The OSHA 300A hours worked figure is the total hours your employees actually worked last year, and payroll is usually the only team that has it. Safety owns the injury log, but the hours box on the summary comes from your timecards and payroll register.
That number matters more than it looks. OSHA uses total hours worked to calculate your injury and illness incidence rate, and GCs often ask for that rate when you bid or prequalify. A wrong hours number makes the rate wrong, even when every injury was logged correctly. The fix is knowing exactly what counts, then pulling it the same way every year.
OSHA 300A hours worked means hours actually worked, not hours paid. That one rule settles most questions.
Total hours worked on OSHA Form 300A is the number of hours all employees actually spent working during the calendar year. It includes salaried, hourly, part-time, and seasonal workers, plus temporary workers you supervise day to day. Vacation, sick leave, holidays, and other paid time off stay out, even though you paid for them.
| Type of hours | Count it on the 300A? |
|---|---|
| Regular hourly hours | Yes |
| Overtime hours | Yes, as actual hours worked |
| Salaried employees | Yes, estimate the hours actually worked |
| Part-time and seasonal workers | Yes |
| Temp workers your crews supervise day to day | Yes |
| Vacation, sick leave, and holidays | No |
| Any other paid time off the job | No |
You calculate OSHA 300A hours worked by pulling actual worked hours for everyone, removing paid time off, and adding supervised temp hours. This order keeps it clean.
Once the total is set, a company executive certifies the summary. You post it from February 1 through April 30. Construction establishments with 20 or more employees also submit 300A data through OSHA's Injury Tracking Application by March 2.
The best practice is to check your OSHA 300A hours worked total every quarter instead of building it once in January. Small fixes in April are easier than big ones in February.
The most common mistake is reporting hours paid instead of hours worked. Paid time off inflates the total and makes your incidence rate look better than it is.
The simplest way is to pull hours worked from the same timecards you already use for payroll, with the injury log connected to it. That's the idea behind eBacon's new Safety Management system.
eBacon builds the OSHA 300A Annual Summary from the hours worked in your timecard data and updates it throughout the year, so the hours box stops being a January project. When an incident is marked recordable, eBacon generates the OSHA 301, adds it to the 300 Log, and carries it into the 300A. Before you certify, it flags any recordable case missing required information, and certifying locks that year's numbers. The Safety Management product page covers the rest, including toolbox talks, safety binders, and PPE requests.
eBacon is the only construction-focused platform featuring certified payroll with a money-saving fringe trust. All-in-one software with scheduling, GPS-enabled time tracking, safety system, and inventory management for contractors with 15 to 500 employees.
Book an eBacon product tour to see Safety Management System build the OSHA 300A from your timecard hours. We'll walk through incident logging, the 300 Log, and certification using the kind of jobs you actually run.
Yes, if you supervise them day to day. OSHA says total hours worked includes workers supplied by a temporary help service when your establishment supervises them. Get the hours from agency invoices or the agency's own reports, since those workers aren't in your payroll.
Yes. Even with zero cases, you still complete the 300A, have a company executive certify it, and post it from February 1 through April 30. The case totals simply read zero, but the hours worked and employee count still need to be filled in.
A company executive must certify the 300A. That means an owner of a sole proprietorship or partnership, an officer of the corporation, the highest-ranking company official at the establishment, or that official's immediate supervisor. Payroll can prepare the numbers, but the signature belongs to one of those people.
Multiply your number of recordable cases by 200,000, then divide by total hours worked. The 200,000 represents 100 employees working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks. For example, 3 recordable cases and 150,000 hours worked gives an incidence rate of 4.0.
Yes, and you should. A year-to-date total each quarter catches missing temp hours, miscoded paid time off, and duplicate entries while they're still easy to fix. In eBacon, the 300A Annual Summary accumulates throughout the year, so the running total is already there to review.