217 Citations, 53 Inspections: What Federal OSHA Actually Wrote Up in Body Shops

The short version. OSHA publishes what it cited, by industry code, and you can look up your own trade. For NAICS 811121, Automotive Body, Paint, and Interior Repair and Maintenance, Federal OSHA issued 217 citations across 53 inspections in the year October 2024 through September 2025, with $369,614 in penalties.

By Anthony Braswell for Quorum Industries LLC, The Autobody Directory · Updated 2026-08-16 · How this was written, and what the machine may not do

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The distribution is the story. This is not a trade being written up for guarding and machinery. It is being written up for two programmes, and one of them dwarfs everything else.

The list, as OSHA publishes it

Four things worth doing arithmetic on

Respiratory protection is 42 percent of every citation and 53 percent of every dollar. Ninety-one citations, $197,146. Nothing else is close: the second-place standard carries about a quarter of the penalty weight of the first.

It showed up in 33 of the 53 inspections, nearly two in three. If an inspector walks into a body shop, the single likeliest outcome in this data is a respiratory protection citation, and the second likeliest is hazard communication at 31 of 53.

Together the top two standards account for 141 of 217 citations, about 65 percent, and both are programme standards. Neither is about a guard on a machine or a hole in a floor. They are about a written programme, a medical evaluation, a fit test, a training record, a chemical inventory and a set of safety data sheets: paperwork that either exists or does not, and that an inspector can establish in an afternoon without watching anyone work.

The average inspection produced roughly four citations and about $6,974. That is a fair sketch of the exposure, though the spread behind an average of 53 inspections is wide, and one noise entry shows five citations arising from a single inspection.

What this does not say

This is Federal OSHA only, and that is a large exclusion. More than twenty states run their own OSHA-approved State Plans covering private employers, California, Michigan, Washington, Oregon and North Carolina among them, and a great many body shops sit inside those. Their inspections are not in this table. We ran the all-jurisdictions version of the same query and it did not return a valid result, so we cannot give you the national picture and are not going to imply one. Every number here is Federal OSHA jurisdiction, FY2025.

The penalties are also not the penalties first proposed. OSHA's own note says the figures reflect current rather than initial amounts, and assessments commonly move during informal conference and settlement, so read these as where the cases landed rather than where they opened.

Fifty-three inspections is a small sample of a large industry. It describes what inspectors found where they went, not how safe the trade is, and a standard that does not appear here is not thereby a standard you are complying with.

Finally, frequency is not severity. This table ranks what gets written up. It says nothing about which hazard is most likely to actually hurt someone in your building.

If you run a shop, the practical read

The list is telling you where the low-hanging fruit is, from the inspector's side of the counter.

Start with the respirator programme, because the data says so. The order of operations inside 1910.134 is where shops most often come apart: the medical evaluation has to come before the fit test, the fit test is annual, the training is annual, and there has to be a named programme administrator and a written, worksite-specific programme. Handing out N95s "voluntarily" does not exit the standard either. It waives the written programme requirement only, and only for filtering facepieces.

Hazard communication comes next, and it is mostly an inventory problem. Fifty citations across 31 inspections is a lot of shops that could not produce a current chemical list, current safety data sheets, labelled secondary containers, or training records tying the two together.

Then look at the third and fifth rows and notice they describe the same room. Spray finishing and flammable liquids together are 18 citations and $37,603, and both live in the booth and the mixing room.

Everything below that is a walkthrough: a blocked exit route, no 300A posted, an extinguisher nobody has inspected, a first-aid cabinet unopened since 2019. Cheap individually, but they are what turns a two-citation visit into a six-citation visit.

Where these numbers come from

One table, retrieved from OSHA on 16 August 2026: Frequently Cited OSHA Standards, NAICS 811121, all establishment sizes, Federal OSHA, period October 2024 through September 2025, at osha.gov. Every count, inspection number and dollar figure above is copied from that table. The percentages and averages are our arithmetic on those figures, and you can check them.

Standard numbers are given as OSHA writes them in the regulations, so 1910.37 and 1910.95 appear on OSHA's own results screen in a zero-padded form, 19100037 and 19100095, which is the same rule under a database's spelling.

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Where this fits

Each link says what it is for. We add one only when a reader on this page has a real reason to need that page next.

• The sign on the shop is not the name on its safety record (why looking a shop up by its owner misses most of its safety record)