Safety Sherpa
The employer makes the final call, and that is why it lands this way
A health care professional recommends. The employer decides. OSHA's position, set out in the 2001 final rule preamble, is that only the employer has the ultimate authority to restrict an employee's work — which means the employer is also expected to have analysed the jobs actually available before concluding that none of them fits.
Why it is not simply unrecordable
There is a tempting reading in which no restricted work was performed, so no restricted work gets recorded, and nothing goes on the log. That is wrong. The employee did not work. Days the employee would otherwise have worked are days away, and they are counted from the day after the injury.
What to do before concluding there is no light duty
Look at the work that exists rather than the job titles. The determination is more defensible when there is a record of what was considered — and if a prequalification reviewer or an inspector later asks why a case was classified as it was, that record is the answer.
Safety Sherpa is software, not a safety consultancy. This page quotes the cited regulation and links to the source text so you can read it yourself. It is not legal advice and does not replace a qualified person's judgment about a genuinely unclear case — our tools walk you through the decisions the regulations require and record your reasoning. The determination is yours to make.