TRIR Benchmarks by Industry (2026 Reference Table)

TRIR benchmark table by industry

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, 2022 reference year, private industry, incidence rate per 100 full-time equivalent workers. All private industry — 2.7 Construction — 2.4 Manufacturing (all) — 3.2 Chemical manufacturing — 1.9 Mining, quarrying, oil and gas extraction — 1.2 Utilities — 1.5 Transportation and warehousing — 4.6 Wholesale trade — 2.8 Retail trade — 3.6 Agriculture, forestry, fishing — 4.2 Healthcare and social assistance — 5.5 Accommodation and food services — 3.2 Read each figure as the midpoint of a wide distribution, not a target. Within construction, a specialty trade contractor doing high-turnover residential work and a heavy civil contractor with a mature permit system sit at opposite ends of the same 2.4 average. Always state the source and reference year when you publish a comparison — a 2022 figure compared against your 2026 rate is a four-year-old reference, which is acceptable for context and unacceptable as a performance verdict.

How to compare your rate without misleading yourself

Four conditions must hold before a comparison means anything. 1. Same case definition. BLS figures follow 29 CFR 1904 recordability. If your site classifies borderline cases as first aid, your rate is lower for a classification reason, not a safety reason. 2. Same normalisation. TRIR uses 200,000 hours (100 FTEs × 40 hours × 50 weeks). UK RIDDOR and most EU frameworks report per 100,000 workers or per million hours worked. Convert to incidents per million hours (TRIR × 5) before comparing internationally. 3. Contractor hours included consistently. A benchmark built on employee hours only will always look better than your rate if you correctly include contractor exposure hours. State which you used. 4. Enough exposure. Below roughly 500,000 hours worked per year, a single recordable moves TRIR by 0.4 or more. At that scale the rate is noise; report a rolling three-year rate alongside the annual figure.

What to do when your TRIR sits above the benchmark

Do not set a numeric reduction target and manage to it — that is the fastest route to under-reporting. Work the causal chain instead. First, segment. Split the rate by site, contractor, shift, task type and tenure. An above-benchmark aggregate is almost always two or three concentrations hiding inside an average. Second, investigate for latent conditions rather than immediate causes. Run every recordable through a structured method — Tripod Beta, BowTie for barrier logic — and classify each failed barrier by its General Failure Type. The organisational profile that emerges tells you which management system is producing your rate. Third, move corrective actions up the hierarchy of controls. If most of your actions land on training and PPE, your TRIR will plateau; elimination, substitution and engineering controls are what shift it durably. Fourth, pair the lagging rate with leading indicators — near-miss reporting rate per 100 FTEs, corrective-action close rate within due date, barrier verification coverage. A rising near-miss rate alongside a falling TRIR is the signature of a genuinely improving programme.

Frequently Asked Questions