By Elyse Love-Dillman, HSE Manager.
It’s known by many names—RIFR, TRIR, TRIF, TIR—but regardless of the acronym, the Total Recordable Injury Rate is widely used as a universal benchmark for safety performance. The rate is calculated by multiplying the number of recordable injuries by 200,000 and dividing by the total number of hours worked in a year. The result estimates how many recordable injuries would occur for every 100 full-time workers over a one-year period. According to OSHA, a recordable injury includes any work-related incident that results in death, days away from work, restricted duties, or medical treatment beyond first aid.
It could be argued that RIFR provides a standardized metric that allows for direct comparisons and simple communication. However, it would be remiss to ignore the many facts that make RIFR an unreliable measure of how safe a company truly is. To start, the metric is reactive in nature, and measures safety as only the absence of injuries and not the presence of safeguards. It also does not capture relative severity – a fatality would have the same impact as a cut hand that requires three stitches. Finally, TRIR and similar injury rates lack statistical stability — because recordable injuries often occur at random, it takes hundreds of millions of work hours before the data reflects any statistically meaningful trends.
This isn’t to say lagging indicators should be disregarded – they still provide valuable insight into the efficacy of a safety program, but we need to be more selective — and intentional — about which ones we use.
A number of alternative lagging indicators have been proposed by academics and safety professionals, including Severity-Based Lagging Indicators, which assign weight to injuries based on their severity. Shifting focus beyond injury counts to include more proactive, system-focused metrics can also provide a more accurate picture of safety performance. For example, the High Energy Control Assessment (HECA) evaluates whether effective safeguards are in place for high-energy, critical hazards by conducting short-term assessments of active work areas.
RIFR and other traditional indicators may still have a place in safety reporting, but they shouldn’t be our primary yardstick. A high-performing safety program isn't defined solely by the number of injuries it avoids — it’s defined by the systems, controls, and behaviors that prevent those injuries from occurring in the first place.
It’s time to evolve how we measure success in safety. Moving beyond TRIR toward a more holistic approach — one that balances severity, system performance, and hazard control — will bring us closer to what really matters: ensuring Everybody Goes Home Safe.
