OSHA Renews Its Warehouse National Emphasis Program: What Employers Need to Know… and How Real-Time Safety Data Can Help!

August 26, 2026

Tom West, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, COSS, Vice President & Global Practice Leader

OSHA has renewed its National Emphasis Program (NEP) on Warehousing and Distribution Center Operations, and for employers in the industries covered by the program, this is not a short-term enforcement initiative.

The new directive became effective July 31, 2026, and is scheduled to remain in effect for five years. It calls for comprehensive safety inspections focused on hazards including powered industrial vehicles, material handling and storage, walking-working surfaces, means of egress, heat, ergonomics, and fire protection.

That should get the attention of far more organizations than those with “warehouse” in their name.

The renewed NEP covers establishments within seven industry classifications:

• Postal Service processing and distribution centers
• Couriers and express delivery services
• Local messengers and local delivery
• General warehousing and storage
• Refrigerated warehousing and storage
• Farm product warehousing and storage
• Other warehousing and storage

Those industries are specifically identified by NAICS code in the OSHA directive and are included in the population from which OSHA will develop establishment targeting lists.

For safety leaders responsible for these operations, the message is straightforward: OSHA’s increased attention to warehouse and distribution risks isn’t going away anytime soon.

Why OSHA Is Continuing to Focus on Warehousing

The data behind the NEP helps explain the continued emphasis.

OSHA reports that employment in warehousing and distribution more than doubled between December 2015 and December 2025, increasing from approximately 882,100 to more than 1.8 million workers. At the same time, injury and illness rates in the industries covered by the program have remained above the national private-industry average.

The differences are substantial.

For 2020–2024, OSHA reports an average DART rate of 1.6 for all private industry, compared with:

• 6.9 for couriers and express delivery services
• 4.9 for Postal Service processing and distribution centers
• 4.9 for local messengers and local delivery
• 4.4 for general warehousing and storage
• 3.8 for refrigerated warehousing and storage

And OSHA’s previous warehouse NEP was not merely an educational exercise. According to the new directive, within the first 18 months of the program OSHA identified more than 1,700 violations and removed approximately 37,410 workers from hazards.

The renewed program makes clear that OSHA intends to continue looking.

These Are Comprehensive Safety Inspections

Another important point for employers: these aren’t inspections narrowly focused on one specific issue.

OSHA describes inspections conducted under the NEP as comprehensive safety inspections. Among the common hazards specifically identified are powered industrial vehicle operations, material handling and storage, walking-working surfaces, means of egress, heat, ergonomics, and fire protection.

OSHA also states that Area Offices may expand inspections arising from fatalities, catastrophes, complaints, or referrals at establishments covered by the NEP to address these common warehouse hazards.

Perhaps most importantly, compliance officers will review OSHA 300 logs, 300A summaries, and 301 incident reports for the current and previous three calendar years to identify injuries and illnesses associated with hazards covered by the program.

That highlights an important limitation of traditional safety management.

Those records tell you what already happened.

What if you could see many of the conditions contributing to those injuries before they become recordables?

Moving From OSHA Recordkeeping to Real-Time Risk Intelligence

This is where technology such as MākuSafe can play a particularly important role.

MākuSafe isn’t a replacement for a strong safety and health management system or OSHA compliance program. It provides something different: real-time leading-indicator data about work as it is actually being performed.

Rather than waiting for an injury, near miss, inspection finding, or OSHA 300 entry to reveal a problem, wearable technology can continuously identify changes in exposures and risk conditions.

For warehouse and distribution environments, three areas highlighted in OSHA’s renewed NEP align particularly well with capabilities already being used by MākuSafe clients: ergonomics, heat, and powered industrial vehicle interactions.

Ergonomics: See Strain and Exertion Before They Become Injuries

Warehouse work changes constantly. Product mix changes. Staffing changes. Volume changes. Workstations and processes change. Employees lift, reach, bend, push, pull, twist, and repeat motions thousands of times.

An annual ergonomic assessment cannot continuously see all of that.

MākuSafe wearable technology provides objective leading-indicator data around physicality and potentially risky motion. Safety teams can identify where elevated motion and strain are occurring, compare jobs, tasks, shifts, teams, or locations, and investigate what is different about the work.

Instead of asking only, “Where have we had ergonomic injuries?” safety leaders can begin asking:

Where is the work telling us an injury is more likely to occur next?

That distinction is significant.

MākuSafe clients have used these insights to identify process and work-design changes that dramatically reduce strain and exertion risk, with some operations experiencing reductions of 80% or more and sites reporting extended periods with zero exertion injuries among participating workers.

This is prevention based on exposure, not simply injury history.

Heat: Understand Exposure Where and When Work Happens

Heat is another hazard specifically named in OSHA’s warehouse NEP.

Heat exposure inside a large distribution center isn’t necessarily uniform. Conditions can change by location, job, shift, time of day, proximity to dock doors, equipment, airflow, and the physical demands of the work.

A wall-mounted environmental sensor can tell you the conditions at the wall.

A wearable can help you understand the conditions where the worker is actually working.

MākuSafe continuously captures environmental information including temperature, humidity, and heat index at the worker level. That allows safety teams to identify where elevated conditions are occurring, which jobs or work areas are experiencing them, when exposure is increasing, and whether operational changes are producing better results.

When combined with information about the physicality of work, the result can be a much richer understanding of the real work environment.

And because the data is collected continuously, organizations can identify patterns that would be nearly impossible to uncover through periodic manual measurements alone.

Forklifts and PIVs: Measure the Interactions That Haven’t Become Incidents

Powered industrial vehicles are another prominent focus of OSHA’s renewed NEP.

Most warehouse safety leaders already know forklifts represent serious potential risk. The challenge is that traditional metrics typically tell you about the collision, near miss, property damage, or reported unsafe behavior after it happens.

MākuSafe’s Scout™ technology takes a different approach.

It can provide objective data about forklift-pedestrian interactions throughout normal operations, helping organizations understand where interactions are occurring, when they occur, and where congestion or process design may be creating unnecessary exposure.

That creates an opportunity to improve traffic patterns, pedestrian routes, staging practices, workflows, training, and facility design before an interaction becomes an injury.

The results can extend beyond safety. In one application, changes informed by MākuSafe data contributed to an 86% reduction in forklift-pedestrian interactions while simultaneously producing approximately a 6% productivity improvement.

That’s an important lesson: safer work and more productive work do not have to be competing objectives. Often, removing unnecessary interactions and inefficient workflow improves both.

AI Makes All This Data Easier to Use

One concern safety teams understandably have about connected-worker technology is whether it simply gives them another dashboard, and another mountain of data to analyze.

That’s why the emergence of conversational AI is particularly important.

Powered by MākuSmart AI, safety professionals can have a conversation with their own leading-indicator data.

Instead of spending hours building reports, an EHS professional can ask questions such as:

Where should I focus today?

Which areas have experienced increasing ergonomic risk?

When are our highest heat exposures occurring?

Where are forklift-pedestrian interactions increasing?

What patterns should I investigate before they result in an incident?

This can be especially valuable for lean EHS teams that don’t have analysts or large staffs. The objective isn’t more data. It is making the most important risks easier to see, understand, prioritize, and act upon.

The Goal Shouldn’t Be to Prepare for an OSHA Inspection

There is an understandable temptation whenever OSHA announces or renews an enforcement initiative to ask:

Are we ready for an inspection?

That’s a useful question, but it shouldn’t be the ultimate goal.

A better question is:

Do we understand the risks our workers are actually experiencing today?

OSHA’s renewed NEP makes clear that warehousing and distribution will remain an enforcement priority. The directive is effective nationwide, establishes targeting procedures for covered establishments, and does not expire until five years after its July 31, 2026 effective date.

For organizations within the covered industries, waiting until an inspection is scheduled, or until an injury appears on the OSHA log, is an increasingly outdated approach.

The technology now exists to continuously understand leading indicators around some of the very hazards OSHA is emphasizing.

Heat. Ergonomics. Powered industrial vehicles. Material movement. Worker-reported observations. Changes in the work environment.

MākuSafe helps organizations turn those signals into practical intelligence about work as performed, without relying on biometrics or continuous employee tracking.

The result isn’t simply greater OSHA readiness.

It’s the ability to find and address risk before OSHA finds it… and, more importantly, before a worker gets hurt.

Learn More

If your organization operates warehousing, distribution, courier, delivery, postal processing, refrigerated storage, agricultural storage, or other covered warehouse operations, now is a good time to evaluate how much visibility you really have into your leading indicators of risk.

MākuSafe can help organizations quickly deploy real-time wearable technology to identify heat, ergonomic, forklift, environmental, and other workplace risk signals, and use AI-powered insights to turn that data into action.

Don’t wait for the OSHA 300 log, or an OSHA inspection, to tell you where your next problem is developing.