In this article
You logged into ISNetworld on a Tuesday morning. Last month you were an A with your biggest client. Today the dashboard shows a C. Nothing feels like it changed on your end. No incident, no new hire, no missed payment. Just a letter that dropped two notches overnight.
If that has happened to you, you are not alone, and the cause is almost never what contractors first assume. ISN grades are not arbitrary, but they are confusing by design because each of the 900 hiring clients on the platform can set their own rules. A single contractor can be an A with Shell, a B with ExxonMobil, and a D with LyondellBasell at the same time, with the same documents uploaded.
The key insight: ISNetworld does not assign one universal grade. Each hiring client runs their own rubric on top of a shared platform. Your grade is calculated separately for every client you work with.
The grade scale
These are the most common thresholds, but they are not fixed. Some clients require an 85 percent minimum for an A. Others set their own passing threshold at 80 percent regardless of the letter. The letter matters less than the number of points you are earning and the threshold your specific client has set.
The categories that get scored
ISN lets each hiring client pick which categories to weight and how heavily. The most common ones are:
Insurance compliance
Your Certificate of Insurance must meet the client's minimum coverage limits, name them as Additional Insured with the correct wording, include required endorsements (Waiver of Subrogation is common), and not be expired. A single missing endorsement can drop this category to zero even if everything else is perfect.
The most common grade killer: An agent renews your policy, the new COI hits ISN, ISN rejects it for wrong wording, and you do not find out until your dashboard shifts.
Safety statistics
Your TRIR (Total Recordable Incident Rate), DART rate, and EMR (Experience Modification Rate) compared against your industry's NAICS code averages. Lower is better. Most industrial clients will not accept an EMR above 1.0, and some demand 0.85 or lower for high-risk work.
RAVS scoring
The safety questionnaire ISN reviewers score against written standards. Weak answers score below the client's threshold (commonly 80 percent) and drag your grade down. A single category scored below threshold can pull your whole grade down a full letter.
Training and certification
Worker-level certifications: OSHA 10, OSHA 30, Confined Space, Fall Protection, respirator fit testing, first aid. Each client picks which ones matter. Some clients track certs per-worker, some at the company level.
Regulatory citations
OSHA citations in the last three to five years. Having them is not automatically disqualifying, but unresolved ones or patterns hurt. Most clients want to see documentation of corrective actions taken.
Contractor questionnaire answers
The Management System Questionnaire and any client-specific addendums. A single "no" on a question the client weighted heavily can pull points across the whole scorecard.
What each grade actually means
Grade A — Fully compliant
Documents current, insurance clean, RAVS above threshold, safety stats solid, no outstanding citations. The client's procurement team can award work without additional review.
What triggers a slip: One document expiring, one RAVS category dropping below threshold, one citation showing up, or an EMR recalculation at renewal. Any of these can knock you from A to B with no warning.
Grade B — Approved with a flag
The client can still award work, but their safety or procurement team may review before final approval. Most contractors cycle between A and B as documents renew and get re-reviewed.
Common triggers: Coverage at the minimum rather than above it, a RAVS category at exactly 80 percent, a training cert that recently expired. B is not a crisis — it is a flag that says "verify before assigning to high-risk work."
Grade C — Approved with significant concerns
Some clients automatically restrict C-graded contractors from specific work types. On a refinery or chemical plant, C may mean shop work only — not process units. The client conversation shifts from "assign the job" to "should we keep using these guys?"
Common triggers: A RAVS category below 70 percent, EMR approaching 1.0, a recent serious citation without documented corrective action, multiple expired documents at once, an Additional Insured endorsement missing for more than a week.
Grade D — Not approved for new work
Existing work may continue but new purchase orders typically halt. This is where your procurement contact calls and says "we need to talk about your ISN status before we can issue the next PO."
Common triggers: Expired COI for more than 14 days, a core safety program rejected in RAVS and not resubmitted, EMR over 1.0 without an improvement plan, multiple documents in rejected status for more than 30 days.
Grade F — Disqualified
The client's dashboard shows a red flag. In many cases their field systems automatically deny your workers at the gate. If you already have workers on site, you usually have 24 to 72 hours before they are told to leave.
Common triggers: No valid COI on file, no RAVS submission, a recent fatality without incident response documentation, failure to respond to the client's direct information requests, or a combination of expired documents and weak safety stats hitting at once.
Recovery timeline: If the cause is a missing document and you have the renewal in hand, F to C in 48 hours is common. If the cause is RAVS rewrites or safety stat issues, expect two to three weeks.
Client threshold variations: the hidden factor
Your grade is not one grade. ISN calculates a separate score for each hiring client using that client's specific rubric. Same contractor, same documents — completely different letter grades depending on what each client weights.
Client A might weight insurance at 40 percent, RAVS at 30 percent, safety statistics at 20 percent, and training at 10 percent. Passing threshold for an A: 90 percent.
Client B might weight safety statistics at 40 percent, RAVS at 30 percent, insurance at 20 percent, and training at 10 percent. Passing threshold for an A: 85 percent.
A contractor with a 0.95 EMR and strong RAVS could be an A with Client A and a B with Client B — purely because Client B weights their weak point more heavily. This is why "how is my ISN grade" is the wrong question. The right question is "how is my grade with this specific client."
The real-life scenarios that drop grades
Here are the patterns that actually trigger grade drops, ranked by frequency:
COI rejected for wrong Additional Insured wording. Your agent renewed, uploaded to ISN, ISN reviewed it 3 days later and rejected it because the client requires "XYZ Company and all subsidiaries" but the COI says "XYZ Company." The rejected document does not count — your grade drops as if you had no COI on file.
Policy renewal uploaded but endorsements missing. Agent sent the ACORD 25, forgot to include the CG 20 10 Additional Insured endorsement or the WC 00 03 13 Waiver of Subrogation. Same result.
RAVS category scored below threshold. You answered a Fall Protection question with a two-paragraph generic answer. ISN reviewer scored it 65 percent. Category threshold is 80 percent. Your whole RAVS section pulls down.
Annual EMR recalculation. Your carrier issued a new EMR showing 1.02 instead of last year's 0.95. The three-year rolling window shifted. Clients with a 1.0 threshold now flag you.
A document sits in "pending" and nobody notices. ISN reviewer requested clarification. The email landed in someone's inbox while they were out. Ten days later ISN auto-rejected it.
Client added a new requirement. Your client updated their requirements last quarter to require a new coverage type or training cert. You missed the notice.
None of these are unusual. All of them are preventable with consistent document tracking and 30-to-60-day advance notice on every expiration.
What to do if your grade just dropped
Log into ISN. Click the affected client's scorecard. Find the category that dropped. Identify the specific item — expired document, rejected upload, missed question. Fix it. Resubmit. ISN typically reviews within 3 to 7 business days and the grade updates.
If the cause is a RAVS rewrite or an EMR issue, communicate proactively with the affected client. A short email that says "We identified the gap, here is the fix, here is the timeline" preserves the relationship while the grade recovers. Clients remember how you handle the drop more than they remember the drop itself.
The honest takeaway
ISN grading looks arbitrary until you understand that each client is running their own rubric on top of a shared platform. Once you see that, your grade stops feeling random and starts feeling like a system you can track.
The contractors who consistently stay at A have someone whose job includes owning the ISN platform — tracking every document expiration 60 days out, reviewing each client's specific scorecard, and responding to reviewer questions within 24 hours. That is the most underrated hire in a small industrial subcontractor.
More ISNetworld Guides
OSHA 300 vs 300A vs 301: The Three Logs Every Contractor Must Keep
OSHA Form 300, 300A, and 301 serve three different purposes — and confusing them is the most common recordkeeping mistake contractors make. Here's what goes on each form, the Feb 1–April 30 posting rule, electronic submission deadlines, and how ISNetworld uses your injury log data.
Read guide →
Waiver of Subrogation Explained for Contractors (Without the Legal Jargon)
What subrogation actually is, why hiring clients demand the waiver, how the WC 00 03 13 and CG 24 04 endorsements work, and why ISN checks for this on every COI.
Read guide →
How to Calculate TRIR and DART (With the Actual Formula)
The exact TRIR and DART rate formulas, worked through step by step with real numbers. Covers the 200,000-hour baseline, NAICS industry benchmarks, why ISNetworld clients use these rates as hard cutoffs, and the six calculation mistakes that inflate your numbers.
Read guide →
PrequalPilot
Never get caught by an expired document again.
Automated 60/30/7-day expiry alerts, RAVS answer tracking, and COI parsing in one place.
Claim your founding spot →