DART stands for Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred. It’s a workplace safety metric tracked by OSHA that counts injuries and illnesses serious enough to keep a worker from doing their normal job. A DART case means the employee either missed work, was placed on lighter duties, or was moved to a different position because of a work-related injury or illness.
What Each Letter Means
Days Away refers to any calendar day an injured or ill worker stays home after the day the incident occurred. This includes weekends, holidays, and vacation days if the employee wouldn’t have been able to work regardless. OSHA caps the count at 180 days per case.
Restricted means the employee comes to work but can’t perform all of their normal job duties, or can’t work a full shift. This applies whether the restriction comes from the employer’s decision or a healthcare provider’s recommendation. For example, a warehouse worker who can only do desk tasks after a back injury would count as restricted.
Transferred covers situations where an injured employee is assigned to a different job entirely, even for part of a day. If a machine operator is moved to inventory work while recovering from a hand injury, that’s a transfer case.
How the DART Rate Is Calculated
The DART rate tells you how many of these serious cases occurred per 100 full-time workers in a year. The formula is:
(Number of DART cases × 200,000) ÷ Total hours worked by all employees = DART rate
The 200,000 figure represents 100 employees working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks. It standardizes the rate so you can compare a 50-person company to a 5,000-person company on equal footing.
As an example: a company with 200 employees logs 400,000 total work hours in a year and records 3 cases where workers missed time, had restricted duties, or were transferred. The calculation would be (3 × 200,000) ÷ 400,000 = 1.5. That means roughly 1.5 serious injuries per 100 workers per year.
How DART Differs From TRIR
DART is often discussed alongside TRIR, or Total Recordable Incident Rate. The key difference is scope. TRIR counts every OSHA-recordable incident, including cases where the worker received medical treatment beyond first aid but returned to normal duties without any restriction. DART only counts the more severe subset: cases that actually pulled the worker away from their regular job.
Because of this, a company’s DART rate is always equal to or lower than its TRIR. The gap between the two numbers represents those less severe “other recordable” cases where the worker got treated and went right back to work. A large gap suggests most injuries are minor. A small gap, where DART and TRIR are nearly identical, means almost every recorded injury is serious enough to disrupt the worker’s normal role.
Industry Averages for 2024
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes national DART rates broken down by industry each year. For 2024, the numbers for private industry overall came in at 1.4 DART cases per 100 full-time workers. Construction was slightly lower at 1.3, while manufacturing was higher at 1.7. These benchmarks give companies a way to see whether their own rate falls above or below the norm for their sector.
A rate well above the industry average is a red flag that often draws OSHA’s attention during inspections or programmed audits. A rate well below it can be a competitive advantage when bidding on contracts, especially in industries like construction and oil and gas where clients routinely request safety metrics before awarding work.
Why DART Rates Matter Beyond Compliance
Employers are required to log every DART case on the OSHA 300 Log throughout the year and summarize the data on the 300A form, which covered establishments must submit annually through OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application. But the DART rate carries weight far beyond regulatory paperwork.
A company’s DART rate feeds into its Experience Modification Rate, the multiplier that insurance carriers use to set workers’ compensation premiums. Higher DART rates signal more claims and higher costs, which translates directly into more expensive insurance. For companies operating on thin margins, that premium increase can be significant enough to affect profitability.
Many large contractors and general contractors also use DART rates to pre-qualify subcontractors. If your rate is above a certain threshold, you may not even be invited to bid on a project. In that sense, the DART rate functions as both a safety scorecard and a business development tool.
What Counts as a DART Case
Not every workplace injury triggers a DART case. A cut that needs stitches but allows the worker to return to full duties the next day is OSHA-recordable, but it’s not a DART case. It only becomes one if the injury leads to time off, restricted duties, or a job transfer beyond the day the injury happened.
The day of the injury itself doesn’t count. If an employee hurts their knee on a Monday, day one of the count begins Tuesday. Every calendar day after that is counted, whether or not the employee was scheduled to work. So if a worker is out for two weeks, that’s 14 days recorded, not 10 working days. The maximum you’re required to record for a single case is 180 calendar days, even if the worker is out longer.
Restricted work is sometimes the trickiest category. If a healthcare provider recommends that a worker avoid lifting over 20 pounds and that restriction prevents them from performing a routine function of their job, it counts. If the restriction doesn’t actually affect any of their normal duties, it doesn’t. The standard is whether the worker can do everything they’d normally be expected to do on a regular shift.