OSHA’s Harwood training grants for fiscal 2026 came out Oct. 1 at $10.2 million across 67 organizations, about 20% less than the $12.8 million the agency awarded in each of the last two years. Construction is all over the list anyway. By Exchange’s count, 38 of the 67 awards name construction or a close cousin such as roadway work zones, excavation or tower work, and those awards total $6.1 million.
The money is small. The training is free, and it’s aimed at the small employers who rarely have a safety director.
How the Harwood training grants break down
OSHA’s announcement gives the total and its awardee list gives the rest. There are two categories. Forty-five Targeted Topic grants, worth $8.2 million, pay for instructor-led sessions. Twenty-two Training and Educational Materials grants, worth $2 million, pay groups to write new curricula that end up free in OSHA’s library. The top award is $215,000, and 17 grantees got exactly that. Materials grants top out at $95,000.
OSHA’s program statistics show $10.5 million a year from fiscal 2016 through 2020 and $12.787 million in both 2024 and 2025. This year’s $10.28 million is the lowest figure on that chart.
Construction safety training: who got what
- Work zones: ARTBA’s Transportation Development Foundation, $215,000 for four hours of roadway work zone training for 600 people nationwide.
- Falls: the Organization of Hispanic Contractors, $215,000 to train 1,000 workers and employers in Texas, ladders and scaffolds included.
- Excavation: Great Lakes Safety Training Center, $110,000 for 252 construction and utility workers in Michigan. South Dakota School of Mines gets $180,000 for trenching and silica.
- Electrical and heat: Chicagoland Construction Safety Council, $199,911 for 400 trainees.
- New materials: Shasta Builders Exchange on falls, the National Association of Tower Erectors on heat illness, and Honeybee Strategies on lithium-ion battery hazards in construction, $95,000 each.
Heat is the most common topic. Sixteen awards mention heat or temperature exposure, against 10 that mention falls, which still kill more construction workers than any other hazard. Four grants cover roadway or roadside work zones, in a week when three workers died on I-10 near Blythe.
What a few hours of training buys
Do the arithmetic before getting excited. The targeted grants plan to reach about 27,750 people, by our tally of the project descriptions, in sessions that run from 30 minutes to 7.5 hours. That’s roughly $300 a trainee. OSHA reports 45,300 people trained under the fiscal 2025 grants and 64,085 the year before. Planned and actual counts aren’t the same measure, but the direction isn’t in doubt.
None of this replaces a site-specific program, and a two-hour fall class doesn’t make anyone competent to inspect an anchor point. Where it helps is with small subs who’d otherwise skip formal training, and with the hazards that sit between trades on a shared site.
Texas contractors have the most to choose from. Seven awards cover construction workers there, on falls, electrical hazards and heat. The list names every grantee, so finding a class is a phone call.
The number worth checking a year from now is how many of those 27,750 seats actually got filled.