Incident cost estimator
What an incident cost, added up from what you actually know — not inferred from a multiplier somebody published once. Every assumption is visible and yours to change.
Regulatory status An illustrative business-planning estimate. Not an OSHA calculation, not a workers' compensation determination, not an insurance or accounting figure.
Most incident-cost calculators ask for the direct cost and multiply it. That produces a number quickly and teaches you nothing: "this incident cost 4.5 times the medical bill" gives a manager nothing to act on. Eleven hours of lost production, two days of supervisor time and a week of overtime cover tells them where the money went, and which of those is worth preventing.
So this adds up what you know. Leave anything blank that you do not — it is excluded and listed as excluded, rather than counted as zero.
Estimate the cost
Nothing you enter leaves your browser. Your costs, rates, hours and the result are not transmitted to EHSTEC, not stored on this device, not written to the address bar, and not included in any analytics — not even as a range, because a range is still a disclosure. Refresh the page and it is gone.
The method, in full
That is the whole calculation. There is no further term, no adjustment and no multiplier hidden inside it — which is the point. If you disagree with the total, you can see exactly which line to argue with.
Why there is no built-in multiplier
The familiar approach estimates indirect cost as a multiple of direct cost. OSHA's $afety Pays is a real public model of that kind, and it uses a multiplier that varies with the size of the direct cost rather than one flat figure.
This tool does not restate those figures, for two reasons. One: a multiplier is a strong claim about your business, and publishing one as though it were a fact about your site would be inventing a number with a dollar sign attached. Two: a multiplier hides the reasoning, and the reasoning is the useful part — knowing that lost production was seventy per cent of the cost tells you what to change.
If you want the cross-check, enter your own multiplier in the optional field and it appears beside the itemised total. Where the two disagree sharply, that is worth understanding rather than averaging.
What this estimate is not
- Not an OSHA calculation and not connected to any OSHA requirement.
- Not a workers’ compensation determination, reserve or claim valuation.
- Not an insurance estimate or premium projection.
- Not an accounting or financial-reporting figure.
- Not a legal assessment of liability or exposure.
- Not a prediction of what any software, including EHSTEC, would save you.
- Not precise. It is a sum of estimates, rounded accordingly — see below.
Why the answer is rounded
A total of $47,832.16 built from a handful of estimated hourly rates is false precision: it reads as a measurement and it is an estimate. So the result is rounded to the nearest $100 below $10,000, $500 up to $100,000, and $1,000 above that — and the rounding is printed next to the number so the round figure is not mistaken for precision of a different kind.
For the same reason, a term you leave blank is excluded and named as excluded rather than treated as zero. A total assembled from three of the nine terms is a different claim from a complete one, and the tool says which you have.
Sources
This is an estimator, not advice
Nothing here is endorsed, approved or reviewed by OSHA, and this is not legal advice. Estimating what an incident cost does not establish compliance with anything. The result depends entirely on figures you supply and assumptions you choose, and it should not be used as the basis of a financial, insurance or legal decision on its own. See our editorial standards for how this content is written and reviewed.
Where the inputs come from, if you have them
The hardest part of this estimate is usually not the arithmetic — it is finding out how many hours were lost, how long the investigation took and when the actions closed, six months after the event. EHSTEC records incidents, computes TRIR and DART per 200,000 hours, and keeps corrective actions with the time they took to close, so those inputs exist as data rather than as recollection. It does not model cost and makes no claim about reducing it. See how incident management works in EHSTEC.