We have fewer than 11 employees — are we exempt?

There is a partial exemption at 29 CFR 1904.1 for employers that had 10 or fewer employees at all times during the previous calendar year, but it is partial in two important ways. It does not remove the obligation to report severe incidents to OSHA, and it can be lifted if OSHA or the Bureau of Labor Statistics notifies you in writing that you must keep records. Also check whether your state plan imposes its own requirements, because several do.

Does the seasonal peak count toward the employee threshold?

The partial exemption is written in terms of having 10 or fewer employees at all times during the previous calendar year. A company that runs eight people in February and twenty-two in July did not have 10 or fewer at all times. This catches a lot of traffic control companies that think of themselves as small.

What has to be reported to OSHA rather than just recorded?

Severe incidents are reportable regardless of the partial exemption — a work-related fatality, an in-patient hospitalization, an amputation, or the loss of an eye. Reporting is a separate obligation from recording, with its own timeframes set out in 29 CFR 1904.39. Every employer covered by the OSH Act has it.

When does the annual summary get posted?

Under 29 CFR 1904.32 the annual summary must be certified by a company executive and posted no later than February 1 of the year following the records it covers, and kept posted until April 30. The requirement applies even in a year with no recordable cases. Certification is limited to specific roles — an owner, an officer, the highest-ranking company official at the establishment, or that person's immediate supervisor.

Who actually reads these records?

More people than owners expect. OSHA during an inspection, obviously. But also prequalification reviewers at DOTs and primes, insurance underwriters at renewal, and sometimes owners screening bidders. Your recordable rate is a number other people use to decide whether to let you work for them.

How long do the records have to be kept?

Retention requirements are set out in 29 CFR 1904.33, and cover the log, the annual summary and the incident reports for a defined period after the year they cover. Keep them somewhere retrievable rather than in a filing cabinet at a yard you might close — the request usually arrives years later.

OSHA Recordkeeping for Traffic Control Companies

What the injury and illness recordkeeping rules require, why the small-employer exemption is narrower than owners assume, and how the records you keep end up in prequalification packages.

Injury and illness recordkeeping is the most reliably neglected compliance obligation in small contracting businesses, for a simple reason: nothing happens when you skip it, right up until several things happen at once.

For traffic control companies specifically there is a second reason to take it seriously that has nothing to do with enforcement. The numbers these records produce are the numbers other people use to decide whether to let you bid.

This covers how the rules generally work and what to ask. It is not legal advice, requirements vary — including by state plan — and the authority having jurisdiction is the one whose answer counts.

The rules, in outline

The federal recordkeeping requirements sit in 29 CFR Part 1904. The structure is worth knowing even if someone else handles the filing.

Recording is the ongoing obligation: maintaining a log of work-related injuries and illnesses that meet the recording criteria, with an incident report behind each entry, and an annual summary.

Reporting is separate and applies to everyone. Severe incidents — a work-related fatality, an in-patient hospitalization, an amputation, loss of an eye — must be reported to OSHA under 1904.39, within timeframes the regulation specifies. This obligation is not removed by the small-employer partial exemption.

Posting happens once a year. Under 1904.32 the annual summary is certified by a company executive and posted no later than February 1 of the following year, kept up until April 30, in a workplace where notices to employees are customarily posted. It applies even if the year had no recordable cases. The list of people permitted to certify is short and specific: an owner, an officer of the corporation, the highest-ranking company official at the establishment, or that person's immediate supervisor.

Electronic submission applies to some employers by size and industry under 1904.41, through OSHA's Injury Tracking Application, on an annual window. Whether it applies to you depends on establishment size and industry classification — check rather than assume, because the thresholds have been revised more than once.

Retention is governed by 1904.33.

The exemption trap

The partial exemption at 1904.1 covers employers that had 10 or fewer employees at all times during the previous calendar year.

Read that phrase carefully, because it is where seasonal businesses get caught. A traffic control company running eight people through the winter and twenty-two through the summer did not have ten or fewer at all times. The exemption is assessed against the whole year, not against a typical month or a current headcount.

Three further points on the exemption:

It is partial. Severe-incident reporting still applies.
It can be lifted in writing by OSHA or BLS for survey purposes.
State plans may differ. A number of states operate their own OSHA-approved plans, and a state plan can impose requirements beyond the federal floor. If you work across state lines, you are working under more than one set of rules.

The practical advice for anyone near the boundary is to keep the records anyway. The marginal cost of maintaining a log you may not be required to maintain is small; the cost of discovering mid-audit that you were required to and did not is not.

Why this matters more in this trade

Traffic control work concentrates exactly the kind of exposure the recordkeeping system exists to measure.

BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries data compiled by the National Work Zone Safety Information Clearinghouse shows between 82 and 143 fatal worker injuries at road construction sites annually from 2015 through 2024, representing 1.6% to 2.8% of all US worker fatalities.

The mechanism is consistent enough to plan against: averaged across 2022 to 2024, 52.7% of those fatalities were workers on foot struck by a vehicle and 24.8% were workers as drivers or passengers in motor vehicle crashes — roughly 78% vehicle-related, leaving 22.5% for everything else combined.

And the traffic environment around your crews is measured too: the Clearinghouse records 763 fatal work zone crashes and 850 work zone fatalities in 2024 from FARS data.

OSHA's own construction rules reach into this work directly — 29 CFR 1926.201(a) requires flagger signaling to conform to Part 6 of the MUTCD, which is the point at which a traffic control manual requirement becomes an employer obligation. The recordkeeping rules and the substantive safety rules are two halves of the same system.

Where your records end up

This is the part owners underestimate. The recordable rate your log produces is not an internal number.

Prequalification. DOT prequalification and prime contractor qualification packages routinely ask for injury rates and the experience modification rate. DOT prequalification for traffic control contractors covers the process, and safety records and EMR in prequalification covers how the numbers get read.

Insurance renewal. Underwriters ask, and the same data feeds the experience modifier that multiplies your workers' compensation premium. Workers' compensation classification covers that mechanism; the short version is that claim frequency drives it harder than severity, which means small recordables matter more than they feel like they do.

Owner screening. Some private owners and primes screen on rate before they screen on price.

The consequence is that recordkeeping is not purely defensive. A company with clean, complete records and a genuinely good rate has a commercial asset — and one with incomplete records cannot prove a good rate even if it has one.

Making the records exist without a separate process

The recurring failure is not ignorance of the rules. It is that incident information lives in a crew lead's phone, a text message and a memory, and reaches the office days later in a form nobody can turn into a record.

What actually helps is narrow:

Capture the incident at the job, not at the office. Date, time, location, people present, what happened, what was done. The person who can describe it accurately is standing there; three days later they cannot.

Tie it to the job record. An incident that exists against a job — with the crew, the plan revision and the equipment on the same record — can be reconstructed. One that exists in a standalone safety folder cannot be cross-checked against anything.

Include near misses, separately. They are not recordable and they are the leading indicator that predicts the recordables. Work zone intrusion prevention and response covers why intrusions in particular deserve their own reporting habit, and measuring safety performance covers what to do with the data once you have it.

Make the daily documentation good enough to support an investigation. A signed, timestamped, located daily ticket with photographs answers most of the questions an incident investigation asks, and it exists already if your crews are producing it for billing. Preventing daily ticket disputes covers building that habit for commercial reasons; the safety benefit is a free by-product.

Traffic OS produces GPS-stamped, signed daily tickets against the job record, with crew, equipment and photographs attached — which is the same evidence base an incident report or an agency audit needs. It is priced in flat monthly tiers, $499 to $1,499 as of September 2026, with no per-user charge, so seasonal field staff are in the system rather than outside it. The features page has the detail; a walkthrough is the quickest way to see what the record looks like after the fact.

The standing caveat

This describes how the federal recordkeeping framework generally works. It is not legal advice, it does not determine whether any particular obligation applies to your business, and it does not address the additional or different requirements of state OSHA plans — several of which are stricter than the federal floor. Verify against the current regulation text and with the authority having jurisdiction, and where the answer is consequential, get it from counsel or your safety consultant rather than from an article.