OSHA 300, 300A, and 301 Forms: What They Are and How to Stay Compliant

If you run safety at a warehouse, distribution center, or 3PL, three federal forms decide whether your recordkeeping holds up: OSHA Form 300, Form 300A, and Form 301. Miss a deadline, leave a field blank, or reconstruct a report from memory weeks after the fact, and a routine inspection turns into a citation.

Here's what each form actually does, when it's due, and where most facilities quietly fall out of compliance.

The short version

The three forms work together as a system:

• Form 300 is the log — a running list of every recordable injury and illness at your establishment for the year.
• Form 301 is the incident report — a detailed record of one specific injury or illness. You complete one 301 for every entry on the 300 log.
• Form 300A is the annual summary — the totals from your 300 log, which you post publicly for your workforce to see.

Most employers with more than 10 employees are required to maintain all three, unless they fall under a partially exempt low-hazard industry. Warehousing and most distribution operations are NOT exempt.

OSHA Form 300: The Log of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses

Form 300 is where you record every work-related injury or illness that meets OSHA's recordability criteria. Each recordable event gets one line on the log.

For every case, the 300 log captures the employee's name, job title, the date of the injury or illness, where the event occurred, and a description of the injury and the object or substance that caused it. You then classify the case by outcome — death, days away from work, job transfer or restriction, or other recordable case — and log the number of days away or on restricted duty.

Where facilities get this wrong: The classification columns. Whether a case counts as “days away,” “restricted duty,” or “other recordable” changes your numbers, your DART rate, and how your facility looks to an inspector. Misclassifying a case — or logging it late and guessing at the details — is one of the most common recordkeeping failures.

The 300 log is not posted publicly, but it must be available to employees, former employees, and their representatives on request, and produced for OSHA when asked.

OSHA Form 301: The Injury and Illness Incident Report

Form 301 is the detailed report behind each line on the 300 log. You must complete a 301 (or an equivalent form) within seven calendar days of learning that a recordable incident occurred.

The 301 captures far more detail than the log: information about the employee, the treating physician or facility, whether the employee was treated in an emergency room or hospitalized, and — most importantly — a narrative of what happened. That narrative is where the 301 lives or dies. OSHA asks specifically: what was the employee doing just before the incident (be specific about tools, equipment, and materials); what happened; what was the injury or illness and what part of the body was affected; and what object or substance directly harmed the employee.

Where facilities get this wrong: The seven-day window and the quality of the narrative. When a supervisor documents an incident days later from memory, the narrative gets vague — “employee hurt back lifting” instead of the specific activity, equipment, and mechanism OSHA wants. Vague narratives don't just risk a citation; they weaken the record if the case ever becomes a workers' comp claim.

OSHA Form 300A: The Annual Summary

Form 300A summarizes the totals from your 300 log for the calendar year. Unlike the 300, the 300A is posted publicly in your workplace, where employees can see it.

The summary includes the establishment's information, the average number of employees, total hours worked, and the year's totals broken down by case type and by injury/illness type. A company executive must certify that they examined the log and believe the summary is accurate.

The critical deadlines: The 300A must be posted from February 1 to April 30 each year, covering the prior calendar year. It must be posted where notices to employees are customarily displayed. Many establishments are also required to electronically submit their 300A data to OSHA by March 2 each year, depending on size and industry.

Where facilities get this wrong: Posting late, taking it down early, or having a summary whose numbers don't reconcile with the 300 log — usually because incidents were logged inconsistently throughout the year.

The pattern behind every recordkeeping failure

Read back through the “where facilities get this wrong” notes and a single theme runs through all of them: the records are only as good as the moment they were captured.

A 300 log with misclassified cases, a 301 with a vague narrative, a 300A whose totals don't add up — these almost never come from safety teams that don't care. They come from documentation that was reconstructed after the fact. An incident happens on second shift. The supervisor handles it, keeps the floor moving, and writes it up later — hours later, or the next day, from memory. By then the specific activity is fuzzy, the photos were never taken, and the classification is a guess.

That lag is where compliance quietly breaks. Not in the filing. In the capturing.

How to close the gap

The facilities with clean, audit-ready records have one thing in common: they capture incidents at the moment they happen, while the details, the photos, and the specifics are still fresh — then let that clean capture flow into the 300, 300A, and 301 automatically.

That's exactly what SafetyCallout was built to do. A supervisor speaks the incident into their phone the moment it happens. The AI structures it into an OSHA-ready report — severity classified, recordability flagged, photos attached — and generates the 300, 300A, and 301 formatting from a record that was captured in real time, not rebuilt from memory a week later.

Compliance stops being a scramble at the end of the year and becomes a byproduct of capturing each incident correctly the first time.

SafetyCallout is voice-first incident reporting built by a warehouse operator running a 600+ person automated distribution center. See how it works at safetycallout.com.

This article is for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal or compliance advice. Always verify current requirements against the latest OSHA recordkeeping standards at osha.gov.