DART rate: the severity metric that costs you schedule
TRIR counts every recordable. DART isolates the injuries serious enough to pull a worker off the job — the ones that actually cost you crew days, premium, and momentum. If you only fix one lagging number, understand this one first.
DART
DART = (Days-Away/Restricted/Transferred cases × 200,000) ÷ hours worked. The gauge shows 1.5, right at the construction average. DART is always a subset of your recordables, so it sits at or below your TRIR — the gap between them tells you how severe your injuries are, not just how many.
Think of TRIR as how often and DART as how bad. A contractor with a low TRIR but a DART close to it has few injuries, but the ones they have are serious. A contractor whose DART is far below their TRIR is catching injuries early and keeping them minor — often through a real return-to-work program that moves an injured worker to restricted duty instead of days away.
That return-to-work discipline is also the fastest way to protect your EMR: a restricted-duty case costs your claims record far less than a lost-time one.
A worked example
A contractor logs 6 recordables on 500,000 hours — a TRIR of 2.4, dead average. But if 5 of those 6 were days-away cases, DART = (5 × 200,000) ÷ 500,000 = 2.0. A DART sitting that close to the TRIR means almost every injury was serious — the narrow 0.4 gap is your severity signal. A firm with the same 2.4 TRIR but a 0.8 DART is catching injuries early and keeping them minor.
DART is a lagging number, so you lower it upstream — with the leading indicators. Strong near-miss reporting, fast hazard closeout, and documentation against the national OSHA citation priorities keep the serious injuries from happening at all. See how all of it fits on the safety KPI pillar.
DART questions
What is the DART rate?▾
DART stands for Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred. It is the rate of recordable injuries serious enough to keep a worker away from their job, put them on restricted duty, or transfer them to other work. DART = (DART cases × 200,000) ÷ hours worked.
What is a good DART rate for construction?▾
The construction DART average is roughly 1.5. Below that is good, and below 1.0 is strong. Because DART is a subset of your recordables, it is always at or below your TRIR.
How is DART different from TRIR?▾
TRIR counts every recordable injury. DART counts only the serious ones — those causing days away, restricted duty, or transfer. TRIR measures frequency; DART measures the severity that actually costs schedule and premium.
Catch severity before it lands
Start with the free safety inspection template. From there POD computes DART and TRIR side by side from your reports, so the gap between them, your severity signal, is never hidden in a spreadsheet.