Focus Four Construction Hazards Still Set Your Mod

Four hazard categories. Roughly six in 10 of the workers who die building things in America. The Focus Four are not a safety-poster cliche. They are a big part of why your experience modification rate (EMR, also called the mod) looks the way it does.

More than 1,000 construction workers died on the job in 2024, and falls, struck-by incidents, caught-in/between events, and electrocution accounted for the large majority (BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, December 2025). OSHA built its whole outreach curriculum around those four because they keep repeating. When the agency opened its 2026 National Safety Stand-Down (May 4 to 8, 2026), it noted falls alone caused 389 of 1,034 construction fatalities in 2024, "and those deaths were preventable" (OSHA, May 2026).

Falls are the mod's most expensive lesson

Falls are the Focus Four's headline and the leading killer in construction, at 33.5% of fatal incidents (OpenSpace, 2026). Fatal falls, slips, and trips among construction and extraction workers dropped 7.5% to 370 in 2024 from 400 in 2023 (BLS CFOI, December 2025). Progress, but the category still leads.

The safety story and the premium story are the same story. A fall rarely produces a cheap claim. Slip-and-fall losses average $54,499 per workers' compensation claim (NCCI), and a severe fall involving head or spinal trauma runs far higher. That is a lost-time claim, not a medical-only one, which means it lands in your experience period near full weight and stays there for three rating years.

Fall protection has also been OSHA's most-cited standard for 14 straight years, with 6,307 citations in 2024 (OSHA). A citation is not just a fine. It is a documented, dated event that a claim, an attorney, and a prequalification reviewer can all point to later.

Struck-by, caught-in, electrocution: severity you don't walk back

The other three categories are smaller in count and brutal in severity. Struck-by incidents run about 11.4% of construction deaths, electrocution 8.4%, and caught-in/between 5.4% (OpenSpace, 2026). Low frequency, high severity is the exact profile that punishes a mod.

Caught-in/between losses, the trench collapses and machinery pull-ins, average $47,749 per claim (NCCI). Electrocutions and serious struck-by events produce burns and traumatic injuries that push well past six figures. The National Safety Council puts the average cost of a workplace death at $1,540,000 (NSC, 2024), and the indirect costs OSHA estimates at two to four times the direct medical and wage numbers land entirely on the contractor.

Here is the part that surprises people. Your mod does not care whether a claim was a freak accident or a foreseeable one. It reads the dollars. A single caught-in claim at $47,749 and a fall claim at $54,499 in the same experience period stack, and the primary portion of each drives the mod hardest.

Why the Focus Four are bid-facing math

For contractors bidding public and large private work, the mod is a gate, not just a premium input. Many general contractors and owners set a 1.00 EMR as the prequalification cutoff; cross it and you can be off the bid list before your price is ever read.

That is where the Focus Four stop being a safety-meeting topic and become a revenue question. One serious fall or trench claim can move a mid-size contractor's mod by double-digit points once the primary loss and the ELR (Expected Loss Rate) weighting are applied. The distance between a 0.98 that clears prequalification and a 1.06 that doesn't is not abstract. It is the job you never got to bid.

The four hazards OSHA circled are the four most likely to generate exactly the kind of severe, lost-time claim that does this. That is not a coincidence. It is why the Focus Four still decide construction mods.

What an audit would check

An audit checks whether the Focus Four claims already on your worksheet are represented accurately: the right classification for the work performed, claim values that match the carrier's current records, and reserves inside your experience period that still reflect reality rather than a cautious early estimate. A severe fall or caught-in claim is expensive enough on its own; it should not be inflated by a stale reserve or a miscoded payroll. Most worksheets an audit reviews carry at least one of these issues, and a single overstated Focus Four claim is often where the recoverable overpayment hides.

If your recent losses trace back to the Focus Four, send us your NCCI worksheet and we'll check whether those claims are sized correctly before your next renewal or bid.