glance.
Beyond recordkeeping and reports, ERA’s Incident Management System provides a full range of incident prevention and response features. You can manage everything from near misses to corrective and preventive actions (CAPA). All of your data and workflows are maintained in one comprehensive platform, ensuring accuracy and compliance and supporting worker safety.
Start Leveraging Data to Improve Your Organization’s Health and Safety
Metrics like TRIR, DART, and LWIR provide greater visibility into incidents and how they affect your organization. They create a foundation from which you can identify and understand challenges and implement effective action to mitigate systemic risks. You can leverage these and other metrics to improve your health and safety programs with ERA’s Incident Management System. Schedule a call with one of our project analysts today to see how we can meet your organization’s unique needs.
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