OSHA’s 2026 Civil Penalty Increase: Cancelled

In a Notice published in the Federal Register on May 27, 2026, OSHA announced that there will be no inflation adjustment to its civil monetary penalties for noncompliance in 2026.

The Agency indicated that the required penalty increase will not take place because:

• The law requires that annual penalty adjustments must be based on one data set.
• Due to budget constraints, that data is not available.
• No alternate calculations are allowed by the law.

Read the Notice here.

Currently, the maximum civil penalty for a willful or repeat violation by an employer is $165,514. The minimum price tag for a willful violation is $11,823. Violations labeled as serious, other-than-serious, “failure to abate,” or “failure to post,” carry a maximum penalty of $16,550.

A Brief History on OSHA Civil Penalty Maximums

OSHA was established in 1971, and with its establishment came civil penalty maximums of $1,000 for serious violations and $10,000 for willful violations. In 1990, with the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990, fines were increased for the first time.

Two and a half decades later, Congress passed the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015 which aligned penalties with inflation and required regulatory agencies like OSHA, US DOT, and US EPA to increase maximum fines with inflation annually.

OSHA has increased its penalty maximums each year since the promulgation of the 2015 Act, until now.

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Tags: enforcement, fines and penalties, osha, penalties