The six-foot rule, the paperwork a small crew actually needs, what the OSHA 10 card is and is not, the 2026 penalty sheet, and the free consultation program almost nobody uses.
Short answer first. If you have even one employee on a jobsite, OSHA applies to you. The good news is that for a residential crew, most of what OSHA cares about comes down to one rule: anyone working six feet or more above a lower level needs a guardrail, a safety net, or a harness tied off to something solid. Get that right, keep ladders and scaffolds set up correctly, post the free poster, and know the three numbers on the penalty sheet. That covers the large majority of what an inspector will look at when they pull up to a house.
The rest of this guide walks through what actually applies to a small residential crew, what does not, what the OSHA 10 card is and is not, what an inspection looks like, and the free program almost nobody uses.
Yes. The Occupational Safety and Health Act covers private employers with employees, and there is no small-business exemption from the standards themselves. A two-man siding crew is covered the same day it makes its first hire.
What small companies do get is a break on paperwork. If your company had 10 or fewer employees at all times during the last calendar year, you do not have to keep the OSHA 300 injury and illness log. That exemption is company-wide, based on your peak headcount for the year, and it goes away the first year you have 11 people on payroll at any point.
Two things do not go away, no matter how small you are. Every employer has to report a work-related fatality to OSHA within 8 hours, and any in-patient hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye within 24 hours. And every employer has to comply with the standards on the jobsite. The recordkeeping exemption is not a compliance exemption.
One more wrinkle: 22 states and territories, California and Michigan among them, run their own OSHA-approved plan covering private employers instead of federal OSHA, and those plans have to be at least as effective as the federal rules. If you work in one of them, the standards below still apply, and some of them go further.
Falls kill more construction workers than anything else. OSHA's own stand-down page cites Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that falls from elevation accounted for 389 of the 1,034 construction fatalities recorded in 2024. That is why inspectors look at roofs and ladders first.
The residential rule is 29 CFR 1926.501(b)(13), and it is short. Anyone engaged in residential construction six feet or more above a lower level has to be protected by a guardrail system, a safety net system, or a personal fall arrest system. A personal fall arrest system is a full body harness, a lanyard with a deceleration device, and an anchor point. OSHA also accepts a fall restraint system, which is a harness or body belt tied to a center anchor with a lanyard short enough that the worker physically cannot reach the edge.
There used to be an easier path. Until 2010, a directive let residential builders use slide guards and safety monitors instead of conventional fall protection with no extra paperwork. OSHA rescinded it. Today, if you want to argue that guardrails, nets, or harnesses are infeasible or create a greater hazard on a specific job, a qualified person has to write a site-specific fall protection plan that documents why, and OSHA starts from the presumption that at least one conventional system was feasible.
What counts as residential? Two tests, both required: the structure has to be a dwelling, and it has to be built with traditional wood-frame materials and methods. A steel I-beam in a wood-framed house does not disqualify it. A steel-framed apartment building is not residential construction under this rule.
A few related numbers that come up on every residential site:
Here is the part that matters for a small crew. In May 2023, OSHA issued a National Emphasis Program on falls. Under it, an inspector who sees fall hazards from the road can open an inspection on the spot, without a complaint and without an accident. A roofing crew with no harnesses on a two-story house is the easiest inspection an area office can write.
If you are buying gear, Guardian Fall Protection builds harnesses, anchors, and rope grabs for residential roofers, and Northern Safety & Industrial stocks fall gear alongside gloves, hi-vis, and respirators.
OSHA's construction training is built around four hazards. Falls are one. The other three account for most of the rest of the deaths.
Struck-by. Falling material, swinging loads, and vehicles backing up. On a residential site the everyday version is a bundle of shingles coming off a roof, a nail gun bounce, or a truck backing into a driveway with a worker behind it. Hard hats, a spotter for backing, and keeping people out from under overhead work handle most of it.
Caught-in or caught-between. Trenches are the big one. An unprotected trench five feet or deeper needs a protective system, and a cave-in does not give you time to react. On residential work this shows up on sewer laterals, footings, and foundation repair. The other common version is a hand or arm pulled into equipment with a guard removed.
Electrocution. Overhead lines when raising ladders and setting trusses, damaged cords, and working near energized panels. Ground-fault protection on every temporary circuit and a ten-foot clearance from overhead power lines are the habits to build.
You do not need a safety manual the size of a phone book to manage these. You need a five-minute toolbox talk at the start of the week, a supervisor who will stop work when someone is unprotected, and a habit of fixing what you see instead of walking past it.
Most residential contractors picture OSHA compliance as a binder. For a small crew the list is shorter than that.
If you are managing all of this on paper, an inspection app removes the excuse. SafetyCulture, now branded Mitti by SafetyCulture, has a free plan for teams of up to 10 with five active inspection templates, and its Premium plan lists at $24 per seat per month billed annually or $29 month to month. Safesite has a free plan with unlimited members that covers inspections, toolbox talks, and incident reports, with reporting limited to the last 30 days, and a Premium plan at $16 per member per month that adds the OSHA 300 log. Either one gets your toolbox talks and inspections time-stamped and stored.
The OSHA 10-hour and 30-hour cards come from the Outreach Training Program. OSHA is direct about what they are. The program is voluntary. Federal OSHA does not require the cards, they are not a certification or license, and completing one does not satisfy the hazard-specific training that individual standards require. The cards also do not expire.
So why does everyone ask for them? Because some states, cities, general contractors, and unions require them as a condition of being on site, most often on public works and larger commercial jobs. New York City has gone further with its own site safety training rule. If you bid work where a GC or a municipality asks for cards, you need them. If you run your own residential jobs, they are a good orientation and a reasonable thing to require of new hires, but they are not what OSHA will ask about in an inspection.
The 10-hour class is for workers and covers hazard recognition, the Focus Four, ladders, PPE, and worker rights. The 30-hour class is for supervisors and anyone with safety responsibility. Trainers have to issue the card within 90 days of the class, and a replacement can only be issued within five years by the original trainer.
Online is the practical route for a small crew. ClickSafety lists its OSHA 10-Hour Construction course at $89, on sale for $59 as of late September 2026, with a 180-day access window, English and Spanish, and the plastic card shipping within two weeks. Its OSHA 30-Hour Construction course lists at $189, on sale for $159. Verify any online provider is on OSHA's accepted list before you pay, because card fraud is common enough that OSHA runs a hotline for it.
Inspections come from four places: a fatality or hospitalization report, a worker complaint, a referral from another agency or a media report, and programmed inspections under emphasis programs like the one on falls. For a residential crew, the drive-by under the falls program is the most likely way you meet an inspector.
The process is predictable. The compliance officer shows credentials, holds an opening conference to explain why they are there, walks the site and takes photos, may interview workers privately, and holds a closing conference to describe what they saw. Citations arrive by mail later. You have 15 working days from receipt to contest a citation or request an informal conference with the area director, and most small employers get a better outcome from the informal conference than from ignoring the letter.
The penalty sheet for citations issued after January 15, 2026, looks like this.
| Violation type | Maximum penalty |
|---|---|
| Serious, other-than-serious, or posting | $16,550 per violation |
| Failure to abate | $16,550 per day past the abatement date |
| Willful or repeated | $165,514 per violation |
Those are maximums, and small employers rarely pay them. Under the penalty policy OSHA updated in July 2025, employers with up to 25 employees are eligible for a 70 percent size reduction, employers who fix the hazard immediately can earn another 15 percent, and employers who have never been inspected or had a clean inspection in the previous five years get 20 percent. Good faith, meaning a real written safety program you can show, earns up to 25 percent more. A serious citation that starts at $16,550 can end up a fraction of that for a small crew that cooperates and fixes the problem. A willful citation for a repeat fall violation will not.
One number to remember: the falls program means the cheapest inspection to avoid is the one where the inspector saw it from the truck.
OSHA's On-Site Consultation Program is the most underused thing in this whole guide. It is free, it is confidential, and it is run separately from enforcement, usually through a state agency or university. A consultant walks your site or shop, points out hazards, helps you build or fix a safety program, and does not issue citations or penalties. Your only obligation is to correct the serious hazards they find.
Employers that go through the program and meet its requirements can also qualify for a one-year exemption from programmed OSHA inspections. For a small roofing or remodeling company that is worried about the drive-by, that is a very good trade for a morning of your time.
If you would rather hand the whole thing off, Safety Plus operates as an outsourced safety department with manuals, audits, and drug program management, and HammerTech handles orientations, permits, and inspections without per-user fees for crews that want software instead of a consultant.
You do not have to do everything at once. Here is the order that removes the most risk fastest.
Safety is also a money conversation. Your experience modification rate drives your workers' comp premium, and one lost-time fall can move it for three years. Our guide to the real cost of workers' comp covers the math, and if you are staffing up, hiring your first employee walks through what changes the day you have someone on payroll.
OSHA applies the day you hire. For a residential crew, the standard that will get you cited, and the one that will get someone killed, is fall protection at six feet. Handle that, keep ladders and scaffolds right, post the poster, keep an SDS binder, and document your training. The OSHA 10 card is a good orientation, not a shield. And before an inspector ever shows up, take the free consultation. It is the one program that lets you find out what is wrong without paying for the answer.
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