You can have the toughest crew, the sharpest tools, and the best intentions. But if your Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) is climbing—you’ve got more than a safety problem. You’ve got a cost problem. A compliance problem. A culture problem.

LTIR isn’t some back-office metric—it’s the clearest sign of how often your people are getting hurt badly enough to miss work. And every lost-time incident bleeds productivity, drives up costs, and makes you a target for regulators, insurers, and clients.

A high LTIR means:

  • OSHA is watching
  • Contracts are at risk
  • Premiums are spiking
  • Morale is eroding

This isn’t just about dodging fines—it’s about creating a site where people get the job done and go home safe.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

  • What a LTIR is 
  • How to calculate it accurately
  • Why it impacts more than just safety metrics
  • Proven ways to bring your rate down
  • How a smart AI platform can help you track, reduce, and report LTIR in real time

Because the most dangerous thing on any jobsite isn’t heavy equipment—it’s a team that stops paying attention to what the numbers are trying to tell them.

Let’s fix that.

What Is Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR)?

Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) isn’t just a number—it’s a pulse check on the health of your operation. It measures how often serious, disruptive injuries or illnesses are happening on your watch—those that pull people off the job and cost time, money, and momentum.

Here’s the breakdown:

LTIR = (Number of Lost Time Incidents × 200,000) ÷ Total Hours Worked
  • Lost Time Incidents: Any work-related injury or illness that results in missed workdays
  • 200,000: The OSHA baseline for 100 full-time workers, calculated as 40 hours/week × 50 weeks/year × 100 employees
  • Total Hours Worked: All employee hours during the measured period

LTIR isn’t just internal housekeeping—it’s the number OSHA, insurers, general contractors, and clients look at to gauge whether your company takes safety seriously.

  • OSHA uses LTIR data as part of its inspection targeting system. A high LTIR can trigger audits, increased scrutiny, or placement in programs like SVEP (Severe Violator Enforcement Program).
  • Insurance providers assess LTIR to determine your premiums, coverage eligibility, and liability risk.
  • Industry benchmarks rely on LTIR to compare safety performance across firms, sectors, and projects.
  • Clients and primes may require a low LTIR as a prerequisite to bid, especially in high-risk or publicly funded jobs.

A high LTIR doesn’t just reflect poor safety—it signals poor operational control. And it can cost you far more than downtime. It can cost you contracts.

Why Does Lost Time Incident Rate Matter?

An LTIR is a reflection of your entire operation. It shows how well you manage risk, protect your workforce, and keep projects on track. A high LTIR? That’s a signal flare, and it reaches far beyond your jobsite.

Reputational Damage

A rising LTIR is a red flag that clients, investors, and potential hires can’t ignore. It tells the world you’ve got a safety problem—and that message spreads fast.

Contractors lose bids. Employees jump ship. Competitors use your record as leverage. In an industry built on trust, a reputation for unsafe sites is a slow death sentence for growth.

Operational Bottlenecks

In high-skill trades, one injury can cripple a crew. When a key operator goes down, tasks get reassigned, delays snowball, and productivity flatlines.

It’s not just one lost worker—it’s a ripple effect through your entire workflow. And when you’re short-staffed under pressure, the chance of another incident only goes up.

Investor & Customer Confidence

High LTIRs create liability. Liability kills deals.

Clients don’t want risk. Investors don’t want lawsuits. A pattern of lost time incidents paints your business as unstable, disorganized, and high-risk. Suddenly, renewals vanish. RFPs go quiet. And your competitors look safer by comparison—even if they aren’t.

Indirect Financial Bleed

The direct cost of an injury—medical bills, workers’ comp, insurance spikes—is just the tip.

What about the indirect damage?

  • Overtime for the rest of the crew
  • Hiring and training temps
  • Hours spent on investigations
  • Lost productivity
  • Legal prep and HR admin

Together, these hidden costs quietly bleed your margins—month after month.

Legal & Regulatory Heat

A high LTIR attracts attention—especially from OSHA.

Expect:

All while your internal resources are tied up managing the fallout. The bigger the issue, the more your leadership team gets pulled away from strategy and growth.

Bottom line?

Your LTIR reflects more than incident frequency—it shows how well you manage your people, your risk, and your future. If it’s rising, you’ve got a problem worth fixing fast.

Track it. Own it. Improve it. Because when you do, everything else gets stronger too.

How to Calculate LTIR (Step-by-Step)

Knowing your LTIR isn’t just for safety managers—it’s how your entire business benchmarks performance, compliance, and risk.

Follow these four simple steps to get your number:

Step 1: Determine Lost Time Incidents

Count all work-related injuries or illnesses that resulted in at least one full day away from work (excluding the day of the incident itself).

Only include incidents that meet OSHA’s criteria for “lost time.”

Step 2: Calculate Total Hours Worked

Add up all actual hours worked by employees during the measurement period.

This excludes PTO, holidays, and unpaid breaks. Only count productive, on-the-clock hours.

Step 3: Use the LTIR Formula

LTIR=(Number of Lost Time Incidents×200,000 / Total Hours Worked​)

200,000 represents the number of hours 100 full-time employees work in a year (40 hours/week × 50 weeks/year)

Step 4: Interpret the Score

A higher LTIR means a higher frequency of serious, work-disrupting injuries.

Aim to trend downward over time—less lost time means better safety, stronger operations, and a more resilient crew.

Example:
If your company had 4 lost time incidents over 300,000 total hours worked, the math looks like this:

LTIR=(4 x 200,000 / 300,000) = 2.67

Your LTIR is 2.67, meaning there were approximately 2.67 lost-time injuries per 100 full-time workers during the period.

A good LTIR? It’s always lower. But more importantly, it’s a number you should understand, track, and act on—because every decimal point represents real injuries, real downtime, and real dollars.

What Factors Affect Your LTIR?

LTIR doesn’t rise or fall by accident. It’s shaped by a mix of visible hazards and hidden risks. 

Here are the five core factors driving your numbers:

1. Injury Severity & Recovery Time

Not all injuries are created equal. A sprained ankle might cost a few days. A broken back? Weeks—if not months.

The more severe the injury, the longer the time off—and the higher your LTIR climbs.

2. Workplace Safety Culture

A weak safety culture is a silent killer. If your team skips protocols, ignores hazard signs, or doesn’t feel safe reporting near-misses, incidents are inevitable.

Safety needs to be a daily behavior—not just a binder on a shelf.

3. Ergonomics & Physical Demands

Bad posture. Repetitive strain. Heavy lifting. Poor workstation design. These issues slowly wear down your crew.

Over time, they cause chronic injuries that add up to serious lost time.

4. Psychological & Mental Health Factors

Burnout, stress, and mental fatigue can extend recovery far beyond the physical injury.

PTSD, anxiety, and workplace trauma are often overlooked—but they directly impact time away from work and your overall LTIR.

5. Use of Safety Technology

Companies using platforms like Field1st spot risk trends early, respond faster, and prevent repeat incidents.

Digital checklists, real-time reporting, and predictive analytics reduce friction and improve action—driving your LTIR down.

Key Takeaway:
If you want to control your LTIR, you have to manage more than injuries. You need to build a system that tracks patterns, supports your people—physically and mentally—and acts fast when something goes wrong. The best teams don’t just react. They predict, prevent, and protect—before the clock starts ticking.

What is a Good Lost Time Incident Rate?

There’s no single “perfect” LTIR—but there are benchmarks that tell you where you stand. OSHA and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publish annual industry-specific LTIR averages, and those numbers serve as a baseline for evaluating performance.

General LTIR Ranges:

  • Below 1.0 → Excellent. This signals a strong safety culture, tight operational discipline, and proactive incident prevention.
  • 1.0 – 3.0 → Industry Average. Most construction, manufacturing, and logistics companies fall here. It’s stable—but there’s room to improve.
  • Above 3.0 → Warning Zone. This level suggests persistent safety breakdowns, higher injury frequency, and a need for urgent corrective action.

How to Stay Below the Line

Reducing LTIR isn’t about luck—it’s about having the right systems in place. Platforms like Field1st help safety leaders lower LTIR by automating incident reporting, streamlining root cause analysis, and ensuring real-time hazard tracking across every crew and jobsite.

No more lost paperwork. No more delayed responses. Just fast, accurate data that helps you spot trends, close gaps, and keep people safe.

Want to turn your LTIR into a competitive edge? Start by making reporting easier, tracking smarter, and prevention the default—not the scramble.

6 Ways to Improve Your Lost Time Incident Rate

Lowering your LTIR isn’t about quick fixes—it’s about building smarter systems that prioritize prevention, empower teams, and respond fast when things go wrong. 

Here are six proven strategies to bring your LTIR down—and keep it there.

1. Strengthen Safety Programs

A solid foundation starts with a proactive safety culture.

  • Conduct routine workplace hazard assessments.
  • Involve employees in safety committees and feedback loops.
  • Reinforce accountability through toolbox talks and leadership alignment.

When safety becomes part of your team’s daily rhythm—not just a checklist—you stop problems before they start.

2. Enhance Training & Awareness

Training isn’t a one-and-done.

  • Deliver OSHA-compliant programs tailored to job-specific risks.
  • Use real-world scenarios, hands-on simulations, and multilingual materials.
  • Reinforce knowledge with microlearning modules and refresher courses.

The better trained your crew, the faster and smarter they’ll react to risk.

3. Conduct Thorough Risk Assessments

You can’t reduce incidents if you don’t know where the danger is.

  • Map out high-risk zones, tasks, and roles.
  • Use historical data to prioritize threats and resource allocation.
  • Apply controls—from better signage to engineered safeguards.

Field1st enhances this process by digitizing field-level hazard reporting and using site-specific analytics to pinpoint repeat risk factors. It helps you stop problems before they escalate—right from the ground up.

4. Leverage Technology for Safety Monitoring

Modern risks require modern tools.

  • Use IoT-enabled devices to detect environmental threats like gas leaks, excessive noise, or machine anomalies.
  • Deploy predictive analytics to identify behavior patterns and equipment trends that lead to incidents.

Field1st does exactly this—flagging near-miss clusters and high-risk behaviors so you can act before the next lost-time injury hits your log.

5. Develop Effective Return-to-Work Programs

Getting injured employees back safely is critical.

  • Design custom reintegration plans that match the worker’s recovery pace and job demands.
  • Coordinate between HR, supervisors, and healthcare providers to monitor progress.

These programs reduce downtime, support employee morale, and help avoid re-injury—keeping your LTIR low and your team whole.

6. Improve Incident Reporting & Response

If you don’t capture it, you can’t fix it.

  • Implement real-time incident reporting tools across your sites.
  • Ensure teams can report via mobile—even offline.
  • Run Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for every reportable event.

With Field1st, incident reporting becomes seamless. Field crews can log events with voice-to-text, photos, GPS, and severity tags—all in seconds. Automated workflows escalate issues and track resolution so nothing falls through the cracks.

Key Takeaway:

Improving LTIR means more than reacting to injuries—it means staying two steps ahead. With smarter training, tighter tracking, and platforms like Field1st, safety becomes strategic—not just reactive.

Reduce Lost Time Incident Rate with Field1st

Lowering your Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) isn’t just about metrics—it’s about protecting your workforce, avoiding OSHA scrutiny, and keeping your operation moving without costly interruptions. A high LTIR drains morale, delays schedules, and invites compliance issues. A low LTIR proves your team is dialed in, your systems work, and your job sites are safe.

That’s where Field1st comes in.

This isn’t just another reporting app—it’s an all-in-one safety command center designed to give safety leaders real-time visibility and control over incident reporting, response, and resolution.

Here’s how Field1st helps you reduce LTIR:

  • Real-Time Incident Tracking: Capture every incident, near-miss, or hazard the moment it happens—from the field, online or offline. No paper. No delay. Just fast, accurate data to power better decision-making.
  • Automated Safety Reports: Eliminate manual logs and let Field1st auto-generate OSHA-ready forms, audit trails, and compliance reports with timestamps, GPS data, and photo evidence.
  • Predictive Analytics to Prevent Future Incidents: Field1st doesn’t just react—it predicts. The platform uses historical and real-time data to spot patterns, identify hotspots, and flag emerging risks before they turn into lost-time injuries.

With Field1st, you don’t just track LTIR—you actively lower it. See Field1st in action. Book a Field1st Demo Now. Get control. And start driving that LTIR down—for good.