Ask most people who regulates driver safety and they'll point to the DOT or FMCSA, the agencies behind CDLs, hours of service, and roadside inspections. If your company doesn't have DOT-regulated drivers, it's easy to assume driver safety isn't your regulatory concern. But the moment an employee drives for work, in a company vehicle or their own, OSHA makes their safety your responsibility, and many employers don't realize it until something goes wrong.
OSHA has no single standard for on-road driving. Instead, its General Duty Clause requires every employer to protect workers from recognized hazards, and driving for work is one of them. Meeting that duty comes down to a driver safety program that treats driving as the workplace hazard it is. It applies to any employer whose employees drive on the job, in company or personal vehicles.
Yes, though not the way most people expect. OSHA doesn't have a dedicated driving standard the way it has standards for machine guarding or fall protection. What it has is the General Duty Clause, Section 5(a)(1) of the OSH Act, which requires every employer to keep the workplace free of recognized hazards likely to cause death or serious harm. When no specific standard covers a hazard, the General Duty Clause fills the gap, and that is exactly how OSHA treats driving.
This is where the confusion starts. FMCSA regulates commercial motor carriers, setting the rules for CDL drivers, DOT numbers, and hours of service. If you don't run commercial vehicles, none of that applies to you, and it's easy to read that as proof that driving safety isn't regulated for your company.
OSHA is the part people miss. The FMCSA governs commercial fleets; OSHA governs the employer's duty to every worker who drives. A sales team in personal cars, home health aides driving between visits, or technicians in pickups under the CDL threshold all fall under OSHA's duty to protect driving employees, even with zero DOT obligations.
Because the obligation comes from the General Duty Clause rather than a checklist of standards, OSHA doesn't hand you a form to complete. It expects you to identify the hazard and take reasonable steps to address it. In practice, that comes down to four things.
The baseline expectation is straightforward: treat work-related driving as the serious hazard it is, and manage it deliberately. OSHA's own guidance for employers tells any organization whose people drive, in company or personal vehicles, to put a program in place. It even spells out the practices that make one credible:
These pieces are the backbone of a driver safety program, and having one is what turns OSHA's open-ended duty into something concrete you can point to.
This is the requirement employers are most likely to trip over. OSHA treats distracted driving as a workplace hazard under the General Duty Clause. A company can violate the OSH Act if, by policy or practice, it requires texting while driving, rewards it, or makes texting a practical necessity. That last one catches employers off guard. If your quotas or your expectation of instant responses push drivers to their phones, that alone can be a violation. No one has to have told them to text.
The fix is a clear, enforced policy that treats your vehicles as text-free zones. A signed policy is only the start. Reducing distracted driving across a fleet takes reinforcement and follow-through, and the hazard runs wider than texting, since the forms distraction takes span visual, manual, and cognitive lapses that a phone ban alone won't reach.
OSHA's recordkeeping rule reaches driving too, and this one surprises employers who think of themselves as office-based. But once an employee is driving for work, the rules change. A crash between job sites, out to a customer, or on a business trip goes on your OSHA 300 log if it causes a recordable injury, and a work-related driving fatality has to be reported to OSHA. If you've never treated your employees' on-the-job crashes as OSHA events, that's the gap to close.
OSHA's guidance treats training as ongoing, not a one-time orientation. It calls for periodic refreshers precisely because experienced drivers grow complacent, and for training matched to the vehicles and conditions your people actually face.
The through-line in all of this is one mistaken assumption: that if you don't fall under the DOT, driving safety isn't regulated for you. A few specifics catch employers by surprise:
Compliance here isn't about paperwork. It's about showing you took the hazard seriously and acted on it. A quick gut check:
If any of those gave you pause, the fix is the one OSHA itself recommends: a driver safety program that sets clear standards, monitors driver risk, and trains against it. That program is what turns an open-ended legal duty into something you can actually stand behind.
Meeting OSHA's requirements keeps you compliant. Building a program that actually reduces crashes takes more, and 6 Must-Haves of an Effective Fleet Safety Plan walks through what that looks like.