ASTM E2920-26: a New Standard for Recording Serious Injuries and Fatalities
In 2024, the U.S. recorded 5,070 fatal work injuries (a worker died every 104 minutes). That number hasn’t moved the way it should, and one reason is how the industry has measured safety for decades: lagging indicators diluted by a flood of high-frequency, low-severity incidents. A sprained wrist and a fatality have been sitting on the same spreadsheet.
ASTM Standard E2920-26, the “Standard Guide for Recording Priority Occupational Injuries and Illnesses,” changes that. Developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials, it gives safety leaders an objective, standardized way to record Serious Injuries and Fatalities (SIF)—separating what actually threatens a life from everything else competing for your attention.
The standard does three things:
- it creates a consistent methodology for recording work-related harm,
- it lets you use injury data to evaluate how well your highest-level hazard controls are actually performing, and
- it gives you a stable foundation for benchmarking against other organizations and industries.
Here’s how it works.
Four levels that separate signal from noise
E2920-26 organizes incidents into a four-level hierarchy, so your data stays both manageable and actionable:
| Level | Classification | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | aSIF (Actual SIF) | Life-ending, life-altering, or life-threatening incidents. |
| Level 2 | Priority Injuries | Significant harm that doesn’t meet aSIF criteria but still functions as a critical KPI. |
| Level 3 | Regulatory Recordables | Incidents your local jurisdiction requires you to track, but that aren’t globally standardized. |
| Level 4 | Minor/Near Misses | First-aid cases and events where no one got hurt. |
Levels 1 and 2 are where benchmarking gets real. Because their definitions are standardized, you can compare how well your highest-level safeguards are performing against another organization’s, apples to apples.
What counts as a Level 1 aSIF
To classify an incident as a Level 1 aSIF, it has to meet one of three criteria.
Life-ending: any work-related incident resulting in a fatality.
Life-altering: an injury causing permanent or significant loss or disfigurement of a body part or organ function, one that permanently changes how the person lives.
Life-threatening: an injury requiring immediate, life-preserving rescue action—the standard assumes that without that intervention, the outcome would have been a fatality.
Severity Symptom Reference
Check out some examples of symptoms and where they would fall in the severity level classification.
| Fatality |
| Use of CPR or AED that applies a shock |
| Amputations involving bone removal |
| Life-threatening damage to brain or spinal cord |
| High-pressure injection injuries |
| Heat Stroke (acute/critical) |
| Eye injuries resulting in permanent vision loss |
| Traumatic herniated disk with neurologic deficit |
| Chemical/Radiological exposure to vital organs |
| Psychosocial disorders (e.g., PTSD) caused by work |
| Fractured bone |
| Concussion or cerebral hemorrhage |
| Lacerations requiring sutures/closures (≥2 inches) |
| Second or third-degree burns (>3 inches diameter) |
| Loss of consciousness (standard) |
| Punctured eardrum |
| Dislocation of any joint |
| Partial or full thickness tear of cartilage/tendon |
| Injury to the eye requiring a physician |
| Musculoskeletal disorder resulting in permanent impairment |
| Commuting injuries |
| Minor injuries that result in temporary job reassignment |
| Temporary muscle soreness |
The three-part work-relationship test
Before you can classify an incident at all, you have to determine whether it’s work-related. E2920-26 gives you three questions to ask.
Scope of employment: Was the employee being paid, required to perform the task, or mandated by their job description at the time of exposure?
Direct connection: Did the work exposure trigger the symptoms, or contribute to their severity—would this have happened the same way without it?
Employer authority: Was the activity or environment under your general authority or control?
Pass all three, and it’s work-related.
Turning levels into a number you can benchmark
The standard gives you a formula built to work regardless of your organization’s size:
(Number of Level 1 + Level 2 cases × 1,000,000) ÷ total hours worked by employees and contractors.
Level 3 and 4 data won’t plug into that formula the same way. Reporting requirements shift by jurisdiction and by corporate safety culture, so they don’t benchmark cleanly across organizations.
That’s not a flaw. It’s the standard drawing a clear line between what compares fairly and what doesn’t.
Why near-misses still matter, even though you can’t benchmark them
This is where E2920-26 gets interesting for safety leaders who think in terms of leading indicators. Two concepts sit underneath the four levels: pSIF (Potential SIF). An incident at Levels 2 through 4 that didn’t result in an aSIF but easily could have under different circumstances, and SIFRisk, the systems or process conditions likely to produce an aSIF if left unaddressed.
Recording non-benchmarkable Level 4 near-misses provides great visibility. When you first implement E2920-26, don’t be surprised if your reported incident rate climbs. That’s not your program getting worse—it’s incidents that were always happening finally getting seen. That visibility is what gives you the data to build controls that drive your actual injury rates toward zero.
The standard doesn’t just change how you fill out a form. It gives every safety leader the same vocabulary for the incidents that matter most—so the data you’re already collecting finally tells you something you can act on, and compare year over year against the peers doing this work alongside you.
