Annual audiometric testing mandated by Federal Regulations is creating an enormous, fragmented database. Epidemiologic studies, based on this information, can potentially elucidate important parameters related to the development of noise‐induced hearing loss. This paper illustrates the application of survival data analysis to the audiometric data of approximately 2500 people taken over as many as ten successive years. Survival analysis includes both the number of people who fail during a study (develop a standard threshold shift in this instance) as well as those who survive or are lost to follow‐up. In this case, we found that the survival function (the probability of surviving past a time interval) and the hazard function (the probability of surviving through a time interval given that the worker has survived to the beginning of the interval) are insensitive to the exposures at the facility. However, when these functions are stratified on age at first test, older workers are at higher risk than younger workers.