Cal/OSHA Enforcement in Fresno County

Cal/OSHA does not publish county-level enforcement statistics. This page is the Fresno County cut, computed from the federal enforcement data: the 1,967 inspections opened at county addresses from January 2020 through December 2025, and the 2,455 citations they produced, carrying $6.7 million in penalties as they currently stand.

Fresno County is the most heavily inspected of California’s ten most populous counties: about 80 annual inspections per 100,000 covered workers, against a state rate of roughly 40, per our county breakdown. Sites with a Fresno city address account for 55% of the inspections; Clovis (154), Sanger (84), Selma (82), Reedley (79), and Kerman (66) lead the rest.

What gets cited in Fresno County

Average penalty is the penalty as it stands now, after any appeals and settlements, averaged across the row’s citations — as retrieved August 30, 2026; these figures may change as cases settle.

The §3203 IIPP and §3395 heat illness prevention run nearly level at the top — 400 and 370 — and heat takes 15.1% of the county’s citations against 8.7% statewide, 1.7x the state’s concentration. §3457, field sanitation — toilets, washing water, and drinking water for field crews — is #3 at 71 citations, 5.5x its statewide share, a row in none of the other counties’ top tens on these pages. §1509, the construction IIPP, is ninth here. §3314, hazardous-energy control, carries the table’s highest average penalty at $9,029.

Free IIPP template. The §3203 program that leads this table — one section for each of the eight elements listed in §3203(a), plus the inspection and training record forms §3203(b) requires. PDF, no account. Request the template →

Agriculture takes a quarter of the county’s citations

Agriculture (sector 11) accounts for 607 citations — 25% of the county’s total, against 7% statewide. Construction, 26% of citations statewide, is 14% here. The ten most cited industry groups:

Farm labor contractors — support activities for crop production — are the county’s most cited industry group by a wide margin: 350 citations, 14.3% of the county’s total, 6.3x the statewide share. Fruit and tree nut farming (105, 3.7x) and fruit and vegetable preserving (65, 2.9x) complete the agricultural picture. What Cal/OSHA cites in agriculture statewide is in our agriculture cut; the human layer of heat enforcement is in our heat investigations piece.

Complaints start four in ten inspections

Share of the 1,967 county inspections opened 2020–2025, by trigger, against the statewide mix:

41% of the county’s inspections began with a complaint, against 24% statewide — the highest complaint share of California’s large counties — while accident investigations, at 23%, run under the statewide 31%. Fatality and catastrophe investigations (7%) run above the statewide 5%. Complaints are the county’s largest single trigger.

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 and includes federal OSHA’s California activity; retrieved August 30, 2026. Scope: inspections opened January 2020 through December 2025 at Fresno County sites, and citation line items issued in the same window on those inspections, excluding citation records deleted in the source data.

Each inspection is assigned to the county by its five-digit site zip via the Census Bureau’s 2020 ZCTA-to-county relationship file, assigning each zip to the county holding the largest share of its land area, with the site city as fallback — the same method as our county breakdown, whose Fresno row these totals match. City counts use the city on the inspected site’s address, which is the postal city rather than the municipal boundary. Federal OSHA’s own inspections at county addresses — 25 of the 1,967 — are included, matching our other city and region pages, and identified by the inspecting office on the record. Citations are grouped to the base section, so §3203(a) and §3203(a)(4) count together; industry groupings use the NAICS code on the inspection record; trigger shares use the inspection-type code, with the statewide column computed from all California inspections the same way. “Times the statewide share” compares an industry’s or standard’s share of the county’s citations with its share of all California citations in the window. The per-worker rate divides the six-year inspection count by six and by the county’s average covered employment 2020–2025 from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, times 100,000; 2025 employment is preliminary. Penalty figures are the penalty as it stands now, after any appeals and settlements (the dataset’s “current penalty”), and change as cases settle. Cal/OSHA’s own statewide summaries are at DIR’s citation statistics pages.

A citation count says what inspectors cited, not what any employer must do — the standards themselves say that.