How Much Are Cal/OSHA Penalties? Averages by Outcome and Employer Size

“How much are Cal/OSHA penalties?” usually gets answered with the statutory maximums. This page answers it with what actually happened: CompliantCA’s computation across the 26,214 Cal/OSHA inspections that received citations from 2020 through 2025, totaling each inspection’s penalties as they stand today, after appeals and settlements.

The two numbers to hold together: the median cited inspection stands at $1,685, and 40.6% stand at $1,000 or less — while the average is $6,226, almost four times the median. Most cited inspections end small; a small share of severe cases accounts for most of the dollars, and what makes a case severe is measurable.

Most penalties are small; a few are very large

The most expensive single inspection cited from 2020 through 2025 stands at $988,000. For how the penalty math itself works — the §336 formula, the classifications, the adjustments — see How Cal/OSHA Penalties Are Calculated; for how citations shrink and disappear after issuance, see How Cal/OSHA Citations End.

Penalties rise sharply when someone was killed or hospitalized

Linking the enforcement data to the federal accident-investigation tables classifies each cited inspection by what preceded it:

An inspection that followed a fatality costs 2.4 times the overall average — and its median, $6,050, is 4.3 times the no-accident median. The difference is not citation volume: fatality inspections average 3.0 citation line items, essentially the same as everything else (2.9). It is severity — the same count of citations, classified and priced higher. Cal/OSHA also investigates differently after a death: what gets cited shifts from paperwork toward field conditions.

Cost rises with employer size

The gradient is steady — median cost at the largest sites is 2.7x the smallest — and it is partly by design: Cal/OSHA’s penalty formula includes an employer-size adjustment that discounts small employers. Note the unit: employees at the inspected site, which is what the inspection record carries; a large company’s small branch counts by the branch. For who gets inspected by size — a different question — see Cal/OSHA Citations by Employer Size.

Free IIPP Audit Checklist. The records an inspection asks for first, one question about each — can you produce it today? A cite per item and a gaps table at the back. PDF, no account. Request the checklist →

Methodology

CompliantCA computed this analysis from the U.S. Department of Labor enforcement dataset (the OSHA Information System), which includes Cal/OSHA because California operates an OSHA-approved State Plan. Scope: Cal/OSHA inspections with citation line items issued January 2020 through December 2025, excluding citation records deleted in the source data — and excluding the roughly 4% of cited California inspections conducted by federal OSHA area offices (federal facilities and maritime work), so the page measures the agency its title names. The unit is the cited inspection: each inspection’s line-item current penalties are summed, and averages, medians, and shares are computed across inspections. Penalty figures are the penalty as it stands now, after any appeals and settlements (the dataset’s “current penalty”), as retrieved 2026-08-26; they change as cases settle, and recent inspections have settled less than older ones — see the cohort discussion in our citation-outcomes analysis. Outcome classification links inspections to the dataset’s accident-investigation tables (events 2020 onward): “fatality” means at least one linked victim recorded as a fatality; “hospitalization” means at least one hospitalized victim and none fatal; “no linked accident investigation” includes both inspections with no accident and accidents whose investigations have not yet been published — investigation summaries publish with a lag of years, so some recent inspections in that row will reclassify as case files release. Employer size is the employee count at the inspected site on the inspection record. Cal/OSHA’s own penalty summaries are at DIR’s citation statistics pages.

A cost statistic describes past cases, not any employer’s exposure — penalties are set by classification and circumstance under 8 CCR §336, not by averages.