Inspection density and the 5 % quota from 2026

The legal basis

The Occupational Safety Inspection Act of 22 December 2020 inserted § 21 (1a) ArbSchG. It requires that, beginning with calendar year 2026, at least 5 per cent of the establishments present in each state be inspected in the course of a calendar year. State law cannot deviate from this quota. The number of establishments present is taken from the Federal Employment Agency statistics of the previous year, not from the business register. Using the roughly 3.2 million enterprises from the Destatis statistics instead substantially overstates the statutory target.

Where enforcement stands today

The BMAS interim report on inspection density counts 18,225 workplace inspections with a system assessment across 2,180,620 establishments in 2022, roughly eight per 1,000 establishments or 0.84 %. The report explicitly distinguishes this inspection density from the minimum inspection quota of the Occupational Safety Inspection Act: the two do not measure the same thing and must not be set against each other. For Baden-Württemberg, the 2023 annual report of the labour inspectorate gives a target achievement of 19 %, 2,499 of 13,016 inspections, measured against the target for the entire third GDA period rather than an annual target for 2023. The annual reports do not publish target achievement as a metric for other states.

How the GDA steers its inspections

The GDA steers workplace inspections by topic and establishment size, not by economic sector. For the third period it plans 150,000 inspections in establishments with 1 to 249 employees, of which 50,000 are randomly selected in establishments with 20 to 99 employees. The substantive priorities are musculoskeletal load, psychological load and carcinogenic hazardous substances.

What inspectors check

• Existence of a written, current risk assessment (§ 5 ArbSchG)
• Coverage of psychological load (§ 5 (3) no. 6 ArbSchG)
• Differentiation by activity area, no blanket approach
• Action cycle including effectiveness review (§ 3 ArbSchG)
• Complete documentation (§ 6 ArbSchG)