Contractor safety prequalification, decoded

The numbers on the questionnaire

Nearly every prequalification packet asks for the same core inputs:

• TRIR — total recordable incident rate: recordable cases × 200,000 ÷ hours worked. The 200,000 normalizes to a 100-employee-year, so firms of any size compare.
• DART — the same computation counting only cases with days away, restriction, or transfer; a severity-weighted view.
• EMR — experience modification rate from workers' compensation: your actual claim losses against expected losses for your class. Below 1.0 beats the average; above it, premiums and prequal scores both suffer.
• OSHA history — citations, and increasingly the establishment-level injury data OSHA publishes from electronic submissions.
• Program evidence — written programs, training records, toolbox-talk cadence, and sometimes a named safety lead.

Where the numbers come from — and why accuracy is strategy

TRIR and DART come straight off your OSHA 300A: total cases and case types over total hours. That makes recordkeeping accuracy a commercial matter — inflated hours or suppressed cases misstate the rate in ways that surface later (the data is increasingly public), while sloppy day counts overstate DART against you.

EMR arrives from the rating bureau via your carrier, lagging your loss history by roughly a policy year. It rewards claim management — early reporting, return-to-work programs, medical-only outcomes — as much as injury prevention itself.

Moving the numbers honestly

Four levers move the inputs without cooking them:

• Fix the denominator first: actual hours worked, tracked properly per establishment — many small contractors understate hours and inflate their own TRIR.
• Manage severity: return-to-work and transitional duty convert days-away cases into restricted-duty cases and shrink DART and EMR both.
• Close the loop on causes: the incidents feeding your rate are the input to corrective actions; a rate that falls without the underlying fixes is a rate about to spike.
• Package the evidence: prequal reviewers score responsiveness — current 300As, insurance letters for EMR, training matrices, and program documents retrievable in a day, not a month.

When your rate has a bad year

A single serious case can spike a small contractor's TRIR for three reporting years. Reviewers know this — what they look for next is the narrative and the trend: what changed after the incident, the corrective actions with closure evidence, and monthly rates showing the recovery. Prequalification is survivable with a bad number and a good system; the reverse rarely holds.

Frequently asked questions