Where you work decides what a safety violation can cost, because more than twenty states run their own OSHA-approved plans with their own penalty schedules. California's 2025 schedule illustrates the spread: a maximum of $25,000 for a serious violation, against a federal maximum of $16,550, and a willful-violation minimum of $11,632 that has no federal counterpart in the same form (Cal/OSHA, Department of Industrial Relations news release, 2025; OSHA penalties page, 2025). The ceiling on a federal willful citation is roughly ten times the state of California's serious-violation maximum, and both systems are called OSHA.
What is a state plan?
Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, a state may operate its own job-safety program if OSHA approves it and the state commits to standards at least as effective as the federal ones. Approved plans cover private-sector and public-sector workers, and OSHA funds a share of their costs. States without plans, roughly half the country, are covered directly by federal OSHA.
How different are the penalties?
| Item | Federal OSHA, 2025 | Cal/OSHA, 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Maximum, serious violation | $16,550 | $25,000 |
| Maximum, willful or repeated | $165,514 | State schedule; willful minimum $11,632 |
| Failure to abate | $16,550 per day | State schedule |
Figures from OSHA's penalties page and the California Department of Industrial Relations, both 2025. The comparison is structural: state plans set their own schedules, review them on their own cycles, and enforce through their own agencies.
Do state plans mean weaker or stronger enforcement?
Either, depending on the state and the year. A plan must be at least as effective as federal OSHA, which sets a floor rather than a ceiling, so several states run higher penalties or broader public-sector coverage than federal law requires. The counterweight is capacity: a plan is only as strong as its inspectors, and staffing and budget cycles vary. The approval process is OSHA's ongoing check, but it operates on the scale of years, not inspections.
What should a worker with a safety complaint know?
File where the workplace is, which routes the complaint to whichever agency has jurisdiction, and the retaliation protections run in parallel: state plans operate their own whistleblower provisions alongside the federal 30-day process. Complaints can be filed with both in some situations, but deadlines differ and the shorter one controls planning. Anti-retaliation rights in state-plan states add a second, sometimes longer, window.
Which states run their own plans?
Roughly 22 states operate plans covering private-sector workers, and several more cover only state and local government employees, whose federal OSHA otherwise does not reach (OSHA, state occupational safety and health plans, accessed 2026). The map runs from Washington and California to Michigan, New York, and Kentucky, with public-employee-only plans in states such as Texas and Florida's for its own workforce. The practical effect for a worker is that the state capitol or county road crew may be covered where a private warehouse next door is under federal jurisdiction.
What does at least as effective mean in practice?
OSHA monitors plans against a checklist of required capabilities: staffing ratios, inspection numbers, penalty schedules reviewed against inflation, and complaint response times. When a plan falls short, federal OSHA can issue findings and, in the extreme, begin a process that ends approval. The record shows this supervision works slowly: plans have operated under multi-year improvement agreements, and the hammer rarely falls within one budget cycle. Effectiveness, in the data available, is a trend, not an event.
How does workers' compensation fit in?
Separately, in nearly every state. Safety enforcement and workers' compensation are different systems with different aims: penalties discipline employers for hazards; compensation pays for injuries regardless of fault. The two interact at the margins, as when a citation documents the conditions behind a claim, but a workers' compensation filing is not a substitute for a safety complaint, and neither system's deadlines waits for the other. Reporting an injury to the employer does not, by itself, trigger an inspection.
What would unify the map?
Congress, not any agency. The Occupational Safety and Health Act allows state plans by design, and proposals to federalize public-sector coverage or standardize penalties appear in most sessions without advancing. Until one does, the honest description of the system is a federal floor with thirty-odd ceilings, and a worker's penalty expectations are a function of geography before they are a function of hazard.
Are the whistleblower and anti-retaliation rights the same everywhere?
No, and this is where the map matters most to an individual worker. State plans run their own retaliation provisions with deadlines and remedies that differ from the federal 30-day process, sometimes longer, sometimes with state-court access that Section 11(c) lacks. A worker in a plan state may have two windows and two forums, and the safe planning rule is the one that recurs throughout this article: file within the shortest applicable deadline and let the longer claim stay available behind it.
The comparison table above is the whole thesis in three rows: same statute, different arithmetic. A warehouse worker in New Jersey and one in Nevada stand under different ceilings for identical hazards, and neither ceiling moved because either of them filed a complaint. That is the state-plan bargain working as drafted, for better and worse.
What the evidence establishes is a deliberately uneven map, unified by a federal floor. What the published figures do not show is enforcement intensity per workplace, which depends on inspector headcount and inspection targeting, data each plan reports on its own schedule.
Related: The $165,514 citation: OSHA's maximums and what gets paid · OSHA adds 15 percent penalty cut for immediate fixes.
For more context, read OSHA adds 15 percent penalty cut for immediate fixes.
For more context, read The $165,514 citation: OSHA's maximums and what gets paid.
For more context, read The 30-day deadline for safety retaliation complaints.