OSHA & regulation8 min read

OSHA's most cited standards and what they say about your gaps

Most of the OSHA most cited standards do not fail where a guard is fitted or a harness is clipped. They fail earlier, at a written program, a certification record or a periodic inspection that does not exist, and a compliance officer can settle those in the first hour without climbing anything. So the list is worth far more as a self-audit against your own document set than as the leaderboard it usually gets read as. The rest of this article is the case for that, standard by standard. The reading is ours, not a statistic OSHA publishes.

The current list covers fiscal year 2025, October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025, and OSHA last updated the page on April 15, 2026. It counts federal OSHA inspections only, and it is United States law: if your sites are Canadian, see the jurisdiction note at the end before you act on any of this.

What are OSHA's top 10 most cited standards for FY 2025?

Fall protection leads, and hazard communication is second.