What Happens After an OSHA Citation in Texas?

10/06/2026 | by Trey Volentine

An OSHA compliance officer walked your site three weeks ago. Today an envelope arrives with a citation and a notice of proposed penalty. The clock that matters most started the moment you received it, and almost nothing about that clock is intuitive.

Texas has no state occupational safety plan for private employers, so federal OSHA has jurisdiction over private sector workplaces across the state, including North Texas. That means the procedures below come from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act and its regulations rather than from a state agency. Here is what a citation actually requires of you, what your options are, and where businesses most often lose ground.

Read the Citation Before You React

A citation is not a single document with a single deadline. Each alleged violation is listed separately, and each carries its own classification, its own proposed penalty, and its own abatement date. Before deciding anything, identify four things for every item:

The standard cited. The specific regulation OSHA says you violated.
The classification. Other than serious, serious, willful, repeated, or failure to abate. Classification drives the penalty and the downstream consequences.
The proposed penalty. Proposed, not final. Penalties are frequently adjusted through the processes described below.
The abatement date. The date by which OSHA says the hazard must be corrected.

Businesses often focus on the total dollar figure at the bottom. The classification usually matters more, because a serious or willful citation that becomes final can be used to support a repeat characterization years later at a different site.

You Must Post the Citation

Posting is a legal obligation and it is easy to overlook in the first hours after a citation arrives.

Under 29 CFR 1903.16, the citation or a copy must be posted at or near each place an alleged violation occurred, so that employees can see it. If posting at the exact location is impracticable, it goes in a prominent place where affected employees will see it. The regulation states that “each citation, or a copy thereof, shall remain posted until the violation has been abated, or for 3 working days, whichever is later.” The employer must take reasonable steps to keep the posting from being altered or defaced. Notices of de minimis violations do not have to be posted.

Failing to post is itself a citable violation, and it is an avoidable one.

The Fifteen Working Day Deadline

This is the deadline that ends more OSHA cases than any argument on the merits.

Under Section 10(a) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, codified at 29 U.S.C. Section 659(a), an employer has fifteen working days after receiving the notice of proposed penalty to notify the Secretary of Labor that it wishes to contest the citation, the proposed penalty, or both. The implementing regulation, 29 CFR 1903.17, puts it in operational terms: the notice of intention to contest “shall be postmarked within 15 working days of the receipt by the employer of the notice of proposed penalty.” It is submitted in writing to the OSHA Area Director for the office that issued the citation, and the Area Director transmits it to the Review Commission.

Three details inside that rule deserve attention.

Working days, not calendar days. Weekends and federal holidays are excluded, which makes the actual calendar date less obvious than it looks. Calculate it deliberately and write it down.

The clock runs from receipt of the notice of proposed penalty. Not from the inspection, not from the closing conference, and not from the day the citation is read.

What happens if you do nothing is severe. The statute provides that if no notice of contest is filed within the period, the citation and the assessment as proposed “shall be deemed a final order of the Commission and not subject to review by any court or agency.” That language is unforgiving. A final order is not appealable and generally cannot be reopened, which means an uncontested citation stays on your record with its classification intact.

The Informal Conference, and the Trap Inside It

Before the deadline runs, an employer may request an informal conference with the OSHA Area Director. Under 29 CFR 1903.20, an affected employer, employee, or employee representative may ask for a conference to discuss the results of the inspection, the citations, the penalties, or a notice of contest.

Informal conferences are genuinely useful. They are the usual forum for correcting factual errors in a citation, explaining abatement already completed, discussing whether a classification fits the conduct, and negotiating an informal settlement agreement that may reduce penalties, reclassify items, or extend abatement dates.

Here is the trap. The same regulation states that “no such conference or request for such conference shall operate as a stay of any 15-working-day period for filing a notice of intention to contest.” Requesting a conference does not extend the deadline. Scheduling one does not extend it. Having a productive conversation with the Area Director does not extend it.

Employers lose rights this way regularly. A conference gets scheduled for a date after the fifteenth working day, the employer assumes the matter is in progress, and the citation becomes a final order while everyone is still talking. The safe practice is to treat the contest deadline as fixed and to file a notice of contest if the conference has not produced a resolution in time. A notice of contest can be withdrawn if the matter settles. A missed deadline cannot be undone.

Abatement, Certification, and Documentation

Correcting the hazard is a separate obligation from contesting, and it has its own paperwork with its own deadlines under 29 CFR 1903.19.

Certification. Within 10 calendar days after the abatement date, the employer must certify to OSHA that each cited violation has been abated.

Abatement documentation. For willful and repeat violations, and for serious violations where OSHA specifically requires it, the employer must submit documents proving the correction. Purchase orders for replacement equipment, photographs, invoices, and repair records are typical.

Abatement plans. When the abatement period exceeds 90 calendar days, the employer must submit an abatement plan for each cited violation within 25 calendar days from the final order date, along with periodic progress reports.

Tagging movable equipment. For serious, repeat, and willful violations involving movable equipment, a warning tag or a copy of the citation must be attached to the equipment before it is moved.

If the hazard cannot be corrected in time for reasons outside your control, the mechanism is a petition for modification of abatement date. Section 659(c) allows the Secretary to affirm or modify abatement requirements where an employer shows a good faith effort to comply and that abatement was not completed because of factors beyond its reasonable control. Filing that petition is not the same as contesting the citation, and the two should not be confused.

What the Penalties Actually Are

OSHA penalty maximums are adjusted annually for inflation. According to OSHA’s published penalty schedule, for penalties assessed after January 15, 2026, the maximums are:

Serious, other than serious, and posting requirements: $16,550 per violation.
Failure to abate: $16,550 per day beyond the abatement date.
Willful or repeated: $165,514 per violation.

Two points are worth drawing out. Failure to abate accrues daily, so a correction that slips can outgrow the original penalty quickly. And the gap between a serious classification and a willful or repeated one is roughly tenfold, which is why classification is often the more valuable thing to negotiate.

Contesting: What Happens Next

When an employer files a timely notice of contest, the matter leaves OSHA and goes to the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, an independent adjudicatory agency separate from OSHA and from the Department of Labor’s enforcement function.

The case is docketed, the Secretary of Labor files a complaint, the employer answers, and the matter is assigned to an administrative law judge. It proceeds much like civil litigation, with discovery, motions, and a hearing. Many contested cases settle before hearing. A judge’s decision can be reviewed by the full Commission, and Commission decisions can be appealed to a federal court of appeals.

Contesting is not an admission of anything, and it is not automatically adversarial. It is the procedural step that preserves your ability to challenge the citation, the classification, the penalty, or the abatement period. Employees or their representatives may also contest, though their challenge is limited to whether the abatement period is reasonable.

Five Mistakes Worth Avoiding

Letting the deadline pass while negotiating. The single most common and most costly error. The informal conference does not stay the fifteen working days.
Accepting a classification to close the file quickly. A serious or willful citation that becomes final supports a repeat characterization at any of your sites for years afterward. The cheap settlement today can be the expensive one later.
Abating without documenting. Fixing the hazard and failing to certify within 10 calendar days after the abatement date creates a separate problem out of a solved one.
Treating multi site exposure as a single site problem. Repeat characterizations look across a company, not just the location inspected. A citation in one North Texas facility affects how the next inspection anywhere is handled.
Not posting. Three working days minimum, or until abatement, whichever is later. It is the easiest item on this list and it still gets missed.

Before the Next Inspection

Most of what determines how a citation goes is set long before the compliance officer arrives: written programs that match what actually happens on the floor, training records that are current, an inspection protocol employees know, and a designated person who handles the opening and closing conferences. Our article on what North Texas employers need to know about OSHA inspections covers that side of the process.

Talk to a Texas OSHA Attorney

The fifteen working day period is short, it is calculated in a way that surprises people, and it does not pause for conversation. If a citation has arrived, the first task is to calendar the deadline correctly and the second is to decide, deliberately, whether the classification and the abatement date are ones you can live with. Visit our OSHA page to learn more and to reach our team.

Do Not Let the Contest Deadline Pass

The contest clock runs from the day the notice of proposed penalty arrives, and requesting an informal conference does not pause it. Talk to a Texas OSHA attorney before the fifteenth working day.