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OSHA Citation Notice of Contest
An OSHA citation arrives with a proposed penalty, an abatement date, and 15 working days to contest it. Working days means Monday to Friday, minus federal holidays, not counting the day you received it. Miss it and the citation is final, permanently, with no route back into any court.
The trap is the informal conference. Employers call the Area Office, get a conference scheduled for a date after day 15, and assume the clock is paused. It is not. 29 CFR 1903.20 says in terms that no conference and no request for one operates as a stay of the 15-working-day period. Employers lose the right to contest this way every year, having done nothing more than talk to OSHA first.
The other thing the citation does not tell you is how much of the penalty is negotiable. OSHA's own Field Operations Manual publishes the reduction percentages for size, good faith, and history, and it revised them in July 2025 in favor of small employers: a business with 25 or fewer employees now qualifies for the top size reduction, and an employer that has never been inspected now earns the history reduction. Those tables are public. They are not printed on your citation.
Under 29 USC 659(a), a citation you do not contest within 15 working days becomes a final order "not subject to review by any court or agency". A serious violation carries a maximum of $16,550 and a willful one $165,514, and the citation you let stand becomes the prior violation that makes your next one a repeat.
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This tool is software. It reads your answers, no one reviews them, and it generates and emails the document itself the moment payment completes.
Why the agency will not tell you what to do
The Compliance Safety and Health Officer who inspected you cannot advise you on whether to contest, and the Area Director who signed the citation is the party you would be contesting against. Safety consultants sell abatement, not enforcement defense. OSHA defense attorneys handle the contest at hourly rates, and for a citation with a few thousand dollars proposed, the fee can exceed the penalty. Everything they rely on, 29 CFR Part 1903 and Field Operations Manual Chapter 6, is published.
What the free summary tells you
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Your deadline, computed
The exact date your response window closes, counted from the date on your notice, and what happens if it has already passed.
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Your options under the published rules
Which paths the regulations actually give you, and which one your answers point to.
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The numbers the agency will use
Computed from the same published standards the agency applies, so you walk in knowing what they know.
Related notices in the library
Sources
This tool provides general information based on published OSHA regulations, the Field Operations Manual, and the current penalty schedule. Its citations and figures were checked against official sources using AI-assisted research, most recently on 2026-09-01; no licensed attorney has reviewed this content. It is not legal advice. The deadline it computes is based on the receipt date you entered: verify it against your own records, because an error costs you the right to contest entirely. The penalty reduction figure is a planning estimate derived from OSHA's published percentage tables, not OSHA's own arithmetic, and the Area Director sets the final amount. For a willful or repeat citation, a citation following a fatality or serious injury, or an aggregate penalty over $50,000, retain an OSHA defense attorney.