OSHA regulation search with cited answers
Ask plain-English OSHA questions and get cited answers from 29 CFR standard text, OSHA interpretation letters, and the enforcement record. Every claim carries a .gov link you can open in front of a board or an OSHA Area Director.
Each question runs a live query against the OSHA record.
Anatomy of a cited answer
A worked example: the construction fall-protection question, answered with the controlling standards linked to osha.gov.
“At what height is fall protection required in construction?”
In construction, fall protection is generally required when an employee works 6 feet (1.8 m) or more above a lower level. The residential rule 29 CFR 1926.501(b)(13) and the unprotected sides-and-edges rule 1926.501(b)(1) both set the trigger at 6 feet. The design and performance criteria for compliant guardrail, safety-net, and personal fall-arrest systems live in 1926.502.
Cairn returns this as a streamed answer with each standard linked to its osha.gov page, so you can open the controlling text and defend the claim. General industry carries a lower 4-foot trigger under a different standard, and Cairn flags that distinction when your NAICS context calls for it.
- Fig.
- 01
- Source
- osha.gov, 29 CFR 1926
- Standards
- 1926.501 · 1926.502
- Cited
- 3 .gov links
What sources it searches
- 29 CFR standards
- The full text of the construction (Part 1926) and general-industry (Part 1910) safety standards: the controlling law every answer is grounded in.
- Interpretation letters
- OSHA’s written Letters of Interpretation explaining how a standard applies to specific facts, indexed by standard number and date back to 2000.
- Directives
- Compliance directives (the CPL series) that tell OSHA’s own inspectors how to enforce a standard in the field.
- The enforcement record
- Decades of inspections, citations, penalties, and accident narratives: the precedent that shows how a standard is actually applied.
The controlling authority is always the 29 CFR text on osha.gov; interpretation letters, directives, and the enforcement record show how it is applied.
How it answers
How it works
Cairn routes your question through a query planner that decides which structured filters and semantic searches to run, executes them in parallel against the corpus, then writes a cited answer. The planner runs in milliseconds, and Cairn streams the answer back token by token so you read it as it lands.
What gets cited
Anything in the corpus: 29 CFR standard text, OSHA interpretation letters and directives, enforcement records, accident narratives, and adjacent safety research. When no primary source covers the question, the answer says so rather than inventing one.
Industry-aware context
Set your industry once with its North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code. Queries inherit that context so answers prioritize the standards, citations, and benchmarks that apply to your operations.
What it replaces
45 minutes searching agency websites and Google for a regulation plus the interpretation that explains how it's applied.
A cited paragraph in seconds, with the regulation and the interpretation both linked.
$280/hr consultant retainer for "is this practice compliant?" questions.
Self-serve answer with the underlying records to read yourself.
Manually scrolling enforcement records to find precedent for a violation.
Inspection narratives surfaced inline with the relevant violation.
Re-asking the same question every quarter and getting different answers.
A persistent chat history with the citations that informed each response.
Common questions
- At what height is fall protection required in construction?
In construction, OSHA generally requires fall protection when an employee works 6 feet (1.8 m) or more above a lower level, under 29 CFR 1926.501(b)(13) and 1926.501(b)(1). General industry uses a lower 4-foot trigger under 29 CFR 1910.28(b)(1)(i). Cairn returns the controlling paragraph with the osha.gov source linked so you can verify it.
- Where do the citations come from?
Every answer is grounded in primary sources in the corpus: 29 CFR standard text, OSHA interpretation letters, compliance directives, and the federal enforcement record. Each cited claim links to the underlying record so you can read it yourself.
- What happens if a question can’t be answered from a source?
Cairn says so rather than guessing. If a question can’t be grounded in a primary source, the answer states that no controlling source was found instead of fabricating one.
- Is a Cairn answer legal advice?
No. Answers are research grounded in the cited sources, not legal advice. The controlling authority is always the 29 CFR text published on osha.gov and the official eCFR, which every answer links directly.