OSHA Top 10 For 2025: What The New Preliminaries Say About Where Businesses Still Stumble

Every fall, the preliminary Top 10 citation list gives employers a snapshot of where safety programs are actually failing. The 2025 preliminaries were released during the NSC Safety Congress and the pattern is familiar. Fall Protection in construction sits at the top again, followed by Hazard Communication, Ladders, and Lockout or Tagout. The counts shift year to year, but the order tells a steady story about small gaps that add up across thousands of jobs. OSHA keeps an overview of common citations, and this is the time of year when it is worth aligning your next round of audits with the list rather than guessing where to look.

The trap many leaders fall into is reading the list like a scoreboard, shaking their heads, and moving on. A better use is to convert the items into specific questions that expose drift between your procedures and your floor. If fall protection is not your daily world, pick one of the categories that touches you every shift. Hazard communication is universal. Labels and safety data sheets sound easy until a supplier updates a classification and your secondary container labels do not match. The 2024 HazCom final rule aligned to GHS Revision 7 and set deadlines through 2026 and 2028. That single regulatory change will keep HazCom on the list because it requires coordination between purchasing, inventories, and training. You can reduce your risk with one meeting between the person who orders chemicals and the person who manages training. Ask them to pick three products, compare the current SDS with the old one, and update labels and training content together. That is the small, unglamorous work that prevents citations before they happen.

Lockout or Tagout is another perennial. It shows up because the standard is easy to misunderstand and hard to execute perfectly. The rule applies to servicing and maintenance where unexpected energization could cause harm. The exceptions for minor servicing during normal production are narrow and only apply when there are alternate protections in place that are truly effective. The difference between a program that survives inspection and one that fails is usually the verification step. If your technicians can describe how they test for zero energy and you can show a real annual inspection of procedures, you are already in better shape than many.

The ladder story is similar. It is rarely about ignorance of the standard. It is about daily discipline. If you are a small general contractor, pick one of your job sites and watch how ladders are stored and staged. You will know in an hour whether the rule is followed or whether shortcuts are quietly allowed. Treat the Top 10 as a checklist you revisit quarterly. It is less exciting than a new initiative, but it keeps your attention where thousands of citations say it should be.

There is another way to read the Top 10 that is useful for planning. Use it as input for your insurer conversation. If your incidents or near misses line up with the list, there is a reason. Citations follow harm. You can build premium and risk arguments around the specific changes you are making in fall protection, hazard communication, ladders, and energy control. Then measure whether days away and restricted cases move in the right direction over the next quarters. That is how you turn a national snapshot into a local improvement. It is also how you free up budget to tackle longer horizon issues like ergonomics and heat before they rise on your own list.

Sources and further reading: NSC preliminary Top 10 list and OSHA Top 10 overview. OSHA Hazard Communication page at osha.gov/hazcom. OSHA Lockout or Tagout page at osha.gov/lockout-tagout.