1. What is NAICS?
The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is used to classify businesses according to types of economic activity.
NAICS uses a six digit hierarchical coding system to classify all economic activity into twenty industry sectors. Five sectors are mainly goods-producing sectors and fifteen are entirely services-producing sectors. This six digit hierarchical structure allows greater coding flexibility than the four digit structure of the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system. NAICS allows for the identification of 1,170 industries compared to the 1,004 found in the SIC. For detailed information on the NAICS coding structure please visit the U.S. Census Bureau, where you can also search the NAICS by keyword.
2. What is SIC?
Standard Industrial Classification, or SIC, is used to classify industries. It uses a four digit coding system. It has been superseded by NAICS, starting in 1997. For more information on the SIC please visit the U.S. Census Bureau, or use OSHA’s lookup system to find a code.
3. Which SIC or NAICS version(s) should I use?
The data in the Enforcement Data Warehouse spans many decades in some cases. Various versions of SIC (1977 & 1987) and NAICS (1997, 2002 & 2007) have been used. To view the codes used in the enforcement datasets, follow the links below:
NAICS codes used in the Enforcement Datasets
SIC codes used in the Enforcement Datasets
4. Which agency uses what Industry Code?
EBSA data is not searchable by Industry Code.
OFCCP uses NAICS.
OSHA began using NAICS on January 1, 2003. Prior years’ data uses SIC. For more information on OSHA’s use of NAICS and SIC, go here.
MSHA uses a six digit Commodity Code for which the database provides a translation to SIC code. Use SIC to search MSHA data.
WHD uses NAICS.
5. Why are there multiple entries for the same Company?
The database is an aggregation of datasets from 5 separate agency systems. The data in these systems was collected by each agency in the exercise of its enforcement activities, over the decades, and without a DOL-wide standard for uniquely identifying business entities. So "Baraboo Concrete co inc" and "Baraboo Concrete Company Inc", or "Baraboo Concrete co., Inc.", in the absence of a unique identifier, are considered unique records. We know that this is an imperfect implementation of Company Name search, but we wanted to give you access to the data while we are working on addressing the unique identifier issue, and retrofitting it into the historical records, as much as possible.
Be aware that this is an exact text string search. You must enter the Company Name exactly as it appears in the lookup selection.
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