Research—
The 22-state blind spot in federal OSHA severe-injury data
Federal OSHA severe-injury data shows California with 535 reports and Texas with 17,377 — not because California is safer, but because 22 states run their own OSHA plans that keep private-sector injuries out of the federal file. A guide to reading the data correctly.
If you rank U.S. states by the number of severe-injury reports in the federal OSHA archive, the result looks absurd: Texas has 17,377 and California has 535. California has the larger workforce. It is not 32 times safer. What you are actually seeing is the single most important thing to understand about this dataset — a structural coverage gap that has nothing to do with how dangerous a state's workplaces are.
Three tiers, one explanation
Since 2015, federal OSHA has required employers under federal jurisdiction to report every work-related hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye within 24 hours. But roughly half the states run their own OSHA-approved safety programs — and where a state runs its own program for private employers, those reports go to the state, not into this federal file. Group the states by which program covers them and the "absurd" numbers snap into a clean pattern:
| Coverage | State (federal severe-injury reports) |
|---|---|
| Federal OSHA jurisdiction — full coverage | TX 17,377, FL 11,630, PA 8,314, OH 8,196, GA 5,943, WI 4,276 |
| State plan covers public workers only — private sector still federal, so coverage is normal | IL 6,336, NY 5,260, NJ 2,674 |
| Full state plan covers private employers — federal file only catches the federal-jurisdiction remainder | CA 535, VA 363, WA 168, NC 159, MD 133, AZ 126, TN 109, SC 92, OR 89, MI 72, KY 71, MN 69, UT 63, IN 49, NV 49 |
The bottom tier is the blind spot. Every state in it operates a full OSHA-approved State Plan that regulates private-sector employers directly — so a worker hospitalized at a factory in Michigan or California is reported to Michigan OSHA or Cal/OSHA, and never appears in this federal dataset. The two- and three-digit counts that remain are the narrow slice of each state still under federal jurisdiction (federal contractors, maritime, some tribal and enclave workplaces).
Which states are affected
Twenty-two states and territories run their own OSHA-approved plans covering private-sector workplaces: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming. For those states, the federal Severe Injury Reports archive is not a complete picture of workplace injuries — the authoritative source is the state program.
Seven more jurisdictions — Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and the U.S. Virgin Islands — run plans that cover only state and local government employees. Their private sector stays under federal OSHA, which is why Illinois and New York show up with full counts in the table above.
Why this matters for reading the data
It means every count on this site is a count of federally reported severe injuries. National industry patterns still hold — a hazard like unguarded machinery injures workers in Ohio and California alike, and the industries that dominate amputation reports dominate them everywhere. But state-to-state comparisons of raw totals are meaningless unless every state you compare is in the same coverage tier. Compare Texas to Florida (both federal): fair. Compare Texas to California (federal vs. state-plan): not a comparison at all.
How this was measured
Each figure is a live query against the federal OSHA Severe Injury Reports indexed here — click any state to see its records. The state-plan classifications are OSHA's own program structure. Counts are current as of the latest data snapshot on the home page and shift as OSHA revises the file. Search the full archive by employer, hazard, equipment, body part, state, or industry at safetyincidents.org/search.