What counts as a recordable injury

Last updated: 3 August 2026 Written by Blake Cowan, NCSO

The input that decides your rate, and the one place where a good instinct about recording everything quietly produces a number you did not earn.

The short answer

An injury is recordable when it needed more than first aid. The triggers are medical treatment beyond first aid, days away from work, restricted duty or job transfer, loss of consciousness, or a physician's diagnosis of a significant injury. First aid alone is not recordable, and counting it as though it were is why many contractors report a rate worse than the one they earned.

The calculator does the arithmetic in a second. This page is the part that actually decides your number, and it is where nearly all the errors live.

The line, in one sentence

More than first aid is recordable. First aid alone is not.

Everything else on this page is detail hanging off that sentence, and if you take nothing else, take it.

What counts as first aid, and therefore does not count

This is the list people are surprised by, so it is worth reading properly rather than skimming.

Cleaning, flushing or soaking a surface wound
Bandages, gauze pads, butterfly closures
Hot or cold therapy
Non rigid support such as an elastic bandage
Removing splinters or foreign material from the skin or eye with tweezers, irrigation or a swab
Drinking fluids for heat stress
Over the counter medication at over the counter strength
A tetanus shot
Drilling a fingernail or toenail to relieve pressure, or draining a blister

Every item there is first aid. None of it makes an injury recordable.

What pushes a case over the line

Any one of these, on its own, makes the case recordable.

Medical treatment beyond first aid

Prescription medication, stitches, rigid immobilisation, physiotherapy ordered as treatment. The treatment given is what matters.

Days away from work

Any day the worker could not attend beyond the day of the injury itself.

Restricted duty or job transfer

Light duties, a lifting restriction, moved to a different job because of the injury. Modified work is recordable, and that catches people out.

Loss of consciousness

Recordable on its own, regardless of how brief and regardless of what treatment followed.

A significant diagnosis

A physician diagnosing a significant injury or illness, such as a fracture or a punctured eardrum, makes it recordable even where no treatment was needed.

Death

Always recordable, and always reportable to the regulator on a much shorter timeline than any of this.

The mistake that costs contractors work

Almost every wrong injury rate I have seen was wrong in the same direction, for the same reason: the company counted first aid cases as recordable.

It usually comes from a good instinct. Somebody decides that everything gets logged, which is correct, and then the injury rate is calculated off the log without separating first aid from recordable, which is not. The result is a company with genuinely decent safety performance reporting a TRIF two or three times higher than it earned, then losing prequalification on a threshold it actually met.

The fix is not to record less. Record everything, and then classify it. Your incident and near miss system should capture every event, including the ones that turn out to be first aid and the ones where nobody was hurt at all. The recordable flag is a separate field on the record, decided on the treatment given, and only that field feeds the rate.

Canada does not actually have a recordability rule

Worth knowing, because it explains why this is confusing.

The United States has the OSHA recordkeeping rule, which defines all of this in regulation. Canada has no direct equivalent. Provincial boards work on accepted compensation claims, which is a different concept with a different test, and that is what feeds the provincial rates.

So when a Canadian contractor is asked for a TRIR by an American client or an American prequalification platform, they are being asked for a number defined by a rule that does not apply to them. The workable answer is to use the OSHA style definition on this page, apply it consistently, and be able to explain your basis. That is the same principle as everything else in safety documentation: ask what the person asking actually wants, rather than assuming a standard exists.

When you genuinely cannot tell

Some cases sit on the line, and you will not resolve every one of them from a web page.

Ask the treating practitioner what they provided, in those terms, rather than asking whether it was recordable. Most physicians have no idea what your reporting obligations are, and a question phrased around treatment gets you a usable answer where a question phrased around recordability gets you a shrug.

Then write down the reasoning. A one line note on the record saying why a case was classified the way it was costs nothing, and it is the difference between a defensible number and an argument you cannot win two years later.

Free templates

The incident and near miss form, with the classification field the count depends on.

Incident and near miss report

An investigation form that pushes past worker error to the causes an auditor will ask about.

Direct download. No email, no signup, no form.

PDF to print70 KB DOCX to edit39 KB

Print ready PDF and editable DOCX, no email required, and the full library has the rest. If you would rather have the whole program written and mapped to your certifying partner's audit, that is the paid work, and the software that holds it is free either way.

Safety metrics and injury rates is the hub.
The TRIF calculator turns the count into a rate.
DART rate and lost time rate explains the narrower counts.
Incident and near miss reporting is the system that produces the classification.

Questions people actually ask

What makes an injury recordable?

An injury is recordable when it needed more than first aid. The usual triggers are medical treatment beyond first aid, days away from work, restricted duty or a job transfer, loss of consciousness, or a diagnosis of a significant injury or illness by a physician. If none of those apply, it is a first aid case and it does not belong in your recordable count.

Is first aid recordable?

No, and this is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the whole topic. Cleaning a wound, applying a bandage, using a cold pack, removing a splinter with tweezers and giving over the counter medication at over the counter strength are all first aid. A company that logs every one of these as recordable will report an injury rate several times higher than its actual performance and lose work over it.

Is a doctor visit automatically recordable?

No. What matters is the treatment given, not who gave it or where. A worker can be seen by a physician, be examined, be told they are fine and sent back to work, and that remains a first aid case. It becomes recordable when the physician provides treatment beyond first aid or recommends time away or restricted duty.

Does a near miss go in the recordable count?

No. A near miss had no injury, so there is nothing to record on a rate. It should still be reported and investigated, because near misses are the cheapest information a safety program ever gets, but they belong in your incident system rather than your injury rate.

Does Canada use the OSHA recordability rules?

Not formally, and this is worth understanding. Canada has no direct equivalent of the OSHA recordkeeping rule, and provincial boards work on accepted claims instead. In practice Canadian contractors end up using the OSHA style recordable definition anyway, because the prequalification platforms that ask for a TRIR are American and that is the definition their forms assume.

Who decides whether a case is recordable?

You do, and that is uncomfortable for people who would prefer a rule to hide behind. The decision has to be made on the treatment given and recorded consistently. Consistency matters more than getting every marginal case right, because a company that classifies the same injury two different ways in the same year has a number that means nothing.

Next step

Take the templates and use them, whether or not you ever talk to us. If you would rather not build the program yourself, we will build it inside the app and keep it current.

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