OSHA Restructures Regional Operations

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is implementing changes to its regional structure designed to provide resources most efficiently. 

A new OSHA regional office in Birmingham, Alabama, is being launched to oversee agency operations in the state and those in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and the Florida Panhandle. The Birmingham Region will address the area’s growing worker population and the hazardous work people do in several vulnerable industries. 

OSHA also plans to merge Regions 9 and 10 into a new San Francisco Region to improve operations and reduce operating costs.

As part of the changes, the agency will also rename its regions to associate them by geography rather than its current practice of assigning numbers to regions. As such, the area OSHA calls Region 4 will be renamed the Atlanta Region with jurisdiction over Florida, excluding the Panhandle, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Region 6 will be renamed the Dallas Region and have jurisdiction over workplace safety issues in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

These changes will be fully implemented before the end of Fiscal Year 2024. Take a moment to review a map of OSHA’s new regional structure.