DART stands for Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred. It’s a workplace safety metric used by OSHA and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to track injuries and illnesses serious enough to affect an employee’s ability to do their normal job. A company’s DART rate tells you how often workers get hurt or sick badly enough to miss work, be placed on light duty, or get moved to a different role.
What Each Part of DART Means
Days away from work counts any calendar day an employee can’t work because of a job-related injury or illness. The count starts the day after the incident, and it includes weekends, holidays, and vacation days if the worker wouldn’t have been able to work on those days regardless. So a Friday injury that keeps someone out through the following Wednesday counts as five days away, not three.
Restricted work means the employee comes to work but can’t perform all of their normal duties, or can’t work a full shift. This applies when the employer limits the worker’s tasks or when a doctor recommends restrictions. The key detail: only restrictions that affect “routine functions,” defined as tasks the employee performs at least once per week, count as recordable. If a restriction only affects something the worker rarely does, it doesn’t qualify.
Job transfer applies when an injured or ill worker gets reassigned to a different job, even for part of a day. If someone splits their shift between their regular duties and a different role because of an injury, that counts as a transfer.
How the DART Rate Is Calculated
The formula is straightforward:
(Number of DART cases × 200,000) ÷ Total hours worked by all employees = DART rate
The 200,000 figure represents what 100 full-time employees would work in a year (40 hours per week, 50 weeks). This standardizes the rate so you can compare a 50-person company to a 5,000-person company on equal footing. The resulting number tells you roughly how many serious injuries or illnesses occur per 100 workers per year.
The case count comes from OSHA Form 300, the log where employers record every qualifying workplace injury and illness throughout the year. Columns H and I on that form capture the specific cases that feed into the DART calculation.
DART vs. Total Recordable Incident Rate
DART is often discussed alongside TRIR (Total Recordable Incident Rate), and the difference matters. TRIR captures every recordable workplace injury or illness, including cases where an employee needed medical treatment beyond first aid but returned to full duty the next day. DART is narrower. It only counts incidents serious enough to result in missed work, restricted duties, or a job change.
Think of it this way: a worker who gets stitches for a cut and comes back to full duty the next day would show up in TRIR but not in DART. A worker who needs stitches and then spends two weeks on light duty would count toward both. DART is generally considered the better indicator of injury severity because every case it captures had a real impact on the worker’s ability to do their job.
Industry Averages for 2024
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes DART rates by industry each year, and safety professionals use these benchmarks to see how their organization stacks up. For 2024, the DART rates per 100 full-time workers were:
- Construction: 1.3
- Manufacturing: 1.7
- Health care and social assistance: 1.7
A company with a DART rate well above its industry average has a clear signal that something in its safety program needs attention. Rates below the average suggest the organization is managing risk better than most of its peers, though a low rate alone doesn’t mean a workplace is safe.
Who Has to Track It
Most employers with more than 10 employees are required to maintain OSHA injury and illness records, which means they’re generating the data that produces a DART rate. Companies that had 10 or fewer employees at all times during the previous calendar year are partially exempt and don’t need to keep these records unless OSHA or BLS specifically requires it in writing. Certain low-hazard industries also qualify for partial exemptions regardless of size.
Even exempt employers still have to report severe incidents like fatalities, hospitalizations, amputations, and losses of an eye directly to OSHA. The exemption applies to routine recordkeeping, not to reporting catastrophic events.
Why DART Rates Matter Beyond Compliance
DART rates carry weight far beyond regulatory paperwork. Many companies in industries like construction, oil and gas, and manufacturing are asked to provide their DART rate when bidding on contracts. A high rate can disqualify a company before the proposal is even reviewed. General contractors and project owners use it as a quick filter: if your injury numbers are significantly worse than the industry average, you’re seen as a liability risk.
Insurance costs are also tied to safety performance. Workers’ compensation premiums are influenced by a company’s claims history, and DART cases, by definition, involve the kinds of injuries that generate claims. More days away from work means higher medical costs, more lost productivity, and a track record that insurers price accordingly.
Limitations as a Safety Metric
DART is what safety professionals call a lagging indicator. It measures events that have already happened. A company’s DART rate for 2024 tells you about injuries and illnesses that occurred in 2024, but it doesn’t predict what will happen in 2025 or identify hazards before someone gets hurt.
OSHA has emphasized the importance of pairing lagging indicators like DART with leading indicators, which are proactive measures that can reveal problems before they cause injuries. Examples include tracking near misses, conducting regular safety inspections, completing risk assessments, monitoring maintenance schedules, and measuring how often employees participate in safety training. A workplace that only watches its DART rate is essentially waiting for someone to get hurt before taking action.
There’s also a subtler limitation. Because DART rates carry financial and reputational consequences, some organizations feel pressure to manage the number rather than the underlying safety conditions. Practices like discouraging injury reporting, keeping injured workers on full duty when they should be on restricted work, or delaying medical treatment to avoid a recordable case can suppress the rate without making the workplace any safer. A genuinely useful DART rate depends on honest, consistent recordkeeping.