Cal/OSHA Inspections by County

Cal/OSHA publishes no county-level enforcement statistics. This page is that breakdown — CompliantCA’s analysis of the federal enforcement data, covering the 42,309 California inspections opened from January 2020 through December 2025, mapped to counties and set against each county’s covered employment.

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The rate map: enforcement runs north

The two maps answer different questions. Total inspections follow population: Los Angeles opened 7,605 — the most of any county, and more than the bottom thirty combined. A pale county on the rate map is not a county without inspections; it is a county with many workers. The rate map answers a narrower question: where an individual workplace sees the most enforcement attention per worker — and that answer runs north.

Small counties swing on a handful of inspections — the full table below flags every county under 20,000 covered workers. Among counties above that size, the leaders:

The statewide rate is about 41 annual inspections per 100,000 covered workers. The counties above it are rural and northern; the Central Valley sits near or above the average; the urban coast sits far below it — Santa Clara (16), Orange (18), San Francisco (20), San Mateo (23). Los Angeles leads every count in raw volume, 7,605 inspections, and still runs below the statewide rate per worker.

Butte and Shasta: one district office, one pattern

The two leading counties share more than a border region. Both are served by the same Cal/OSHA district office — and that office opened 48% of its inspections from referrals, four times the share of any other office in the state (the statewide referral share is 8%). Its inspections concentrate overwhelmingly in construction trades.

In Butte County, the data points at a cause it can support: the inspections center on Paradise, Magalia, Chico, and Oroville — the towns destroyed or swollen by the 2018 Camp Fire — and the counts peak in 2021–2022, the rebuilding years, then decline. A rebuild means thousands of residential construction sites, and the enforcement followed them.

In Shasta County, the same referral-and-construction signature appears, centered on Redding — but the counts are still climbing, from 90 in 2020 to 316 in 2025. The data shows the pattern; it does not name the program behind it, and we won’t guess. What an employer in the far north can take from it: referral-driven inspections arrive without a complaint or an accident, and construction is their focus.

All 58 counties

Counties marked † have fewer than 20,000 covered workers; their rates swing on a handful of inspections and should be read as rough. Sierra County’s 409, for example, rests on 14 inspections.

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: California inspections opened January 2020 through December 2025, as retrieved 2026-08-21.

County assignment: each inspection’s five-digit site zip is mapped to a county 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; the roughly 1% of zips with no ZCTA (mostly PO-box zips) are assigned by their city’s majority county. Coverage: 99.9% of inspections mapped. About 6% of inspections sit in zips that cross county lines with less than 90% of land area in the dominant county; excluding them changes no finding on this page, though it can swap adjacent ranks between near-tied counties (Alameda and San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange), which is why this page reports rates and counts rather than precise ranks.

Denominators: county average covered employment 2020–2025 from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, all ownerships; 2025 is preliminary. Rates are annualized: inspections divided by six years, divided by average employment, times 100,000. District-office referral shares are computed from the same inspection data. The chart’s data appears in the table above it and the full table.

An inspection count says where inspectors went, not what any employer must do — the standards themselves say that.