TRIR, Explained: The One Number That Wins or Loses Your Next Bid

When a client sizes up your safety record, one number does a lot of the talking: your TRIR. It shows up on prequalification scorecards, in bid packages, and in the quiet comparison a client makes between you and the contractor bidding against you. Here’s what it is, how it’s calculated, and how to move it, honestly.

What TRIR is

TRIR, or Total Recordable Incident Rate, expresses how many injuries and illnesses your company recorded under OSHA per 100 full time workers in a year. It lets a client compare a small shop and a large firm on the same scale.

The formula

TRIR = (number of recordable incidents × 200,000) ÷ total hours worked.

The 200,000 is the yardstick: 100 employees working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks. That’s why the result reads as per 100 workers.

A quick example

Say your crew worked 250,000 hours last year and had 3 recordable incidents:

(3 × 200,000) ÷ 250,000 = 2.4

Your TRIR is 2.4 recordables per 100 workers for the year.

What number is good?

There’s no single magic figure. Clients compare your TRIR to the published industry average for your type of work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports these by industry. Beating your industry average is the practical target. A lower rate than the contractor bidding next to you is the competitive one. Some clients set a hard ceiling as a prequalification requirement.

If you have 10 or fewer employees

Here is where a lot of small contractors get stuck. OSHA gives a partial exemption from routine injury recordkeeping to any company that had 10 or fewer employees at all times during the last calendar year. Construction is not on OSHA’s low hazard list, so for most trade contractors the head count is the rule that applies. If that is you, you were never required to keep the 300 and 300A logs that a TRIR is built from.

But clients and platforms still ask for the number. Exempt from the logs does not mean exempt from the question, so you need to be ready to present a TRIR or explain clearly why you do not have one.

There is a trap here too. On a small crew, a single recordable makes the math look alarming. A crew of four working about 8,000 hours in a year has one recordable injury, and the formula returns:

(1 × 200,000) ÷ 8,000 = 25

That 25 is not a bad safety record. It is a small sample. The same injury at a company with 200,000 hours reads as a 1.0. Clients who know the metric understand this, and it is your job to hand them the context.

Keep the log anyway. Voluntarily maintaining a 300 and 300A is the simplest way to have a real TRIR ready the moment a client asks.
Track your hours. You need the hours for the denominator no matter what. Payroll records are enough.
Show the sample size. Always report the hours next to the rate. On a small crew the hours tell the real story, and a rate without them means little.
Explain a spike. If one injury pushed your number up, say so, show what you fixed, and give a view across several years so a single event does not define you.
Put the exemption in writing. A short letter on your letterhead stating that you qualify for the small employer partial exemption, with your hours and injury count for each year, answers the question cleanly.
Report the serious events regardless. No matter your size, a fatality goes to OSHA within 8 hours, and an inpatient hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye within 24 hours.

The number is never the whole story, and least of all for a small shop. Keep the records, show the hours, and give the context, and a lean crew can stand next to a much larger one.

How to bring it down the right way

The wrong way is to record too few. It’s a compliance risk, it’s dishonest, and client auditors are good at spotting logs that look too clean. The right way is slower, and it lasts:

Record accurately. Know exactly what OSHA considers recordable so you count neither too many nor too few.
Work the leading indicators. Near miss reporting, inspections, and training reduce incidents before they happen.
Close the loop. Investigate every recordable, fix the root cause, and document the correction.
Give it time. TRIR is a trailing number. A strong program shows up over quarters, not days.

A low TRIR is not a number you chase. It’s the byproduct of a program that works.

If your TRIR is keeping you off shortlists, the fix is a real program and clean records behind it. Let’s talk.