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How to Lower Your EMR, and Why It Takes Longer Than You Think

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:06:22 GMT

Most contractors do not call me because someone got hurt. They call me because they lost a bid.

The job was in their wheelhouse. The number was right. Then the general contractor ran the prequalification and the answer came back no, and nobody on that call said the word "safety" even once. They said three letters. EMR.

That is the part that stings. Your Experience Modification Rate (EMR) is built out of things that happened years ago, and for a lot of contractors it can decide whether they are allowed to compete for certain work today.

Here is what the number is, what moves it, and why the honest answer to "how fast can we fix this" is longer than anyone wants to hear.

What your EMR measures

Your EMR compares the workers' compensation losses your company has had against the losses expected for a company your size doing your kind of work. The comparison runs through your class codes and your payroll, so you are not being measured against every contractor in the country. You are being measured against companies like yours.

A 1.0 means your loss experience is roughly in line with what was expected. Below 1.0 is generally better than expected. Above 1.0 is generally worse.

One thing worth clearing up before we go further. This is a workers' compensation calculation, not an OSHA one. An OSHA recordable and a workers' comp claim are two different things. A recordable with no claim behind it does not feed your mod, and a claim can exist that was never recordable. When you go looking for what is driving your number, you are reading your loss runs, not your OSHA 300 log.

Three details decide most of it, and most owners have never been told any of them.

It runs on roughly three years of history, and it generally leaves out your most recent year. Experience rating generally uses about three years of loss and payroll data, and the most recent policy year is generally excluded from that period. The claim from last month is generally not in the number a general contractor is looking at today. It may affect a future mod once that policy period enters the experience window.

Frequency carries more weight than most owners expect. Each claim is split into a primary portion and an excess portion, and the primary portion carries more weight in the calculation. The practical effect is that several smaller claims can move your mod more than people expect, in some cases more than a single large one. Most owners brace for the catastrophic loss. The thing working against their mod is often the steady run of strains, lacerations, and slips that never felt like a big deal at the time.

It is a lagging indicator being used as a gate. Your mod describes a company that existed a few years ago, and the general contractor running your prequalification is using it to predict the company you are today.

Here is the part worth understanding. The experience modification system exists to adjust workers' compensation premiums based on an employer's loss experience. That is the job it was built for. It was not designed as a standalone ranking of how safe one contractor is next to another, and NCCI has cautioned against using mods to compare employers that way .

Both things are true at the same time. The number has a legitimate insurance purpose, and it is also sitting on prequalification forms helping decide who gets to bid. Knowing the difference will not get you on the list. Working the window will.

One caveat worth stating plainly: experience rating rules and the details of the calculation vary by state and by the rating bureau that handles your policies, so your agent is the right person to confirm the specifics for your operation.

Why there is no fast fix

I want to be straight with you, because anybody promising otherwise is selling something.

You cannot simply erase legitimate losses from your experience. There is no service you can hire that makes a bad loss history disappear overnight. And once a policy year enters the calculation, the losses in that year can keep influencing your mod through successive calculations until that year ages out of the window.

A serious EMR problem is usually a multi-year recovery. Depending on when the losses occurred, your policy dates, and how open claims develop, a bad loss year can influence your mod for several years.

That is not a reason to wait. It is the reason to start now. A few years from today you will either have a number that opens doors or the same one that closed them, and the difference is what you do this quarter.

What genuinely moves the number

Work on frequency first. Pull your loss runs for the last few years and sort them by how often the same mechanism shows up, not by how expensive each one was. If you have four claims that trace back to material handling, material handling is your problem, not the one bad fall everybody still talks about.

Stay on top of your open claims. An open claim is carried at its current valuation, which includes what has been paid and what is currently reserved. Reserves are the carrier's estimate of where the claim is headed, and they move in both directions as the claim develops and gets reevaluated.

You do not control whether a claim closes, and I would be careful with anyone who tells you otherwise. What you can do is stay in it. Review your open claims on a regular schedule with your carrier and your agent. Know what has been paid and what is currently reserved on each one. Supply updated medical information, return-to-work status, and anything else that reflects where the claim honestly stands. If a reserve looks out of step with the current facts and you have documentation that supports a change, put it in front of the adjuster. That is a conversation worth having through the year, not once at renewal.

Build a return-to-work program before you need one. A real, medically appropriate return-to-work program can help prevent or reduce wage-loss benefits and keep claim costs from escalating. Claims that stay medical-only often receive more favorable treatment in experience rating than claims involving lost time, though how much varies by state. Light duty that is genuine, documented, and consistent with the employee's medical restrictions is one of the few levers that works on what is happening right now rather than on something already in the books.

The worst time to invent return-to-work is the afternoon somebody gets hurt.

Fix the cause, not the paperwork. An incident report that ends at "employee was not paying attention" has told you nothing and will not prevent anything. The question is what about the work made that the easy thing to do. Sequencing, access, lighting, the right tool being forty yards away. Those are the answers that stop the second one.

Check your own data. Errors happen. Wrong class codes, claims attributed to you that are not yours, payroll figures that do not match what you reported. Your rating worksheet is available to you through your agent or your carrier, and a careful read is worth the hour. If something is wrong, your agent or carrier can help get it corrected, and it is worth asking.

Where to start this quarter

If you do nothing else, do these three.

Pull your loss runs for the last few years and sort by frequency, not severity. Find the repeating mechanism. That is your target.

Write down a real light-duty plan before you need it, and talk it through with your carrier so everyone knows how it works ahead of time.

Get your rating worksheet from your agent and read it. Confirm your class codes and payroll are right.

None of that requires hiring anybody. It requires an afternoon and the willingness to look.

When it makes sense to bring somebody in

If the repeating mechanism is not obvious, if your open claims are not getting the attention they need, or if you are already being screened out of work, that is the point where outside help pays for itself.

That is a good part of what we do. Safety consulting at United Front covers root cause work and corrective action aimed at what is driving your claims history, along with prequalification management across Avetta, ISNetworld, HammerTech, and the other portals that gate your bid list. Where the gap is people rather than process, we place safety professionals on site . Where it is knowledge, we train your crews .

We are a support element to your business. You know your work better than we ever will. What we bring is a second set of eyes on the pattern you have been too close to see.

If your EMR is costing you work, the losses behind that number are already written. The part still in your hands is what the next few years look like, and that starts today.

Alex Bedoya is the Founder and CEO of United Front Safety Solutions, a minority and veteran-owned construction safety company in Greenville, South Carolina.

OSHA Competent Person Requirements, and What Most Contractors Get Wrong

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:58:01 GMT

A certificate is not a designation. What 29 CFR 1926.32(f) requires, and the three questions to run against your active scopes.

A general contractor asks for the name of your competent person before you mobilize. Somebody on your team forwards a training certificate, and everyone moves on.

That exchange happens on job sites every week, and it usually satisfies nobody who understands the standard. A certificate is not a designation, and training alone does not make anyone competent under OSHA's definition. Here is what the standard says, and where crews get caught.

What OSHA requires

The definition lives in 29 CFR 1926.32(f), and it has two halves:

One who is capable of identifying existing and predictable hazards in the surroundings, or working conditions which are unsanitary, hazardous, or dangerous to employees, and who has authorization to take prompt corrective measures to eliminate them.

Read that twice, because most people only read the first half.

Half one is knowledge. The person can look at a trench, a scaffold, or a leading edge and recognize both the hazard in front of them and the one that is about to develop. That comes from training and from time in the work.

Half two is authority. The person can stop the work. Not recommend stopping it, not report it up and wait. Stop it, and fix it, right then.

OSHA's language is "authorization to take prompt corrective measures." On an excavation, 1926.651(k)(2) spells out what that means: when the competent person finds a hazardous condition, exposed employees come out until it is corrected.

The authority half is the half that fails

This is where most designations fall apart under scrutiny.

A company names a foreman as the competent person for excavation. He knows soil classification cold. He can spot a trench that needs a box from thirty feet away. But when he calls it, the superintendent overrules him because the plumbing inspection is scheduled for two o'clock.

That is not a judgment call the superintendent gets to make. Under 1926.651(k)(2), the employees come out.

That company does not have a competent person for excavation. It has a knowledgeable employee without authority, which is not the same thing and does not satisfy the standard.

If the person you designated has to ask permission before shutting something down, the designation is on paper only.

There is no OSHA competent person card

This is the single most common misunderstanding, and it costs contractors money.

OSHA does not certify competent persons. There is no federal card, no registry, and no course that ends with someone becoming a competent person by virtue of completing it. The employer designates the competent person. That responsibility cannot be handed to a training provider.

Training matters enormously, and a competent person who has not been trained to the hazard is a liability. But a certificate is evidence supporting a designation. It is not the designation itself, and a company that treats a card as the whole obligation has not met the standard.

OSHA defines qualified separately at 1926.32(m), and the two are not interchangeable. Scaffolds make the difference clear: a qualified person trains the people who work from the scaffold (1926.454(a)). A competent person trains the people who erect, dismantle, or inspect it (1926.454(b)). Same scaffold, two roles, and scopes of work routinely use the words as if they were one.

Where a competent person is required

There are two layers. 1926.20(b)(2) requires every employer's safety program to provide for frequent and regular inspections of the job site, materials, and equipment by competent persons the employer designates. That one is general. On top of it, specific standards require a competent person for specific work, and a single designation does not cover all of it.

Among the most common in commercial construction:

Excavations and trenching. Soil classification, protective systems, and inspections.
Scaffolding. Erection, alteration, dismantling, and inspection.
Fall protection. Safety monitor duties (1926.502(h)(1)), supervising the fall protection plan in the field (1926.502(k)(4)), training (1926.503(a)(2)), and determining whether impacted fall arrest equipment can return to service (1926.502(d)(19)). Anchorage design and the written fall protection plan are qualified person work, not competent person work.
Confined spaces. Identifying confined spaces and determining which are permit-required (1926.1203(a)), and reclassifying when conditions change.
Steel erection. Pre-shift crane inspection (1926.753(c)(1)), plumbing-up (1926.754(d)(1)), column guying and bracing (1926.755(a)(4)).
Cranes, rigging, and material handling. Shift inspection of the crane (1926.1412(d)) and daily inspection of slings before use (1926.251(a)(6)). Riggers and signal persons are qualified, not competent, under Subpart CC.
Demolition. The engineering survey required before work starts (1926.850(a)), one of the few competent person duties OSHA requires in writing.
Ladders and stairways.
Exposure controls. Silica (1926.1153), asbestos (1926.1101), lead (1926.62), and cadmium (1926.1127) each name a competent person.

A person competent for scaffolding is not automatically competent for confined space entry. Check the standard that governs the specific scope on your site, because the requirements and the inspection intervals differ.

How often they have to inspect

Two of the most frequently cited:

Excavations. 1926.651(k)(1) requires an inspection prior to the start of work and as needed throughout the shift, plus after every rainstorm or other hazard-increasing occurrence. The requirement applies whenever employee exposure can be reasonably anticipated.

Scaffolds. A competent person inspects before each work shift and after anything that could affect structural integrity.

Both have to happen whether or not anyone is watching. Neither standard requires you to write it down. That is the trap: the inspection is mandatory, the record is not, and the record is the only thing that proves the inspection happened.

Four ways contractors get caught

One designated person for the whole site. A large project with excavation, scaffold, and confined space work needs competency across all three. One name on a form does not stretch that far.

The designation left with the person. Your competent person for excavation took another job in March, and nobody replaced the designation. The work continued.

No documentation of the inspections. The inspections happened. Nothing was written down. From the outside, an undocumented inspection and no inspection look identical.

A subcontractor's designation borrowed as your own. Each employer is responsible for its own employees. Pointing at somebody else's competent person does not discharge that.

What to do about it

Work through your active scopes and answer three questions for each one.

Who is designated, by name, for this specific hazard?
Does that person have the authority to stop work, and does site leadership know it? OSHA does not require that in writing. Put it in writing anyway. It is the only version that survives a turnover.
Where is the inspection record?

If any of the three has no answer, that is a gap that exists right now, not a hypothetical.

Run the three questions above against your active scopes. If the answers do not come easily, that is a conversation worth having before an inspector has it for you.

You can reach us at unitedfrontsafety.com/contact .

United Front Safety Solutions places safety professionals on commercial construction projects nationwide, and delivers OSHA and construction safety training on job sites and at our Greenville facility. Every professional we place carries OSHA 30 at minimum, along with current First Aid, CPR, and AED.

Shane Brannock, QSSP, is an OSHA-authorized Outreach Trainer for Construction (OSHA #500) and an Army veteran. He leads training at United Front Safety Solutions.