If you’re looking for a lost time incident rate calculation guide, you’ve come to the right place. Any manager will tell you that keeping on top of your company metrics is vital to appropriate team planning. The LTIR metric is no exception. 

The Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) is a metric for organizations to analyze their team member injuries over time, resulting in missed work and, therefore, higher costs to the organization. 

In this guide, we’re going to examine the following: 

• the fundamentals of LTIR
• how to calculate LTIR in your organization
• some convenient tips to help you interpret the numbers into actionable steps

LTIR Fundamentals – A Guide To Lost Time Incident Rate

How To Calculate Annual Lost Time Incident Rate

(# of Lost Time Incidents x 200k) / total hours worked by team members

Let’s run through a hypothetical numerical example of how this works.

Our imaginary company’s name is Acme Company, employing 300 team members for the standard 40-hour work weeks, working 50/52 weeks yearly. If Acme company has four lost time accidents, the calculation would be as follows in the numerical example below.

(4 x 200,000)/(300 x 40 x 50) =  1.333

As you may have noticed, the LTIR calculation is similar to the TRIR calculation.

Why Tracking LTIR Is Important For Organizations

Tracking lost time incident rate may seem like a dull necessity of the OSHA, but its data is more valuable than you may realize.

Preventive Trend Tracking

I don’t need to tell you how valuable preventing incidents and accidents is to an organization. In fact, lost time injuries at work cost US businesses more than the GDP of 91 other countries combined. That’s $62 billion per year in lost revenue. I don’t know what it is if that’s not a great incentive to have a robust trend-tracking process for analysis.

Competitive Comparison

The great thing about the LTIR metric is that it puts all the players in an industry in the same comparative field. That is, it’s easy to find the average metrics for your industry and often consider company size simultaneously.

Knowing your industry average LTIR metric can help you understand how your organization lines up against its competition within the industry. If you’re the leader, that might be something to point out to your marketing department.

Insurance

Insurance uses metrics like LTIR to determine a company’s insurance rates. You can always reach out to your insurance broker and request what they look for in terms of LTIR. Next, you can compare your numbers and sometimes argue for a better insurance rate, especially if your company has below-average numbers (industry-leading).

Accurate Perception

When recording accidents or injuries versus those with lost time, the number of minor accidents can significantly skew a company’s perception. Some companies might over-report minor incidents for fear of reprisal for OSHA non-compliance. It’s much more common than you might think.

Recording a metric that only reflects lost-time incidents gives you a more accurate picture of how your organization is performing.

Professional Tip: Be wary of trying to skew your LTIR numbers by making deals with team members not to report lost time accidents. Suppose you feel compelled to try to skew your company’s LTIR metric. In that case, you likely need to rethink your health and safety policy and implement routine training to improve your company’s safety.

How The OSHA Uses LTIR

The OSHA uses the LTIR similarly to insurance companies. That is, they use the metric to judge the company’s overall safety practices. High LTIR scores could signal things like unannounced safety inspections and other undesirable situations for management. That’s one of the many reasons it’s essential to document and review your organization’s LTIR and other metrics, so you know where you stand and how you should improve.

5 Tips For Managing LTIR And Other Pertinent Data

One of the most vital things to know about LTIR is how it can impact an organization based on its size. Amanda Edens clarifies this point in an exchange with Big Sky Industrial’s query in 2016, as published on the OSHA website.

Tip # 1: Know where you stand based on company size

Amanda points out to Big Sky Industrial how the Bureau of Labor Statistics has established a sizing code to classify organizations by the number of employees. Here’s what the sizing code looks like:

Size Category	Number of Employees
1	1-10
2	11-49
3	50-249
4	250-999
5	1,000 +

She admits the calculation might favor larger organizations. The reason for this is percentage differences. The ratio is more dramatic due to the lower staff count. Let’s look at an example.

Acme Company (our fictitious company from earlier) will now have only 14 employees. If they have one lost time accident, that is 1/14 of their team who experience lost time.

Now, let’s look at Acme’s rival company Emca (another fictitious company; it’s Acme backward). Emca company has had a strong year and only had a single lost time accident. However, Emca company has 43 employees. So, that’s 1/43 employees who experienced a lost time accident. See where I’m going with this? 

With a larger team, the amount of worked hours increases dramatically. 

You might be thinking that it makes perfect sense that it should affect smaller companies more than large ones because it puts a much greater strain on a small company than a larger one with a greater pool of resources to draw from in times of crisis.

The solution for smaller companies is to start acquiring this data as soon as possible. Small companies’ anomalies caused by single events are balanced with time and multiple data acquisitions. When multiple years of data are presented, if a smaller company has a trend of accidents, it will be apparent in the data, thus providing evidence that the original single event was common. However, if a single event is the only event within several years, the proof that it was a mere anomaly will also become evident. 

Tip # 2: Record multiple years of data

Recording yearly is a small company’s best defense against skewed LTIR numbers due to a recently lost time incident.

Using the LTIR as an indicator within your organization is a great idea. However, it mustn’t be the only key indicator of your safety and health program.

Tip # 3: Use multiple key indicators

Trend analysis within your organization is a powerful tool for identifying dangers and acting to prevent incidents. By focusing on several key indicators, you can gain a greater perspective of the inner workings of your organization. A greater perspective will let you manage incidents better, having a more educated guess as to those that will require your attention first.

Review your data and performance against other safety indicators such as Total Recordable Case Rate (TRCFR) and Frequency Rate (FR).

Tip # 4: Compare your safety metrics to industry benchmarks

When you understand where you stand compared to others in your industry, you can set achievable goals. Industry-specific LTIR benchmarks don’t exist as of now. However, you can find general industry averages on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website.

The takeaway is that you can set achievable goals by knowing where you stand compared to others.

Tip # 5: Use a digital incident reporting platform.

Keeping track of multiple reports, key indicators, and multiple employees is a challenging task on the best of days. 

Similarly, combing incident reports and finding the needed trends can be daunting, especially with a larger company.

Some reports are necessary on paper, but you can complete almost all reports digitally today. Using a digital platform like 1st Reporting to document incidents that cause lost time can save you hours, especially when generating trend reports.

When all your reports are in one place, it’s easier to spot trends.

Not only that, but a digital platform allows you to share safety reports with other members of management quickly and easily.

A 1st Reporting representative can show you how our platform works and how we might be able to help your organization. Contact us today to book your free demo.