Injury rate calculator: TRIF, TRIR, DART and lost time
Last updated: Written by Blake Cowan, NCSO
Three rates from four numbers, worked out in your browser, with the arithmetic shown so you can defend the figure you submit.
The short answer
TRIF equals your recordable injuries multiplied by 200,000, divided by total hours worked. The same formula gives you DART and your lost time rate, counting narrower sets of the same injuries. Canada tends to say TRIF and the United States says TRIR, and both use the 200,000 basis, so one calculation answers both.
Put your numbers in and it works all three out. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere, because the arithmetic happens in your browser.
Work out your rate
Every hour actually worked by everyone, for the period you are reporting. Leave out vacation, statutory holidays and sick time, because nobody was exposed to a hazard during those.
Anything beyond first aid. This is the number clients ask for most.
Enter hours worked first
The subset of recordables that changed what the worker could do.
Enter hours worked first
The subset where the worker missed time beyond the day of injury.
Enter hours worked first
The formula, so you can check it by hand
If the calculator will not run, or you would rather see it done, here it is in full.
Rate equals count times 200,000, divided by total hours worked.
Take a company with 250,000 hours worked in a year, which is roughly 125 people. Over that year they had 3 recordable injuries. One of those put somebody on light duties for a fortnight, and one of those cost a week off work.
| What you are working out | The arithmetic | Result |
|---|---|---|
| TRIF or TRIR | 3 times 200,000, divided by 250,000 | 2.40 |
| DART rate | 2 times 200,000, divided by 250,000 | 1.60 |
| Lost time rate | 1 times 200,000, divided by 250,000 | 0.80 |
Scroll the table sideways to see every column. The first column stays in place.
Notice the DART count includes the lost time case. A worker who missed a week was also away from their job, so they belong in both. Your DART can never exceed your TRIF, and your lost time rate can never exceed your DART. If they do, something has been counted in the wrong bucket, and that is worth finding before a client does.
Where the 200,000 comes from
It is 100 workers, at 40 hours a week, for 50 weeks. That is the whole story.
The point of it is comparison. A raw injury count tells a client nothing, because four injuries at a company of twelve and four at a company of six hundred are not the same event. Dividing by hours and multiplying by a fixed number puts every company on the same scale, so a rate of 2.4 means the same thing whoever reports it.
Getting the hours right matters more than the injuries
Most people concentrate on counting injuries correctly and then guess at hours. It is the wrong way round, because hours is the bigger number and a sloppy estimate moves the result further than a debatable injury does.
Include every hour actually worked, by everyone. Overtime. Supervisors. The office. Working owners.
Leave out vacation, statutory holidays, sick leave and any other paid time when nobody was near the work. Padding the denominator with paid time off makes your rate look better, and it is visible to anybody who compares your submission against your payroll records.
If you genuinely do not have hours, the accepted estimate is 2,000 hours per full time worker per year. Use it as a fallback and say that is what you did, rather than presenting an estimate as a measurement.
TRIF, TRIR, TRIFR, TCR, and why the acronym is the least of it
Same argument as the one about JSAs and JHAs: the vocabulary follows whoever trained the person asking, not a standard.
Canadians say TRIF. Americans say TRIR. You will also meet TRIFR, TCR and total recordable case rate. On the 200,000 basis these are the same calculation, and swapping the name does not change the number.
What genuinely changes the number is the definition of recordable, and that is worth a conversation rather than an assumption. What counts as a recordable injury is where most wrong rates actually come from, and it is almost always the same mistake in the same direction.
So is your number any good
That depends entirely on your industry and on who is asking, and anybody quoting you a single national target is guessing.
What TRIF clients actually require covers the thresholds ISN, Avetta and ComplyWorks clients set, and what happens when you sit above one. Canadian injury rate benchmarks has the published provincial numbers, along with the reason you cannot compare them to each other as directly as everybody does.
And if the number is worse than you would like, how to actually lower it is the practitioner answer, which has more to do with modified work and what you count than with posters.
Free templates
The incident and near miss form the recordable count comes from, if you do not already have one you trust.
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.
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.
Related
- Safety metrics and injury rates is the hub for everything on this page.
- What counts as a recordable injury is the input that decides the answer.
- DART rate and lost time rate covers the two narrower rates in their own right.
- Contractor prequalification is where these numbers get submitted.
- Incident and near miss reporting is the system that produces the count in the first place.
Questions people actually ask
How do you calculate TRIF?
Is TRIF the same as TRIR?
What hours do I include in total hours worked?
Why is the multiplier 200,000 and not 1,000,000?
What is the difference between TRIF, DART and the lost time rate?
Do I need to include subcontractors in my rate?
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.