Time Machine

Occupational safety specialists

Name: Occupational Health and Safety Specialists: employment and wages since 1911
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Official title Occupational Health and Safety Specialists (SOC 19-5011)

Also called EHS specialist, Safety specialist, Industrial hygienist, OHS specialist, Safety professional

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 140,610 US occupational safety specialists, with median pay of $90,150 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 35 from 1911, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for occupational safety specialists: Cloud EHS platforms, 2000 to 2018.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 18.5% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

35.7% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Occupational safety specialists: jobs and pay since 1911 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/19-5011

Chicago

Future History. "Occupational safety specialists: jobs and pay since 1911." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/19-5011.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_19_5011, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Occupational safety specialists: jobs and pay since 1911}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/19-5011}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time

187519001925195019752000now

Country

2026

Known then as Factory Inspector / State Labor Inspector

Known then as Safety Engineer / Industrial Hygienist

Known then as Industrial Hygienist / Safety Professional

Known then as Safety and Health Specialist / OSHA Compliance Officer

Known then as Occupational Health and Safety Specialists (BLS SOC 19-5011)

Known today as Occupational Health and Safety Specialists (BLS SOC 19-5011)

Projected to still be called Occupational Health and Safety Specialists (BLS SOC 19-5011)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

141K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$90,150

≈ $87,839 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1867

Massachusetts passes the first US factory inspection law, authorizing state inspectors to examine mills and report on safety conditions. This is the first formalization of a government safety inspection function in the United States. The inspectors are generalists with no specialized training; enforcement power is minimal.

Beat · 1911

March 25, 1911: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 workers in lower Manhattan, mostly young women, because the building's fire escape exits were locked. Seven months later, 35 insurance safety inspectors found the American Society of Safety Engineers' predecessor organization in New York City. The fire triggers the New York Factory Investigating Commission, whose recommendations reshape workplace safety codes across the country and establish the political foundation for what will become the OSH Act nearly 60 years later.

Beat · 1914

The US Public Health Service establishes the Office of Field Investigations into Occupational Diseases (renamed the Office of Industrial Hygiene and Sanitation in 1919), the first federal institution specifically dedicated to occupational health research.

Beat · 1939

The American Industrial Hygiene Association is founded in October 1939 with an estimated 300 industrial hygienists as its initial constituency. The AIHA's founding separates the chemical exposure and measurement wing of the profession (industrial hygiene) from the engineering and accident-prevention wing (safety engineering / ASSE). Both organizations grow steadily through the 1940s and 1950s as large manufacturers institutionalize safety programs.

Beat · 1970

December 29, 1970: President Nixon signs the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The Act takes effect April 28, 1971, establishing OSHA to set and enforce safety standards, and NIOSH under CDC to conduct research. The OSH Act covers virtually all private-sector employers, creating a federal compliance mandate that drives the single largest expansion of the OHS profession in its history. ASSE membership will nearly double from 10,000 in 1971 to 24,000 by 1990.

Beat · 1984

December 2-3, 1984: A methyl isocyanate gas release at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India kills more than 3,800 people immediately and causes long-term injuries to an estimated 150,000-600,000. The disaster drives both EPA's Risk Management Program (RMP) rules and OSHA's Process Safety Management (PSM) standard, promulgated in 1992. PSM adds formal process hazard analysis, management of change protocols, and pre-startup safety reviews to the OHS specialist workload in chemical and petroleum sectors.

Beat · 2002

OSHA revises its recordkeeping rule, replacing the 20-year-old OSHA 200 log with the OSHA 300, 300A, and 301 forms. The new system requires more granular incident classification and narrative documentation. BLS also shifts the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses to use the revised categories. For OHS specialists, the 2002 revision means updating recordkeeping procedures across the employer base, retraining supervisors, and managing the transition in EHS software platforms.

Beat · 2016

OSHA finalizes a rule requiring electronic submission of injury and illness records for employers with 250 or more employees and high-hazard employers with 20 or more employees. The rule creates a direct regulatory driver for digital EHS platforms and produces a publicly available dataset of establishment-level injury rates. OHS specialists at covered employers add data preparation and submission tasks; the public dataset enables benchmarking against industry peers for the first time.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1867

The occupation that would become the occupational health and safety specialist began in the factory inspection offices of American industrial states in the 1860s. Massachusetts passed the first state factory inspection law in 1867, authorizing state inspectors to examine working conditions in mills and mines and report violations to the legislature. These early inspectors were generalists, lawyers and engineers mostly, with no specialized safety training and almost no regulatory enforcement power. The decisive shaping came from two directions that converged in the early twentieth century. The first was Alice Hamilton, a physician and reformer at Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago, who in 1910 was appointed to lead Illinois's survey of industrial lead poisoning. Her team visited factories, reviewed company medical records, and interviewed workers at home where they spoke more freely. The survey's 1911 report documented 578 cases of lead poisoning across seventy industrial processes, the first systematic American study to prove that specific occupational hazards caused specific diseases at scale. Hamilton went on to join Harvard's newly established School of Public Health in 1919, became the first woman on the Harvard faculty, and published the field's first textbook, Industrial Toxicology, in 1934. The second shaping force was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, which killed 146 garment workers, mostly young women, when locked fire exits prevented escape. Seven months after the fire, 35 insurance safety inspectors in New York City formed the United Society of Casualty Inspectors, which would eventually become the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE), now the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP). Workers' compensation laws, spreading state by state from New York's 1910 law, gave employers a financial stake in accident prevention for the first time and drove a rapid buildup of private-sector safety departments. By 1913 the National Safety Council had been founded to pool information across industries. By 1939 the American Industrial Hygiene Association was established to serve an estimated 300 industrial hygienists. The work existed and was growing; it simply did not yet have a formal occupational category, a federal mandate, or a national certification until the second half of the twentieth century.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace occupational safety specialists? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

→ 2035

+18.5%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 19-5011 (Occupational health and safety specialists): 143.1 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 169.6 thousand in 2035, a change of +26.4 thousand (+18.5%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers. The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.

Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

35.7%

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 19-5011.00 Occupational Health and Safety Specialists. Shown: human-rated β = 0.357, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.286 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.429; GPT-4-rated β 0.333. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for occupational safety specialists

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is taking this onManage hazardous chemical inventories and Safety Data Sheet (SDS) libraries, with AI agents that automatically retrieve current SDS documents, detect version changes, summarize hazard information, and flag gaps in chemical compliance calendars.

Manage hazardous chemical inventories and Safety Data Sheet (SDS) libraries, with AI agents that automatically retrieve current SDS documents, detect version changes, summarize hazard information, and flag gaps in chemical compliance calendars.^[6],[7]

Tools picking this up

Benchmark Gensuite AI Agents ↗

Where your edge is

Use AI-maintained SDS libraries as a starting point, but retain responsibility for verifying that substitute chemicals meet process compatibility requirements and that workers exposed during transitions receive updated training.

AI is sitting alongside you hereMonitor and manage environmental and safety permit compliance, using AI agents to extract permit conditions, auto-populate compliance calendars, track renewal deadlines, and identify untracked permit obligations across multi-site operations.

Monitor and manage environmental and safety permit compliance, using AI agents to extract permit conditions, auto-populate compliance calendars, track renewal deadlines, and identify untracked permit obligations across multi-site operations.^[6],[5]

Tools picking this up

Benchmark Gensuite AI Agents ↗

Where your edge is

Keep regulatory interpretation skills sharp: AI agents extract requirements from permit text but cannot assess ambiguous regulatory language or negotiate with inspectors when a permit condition conflicts with operational needs.

AI is sitting alongside you herePerform real-time workplace safety monitoring using computer vision platforms that analyze existing camera feeds to detect PPE non-compliance, unsafe worker proximity to equipment, and ergonomic risk behaviors, generating automated alerts and weekly hazard reports for specialist review.

Perform real-time workplace safety monitoring using computer vision platforms that analyze existing camera feeds to detect PPE non-compliance, unsafe worker proximity to equipment, and ergonomic risk behaviors, generating automated alerts and weekly hazard reports for specialist review.^[8],[9]

Tools picking this up

Voxel AI ↗

Where your edge is

Learn to triage computer vision alerts by severity and context: systems like Voxel flag thousands of observations weekly, so the value-add is your ability to distinguish a high-risk pattern from a one-off and translate findings into targeted corrective action programs.

Where occupational safety specialists go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

Construction Managers
US median pay
$114,990 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+9.1%
Compliance Officers
US median pay
$80,730 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+3.8%
Training and Development Specialists
US median pay
$69,280 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+10.8%

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Construction Managers

Safety specialists working in construction, manufacturing, or infrastructure already interact daily with site supervisors, project schedules, and subcontractor management, the core operational domain of construction managers. Many senior safety specialists earn OSHA 30 and project management credentials that support this transition. The pivot requires adding cost control, scheduling, and subcontractor contracting skills, but the site-level authority and cross-trade coordination experience transfers well.

What you'd add

· Project scheduling software (Procore, Primavera P6)
· Construction cost estimation and budget management
· Subcontractor contract administration
· PMP or CCM certification

What it takesSome new skills to pick up

Tools of the era

How has the work of occupational safety specialists changed since 1867?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Physical inspection with notebooks and state rulebooks
The earliest safety inspectors had no instruments beyond their senses and a copy of the applicable state factory law. Massachusetts inspectors in the 1860s walked through mills noting blocked exits, unfenced machinery, and poor ventilation with pen and paper. There was no standardized checklist, no measurement equipment, and no national framework. The job was essentially close observation, a craft-level practice inherited from the insurance loss-prevention tradition.
Industrial hygiene instruments: gas meters, dust counters, noise dosimeters (early analogue era)
Alice Hamilton's Illinois lead surveys in 1910-1911 established the methodology that would define industrial hygiene: systematic measurement of exposure, not just visual inspection. By the 1920s, specialized instruments were entering field use, including early gravimetric dust samplers for measuring silica concentrations, colorimetric gas detection tubes for carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide, and factory ventilation measurement tools. The American Industrial Hygiene Association, founded in 1939, codified the analytical standards for these instruments. Hazard quantification, not just hazard description, became the signature competency of the industrial hygienist.
Federal standards and calibrated monitoring equipment (Walsh-Healey era)
The Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act of 1936 was the first federal law to impose minimum safety and health standards on employer workplaces, though only for federal contractors. More importantly, it drove the development of quantitative exposure standards: permissible noise levels, acceptable dust concentrations, and toxicological threshold limits that the emerging profession of industrial hygiene could measure against. The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists began publishing Threshold Limit Values (TLVs) in 1946. Calibrated personal air sampling pumps, sound level meters, and heat stress measurement equipment became the tools of a practitioner who now had numbers to compare against legal limits.
OSHA compliance framework: OSHA forms, BLS 200 log, written programs
The Occupational Safety and Health Act, signed December 29, 1970 and effective April 28, 1971, created the first national mandatory safety framework covering all private-sector employers. Its paperwork requirements alone transformed what safety professionals did day-to-day: every employer was required to maintain an OSHA 200 log of recordable injuries and illnesses, post it annually, and make it available for inspection. Written safety programs became legally required for dozens of hazard categories. The OHS specialist's work shifted from purely technical measurement toward a hybrid of field inspection, program development, regulatory interpretation, and compliance documentation. OSHA's Training Institute, founded in January 1972, began professionalizing the compliance officer role.
Effect on the work
ASSE membership grew between 1971 and 1979, an increase in eight years that closely tracks OSHA's demand creation effect. Every employer covered by the OSH Act (millions of establishments) needed access to safety expertise.
HAZCOM / right-to-know, PSM standard, and early EHS software (paper to PC)
Two OSHA standards from the 1980s and 1990s materially expanded the OHS specialist's workload. The Hazard Communication Standard (1983, expanded 1987) required employers to maintain Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) for every hazardous chemical in the workplace and provide worker training, creating a chemical inventory management function that became a core OHS duty. The Process Safety Management standard (1992), driven by the 1984 Bhopal disaster, added formal process hazard analyses, operating procedure management, and management of change reviews for facilities handling highly hazardous chemicals. EHS software began appearing as a category in the late 1980s, with early systems computerizing incident logs, chemical inventories, and training records, replacing spreadsheets and paper filing systems.
Cloud EHS platforms, OSHA 300 electronic recordkeeping, and integrated management systems
The OSHA 200 log was replaced by the OSHA 300 log in 2002, alongside the more detailed 300A summary and the incident report, requiring OHS specialists to maintain more granular injury data. Cloud-based EHS platforms from vendors including Cority, VelocityEHS, and Intelex emerged through the 2000s and 2010s, centralizing incident tracking, inspection scheduling, chemical inventory, permit management, and training records in integrated systems accessible across multi-site enterprises. OSHA's 2016 rule requiring electronic submission of injury data created a direct regulatory driver for digital recordkeeping. The OHS specialist's analytical workload grew as richer data sets made trend analysis and leading-indicator identification feasible for the first time.
AI and computer vision: real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and EHS AI agents
Computer vision platforms applied to existing facility camera infrastructure began reaching commercial viability for occupational safety use around 2018-2020, with vendors like Voxel AI transforming CCTV feeds into real-time PPE compliance monitors, proximity alert systems, and ergonomic risk detectors. EHS platform vendors introduced AI features into their core products from 2023 onward: Intelex partnered with COMET in 2025 to add AI-assisted root cause analysis to incident investigations; Benchmark Gensuite launched AI agents in October 2025 that autonomously handle chemical SDS retrieval, permit extraction, and compliance calendar population. The OHS specialist's role in this era shifts toward configuring and governing AI tools, triaging high-volume automated alerts by severity and context, and maintaining the regulatory judgment and human accountability that AI outputs cannot provide.
Effect on the work
AI augments rather than displaces: EHS professionals in a 2025 survey reported embracing AI as a tool for precision, with the consensus framing being efficiency gains for analytical tasks rather than headcount reduction. The 12% projected employment growth to 2034 suggests the AI layer is increasing the ROI of the profession rather than substituting for it.

Part of Science · see all 27 roles →

Different role?

See the same long-arc view for your own profession.

Browse the directory by industry, or search by title or SOC code.

Browse all roles

Occupational Health and Safety Specialists employment and pay by year

On record since1867

Latest US employment140,610 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$90,150 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+18.5% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

Canada (NOC 22232)
Employment, 2020
19,625, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 22232 Occupational health and safety specialists, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
Median pay, 2020
C$80,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 22232 Occupational health and safety specialists, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.

View all 12 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1911	35	n/a	Est., EHS Today Researched context	Report
1940	2,000	n/a	Est., EHS Today Researched context	Report
1964	8,000	n/a	Est., EHS Today Researched context	Report
1979	15,500	n/a	Est., EHS Today Researched context	Report
1990	24,000	n/a	Est., EHS Today Researched context	Report
2019	92,780	$74,100	BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic	Report
2020	95,960	$76,340	BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic	Report
2021	106,340	$77,560	BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic	Report
2022	109,430	$78,570	BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic	Report
2023	122,300	$81,140	BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic	Report
2024	128,430	$83,910	BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic	Report
2025	140,610	$90,150	BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic	Report

Embed this timeline on your site

Free for any site. Paste this where the timeline should appear; it stays interactive, every datapoint stays cited, and it sets no cookies on your page. How embedding works

<iframe src="https://futurehistory.earth/embed/19-5011"
  width="100%" height="430" style="border:0"
  title="Occupational Health and Safety Specialists, a Future History timeline"
  loading="lazy"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:13px;margin:4px 0 0"><a href="https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/19-5011">Occupational Health and Safety Specialists: jobs and pay over time</a>, from Future History</p>

See all roles in Science

Where occupational safety specialists go next

Construction Managers

Physical inspection with notebooks and state rulebooksPhysical inspection with notebooks1867–1910

Industrial hygiene instruments: gas meters, dust counters, noise dosimeters (early analogue era)Industrial hygiene instruments1910–1938

Federal standards and calibrated monitoring equipment (Walsh-Healey era)Federal standards1938–1971

OSHA compliance framework: OSHA forms, BLS 200 log, written programsOSHA compliance framework1971–1985

HAZCOM / right-to-know, PSM standard, and early EHS software (paper to PC)HAZCOM / right-to-know1985–2000

Cloud EHS platforms, OSHA 300 electronic recordkeeping, and integrated management systemsCloud EHS platforms2000–2018

AI and computer vision: real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and EHS AI agentsAI2018–present

Occupational Health and Safety Specialists employment and pay by year

In other countries

More in Science