OSHA’s Top 10 Most Frequently Cited Standards for FY 2022

OSHA’s Top 10 Most Frequently Cited Standards for FY 2022

Let’s take a look at each standard and OSHA’s guidelines and requirements.

  • By Alex Saurman
  • Dec 01, 2022

Every year around fall, OSHA announces its top 10 most cited standards for the fiscal year. Fiscal Year 2022’s (FY22) standards were once again announced at the National Safety Council (NSC) Safety Congress & Expo, this year taking place in sunny San Diego. OSHA’s Directorate of Enforcement Program’s Deputy Director Patrick Kapust spoke to a packed room about each violation at a session called “OSHA’s Top Ten Violations,” moderated by NSC’s Associate Editor of Safety+Health magazine Kevin Druley.


The violations for FY22 shared at the session used preliminary data from October 1, 2021, to September 6, 2022. This data was not final at the time of the announcement in September.

If you’ve been following the coverage of OSHA’s top 10 most cited standards over the past few years, you’ll notice some change to the order of violations, but not much to the violations listed. Let’s take a look at what the top 10 violations for FY22 are.

  1. Fall Protection, general requirements - 5,260 violations
  2. Hazard Communication Standard, general requirements - 2,424 violations
  3. Respiratory Protection, general industry - 2,185 violations
  4. Ladders, construction - 2,143 violations
  5. Scaffolding, general requirements, construction - 2,058 violations
  6. Control of Hazardous Energy (Lockout/Tagout), general requirements - 1,977 violations
  7. Powered Industrial Trucks, general requirements - 1,749 violations
  8. Fall Protection - Training Requirements - 1,556 violations
  9. Eye and Face Protection - 1,401 violations
  10. Machinery and Machine Guard, general requirements - 1,370 violations

Machinery and Machine Guard

Ranking number 10 again for the second year is machinery and machine guarding violations. Since the announcement of the fiscal year 2021 (FY21) violations, the number under this standard has increased. In FY21, OSHA’s preliminary data showed that 1,113 violations were issued for this standard. Over 200 additional violations were issued in the following fiscal year, for a total of 1,370.

Machinery and machine guarding are meant to protect workers from machine hazards. There are many types of machine guarding that employers can use, but the four general types are “fixed, interlocked, adjustable and self-adjusting.”


This article originally appeared in the December 1, 2022 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.

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