Three different things get called the OSHA heat rule, and only one of them can be cited against a Texas contractor today. Sorting them out is the difference between a safety program built for a regulation that may never arrive and one built for the compliance officer who can show up on any day the National Weather Service posts a heat advisory.
No. OSHA published a notice of proposed rulemaking, Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings, on August 30, 2024. The informal public hearing closed July 2, 2025, and the post-hearing comment period closed October 30, 2025. Since then the rulemaking has not moved, and the regulatory agenda carries no target date for final action.
Treating that as a reprieve is the mistake. Enforcement never depended on the standard.
The 2022 heat emphasis program expired April 8, 2026. OSHA issued a replacement two days later: CPL 03-00-024, a revised National Emphasis Program for outdoor and indoor heat-related hazards, effective for five years. It runs to April 2031 unless a superseding directive cancels it.
The new directive refreshed the target list using more recent injury data, dropping 46 industries, keeping 33 and adding 22, for a target list of 55 high-hazard industries. Construction is on it. So are transportation, warehousing, manufacturing, agriculture and restaurants.
The scale is worth sitting with. OSHA reports conducting an average of roughly 2,400 heat-related inspections a year between 2022 and 2025, which amounted to about 6 percent of all federal OSHA inspections in that period, and an average of about 50 of those each year were fatality inspections. Under the emphasis program, compliance officers can open programmed inspections at targeted worksites on heat advisory days. No complaint and no incident required.
Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the General Duty Clause, which requires employers to furnish a workplace free from recognized hazards likely to cause death or serious physical harm. During the first emphasis program, OSHA issued 60 General Duty Clause citations for heat, sent 1,392 hazard alert letters and reported removing nearly 1,400 employees from hazardous heat conditions.
General Duty Clause cases are harder for the agency to prove than a specific standard violation, because the hazard has to be shown to be recognized and a feasible means of abatement has to be identified. That difficulty is exactly why the proposed rule's thresholds matter even unfinalized. Inspectors and expert witnesses use them as the reference point for what a reasonable employer should have recognized.
Nothing, and that is the point. Texas has no state occupational safety and health plan for private employers, so federal OSHA enforces here directly. Texas has no state heat standard. Seven states have adopted their own enforceable heat rules. Texas is not among them.
Local requirements are gone as well. Austin and Dallas had ordinances requiring rest and water breaks for construction workers. House Bill 2127, the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, preempted local ordinances in fields already covered by state law, including labor. A Travis County court declared the law unconstitutional in 2023, but the Third Court of Appeals reversed in July 2025, holding the cities lacked standing without a specific ordinance dispute. The practical result for a contractor in Central Texas is that the floor is the General Duty Clause and whatever the contract documents require.
Four ways, and only one of them is the OSHA penalty.
Build to the structure of the proposed rule. It mirrors what state standards already require and what a compliance officer already looks for, and if the federal rule is finalized you will not be starting over. The proposal, as published, contemplates:
None of that is a legal requirement in Texas today. All of it is what an investigator, an expert and an underwriter will measure you against.
If you run crews in Guadalupe, Comal, Bexar or Gonzales county and you want your written program reviewed against what your workers compensation and general liability carriers are asking for at renewal, send it over. We will tell you what is missing before an underwriter or a compliance officer does.