Which safety certifications to require, and how long they last

The OSHA 10 or 30 in your inbox has no expiry date

Open the photo your sub just sent. An OSHA 10 or OSHA 30 card carries a name, a course title, a trainer, a completion date and usually a card number. What it does not carry is an expiration date — the Outreach Training Program prints none on a student card, and OSHA does not expire the training. Federally, a card issued in 2014 is exactly as valid as a card issued last month.

So the “expires after 5 years” line on your checklist is not coming from OSHA. It comes from you, from the owner's contract, or from a statute covering this particular job. Know that before you tell a sub their card expired. The subs who genuinely train their people know it did not, and the argument costs more than the card is worth.

Why you should still set a validity window

Requiring recent training is defensible, and you do not need OSHA's backing to take that position. Standards move. A card issued a decade ago describes a jobsite that no longer exists, and its holder may have spent eight of those years off the tools. So pick a window, say it plainly in the subcontract — “OSHA 30-Hour Construction completed within the last five years” — and apply it to everyone. A rule you wrote is enforceable and explainable. A rule you blame on OSHA falls apart the first time a sub reads the card back to you.

OSHA 10 is the worker card; OSHA 30 is the supervisor card

The outreach program runs two lengths, aimed at different people. The 10-hour is entry-level hazard awareness for the crew. The 30-hour is longer and written for anyone carrying safety responsibility for others — foremen, superintendents, lead hands, the owner-operator directing a crew of three.

• OSHA 10-Hour — every worker your sub puts on your site, if you require cards at all.
• OSHA 30-Hour — the sub's foreman or site supervisor, and whoever signs their half of the pre-task plan.
• OSHA 500 / 510 — trainer track, not worker track. The 510 is the construction standards course; the 500 authorizes someone to teach it. A card reading 500 means you are looking at the sub's in-house trainer — and unlike a 10 or a 30, a trainer card does carry a printed expiration. Trainer authorization runs four years and is renewed by the update course, so a lapsed 500 is a real lapse rather than a policy one.

One thing trips up general contractors more than any of this: a safety card names a person. A certificate of insurance names a company, so “ABC Plumbing is covered” is a sentence that means something. “ABC Plumbing is OSHA 30” is not — one of their eleven people is. Ask which one, and whether that one is the one showing up on Tuesday.

Construction and general industry are different cards

The outreach course comes in disciplines: Construction, General Industry, Maritime and Disaster Site Worker. The card prints which one it was. Construction training tracks the 1926 standards; general industry tracks 1910, which is written for factories and warehouses rather than for a site with an open trench in it.

The mix-up is almost never anyone being clever. It is a plumber who took a general-industry 10-hour at a manufacturing job years ago and has carried the card since. Genuine card, genuinely issued, wrong industry. If your requirement says only “OSHA 10”, you are collecting whichever course somebody happened to sit.

So write the discipline into the requirement, the same way you write a limit rather than asking for “general liability” and hoping. What to require before a sub starts makes that argument for the certificate side of the file.

The credentials that really do expire

Some safety credentials carry a genuine expiry, printed on the card by the body that issued it. These are different in kind from an OSHA 10 or 30. The date is not your policy and you cannot extend it. The day after it passes, the holder is not qualified in the eyes of whoever wrote the rule.

The forklift row is the one that gets filed wrongly, and its cite is worth a second look. Construction does not restate this rule — 29 CFR 1926.602(d) adopts 1910.178(l) by reference, which is why your sub's forklift duty lives in a general-industry section. The regulation does not expire a card at all. It puts a duty on the operator's employer: evaluate that operator's performance at least once every three years. So what you are collecting is your sub's evaluation record. The wallet card their trainer printed often shows a date anyway, which is convenient but is not what the rule is about.

Crane works the same way, with a bigger credential on top. The operator's certification is a real five-year card from the certifying body. Federal crane rules separately require the operator's employer to evaluate and document competency for that equipment and that work. Two documents, two holders — ask for both before the crane is on the road.

On Corps of Engineers and many other federal jobs the governing document is EM 385-1-1, not the outreach program. It sets its own qualification and refresher requirements for the site safety and health officer, and the contract's accident-prevention-plan clause binds. Read that spec; do not assume an OSHA 30 satisfies it.

“Competent person” is an appointment, not a card

Excavation, scaffolding, fall protection, confined space — a run of construction standards each require a competent person on site. The definition at 29 CFR 1926.32(f) is somebody capable of identifying existing and predictable hazards and authorized to take prompt corrective measures. Read the second half again. That is authority, and only an employer grants it.

Which means there is no card to collect. Training providers do issue competent-person certificates, and they are useful evidence that training happened. The designation itself is your sub naming a specific person, for a specific hazard, on a specific job. Ask for that written designation — who, for what — with the training records attached.

There is no registry to check a card against

Here is what makes safety paperwork harder than insurance paperwork. When a certificate arrives you can go around it. The agency printed on it holds the policy file and can send the endorsement, which is the whole method behind how to verify a certificate of insurance. Training cards have no equivalent. OSHA runs no public lookup for outreach cards, so there is no number to type in and nothing to reconcile against. The card, the provider and the trainer are what you get.

1. 1Capture the training provider and trainer's name, not just the course and the date. They are printed on the card and they are the only route back to a source.
2. 2Call the provider when a card looks wrong — a course title that does not exist, a discipline that does not fit the work, a name nobody answers to. Providers keep completion records and confirm one.
3. 3Keep the image, not a typed summary. A spreadsheet cell reading “OSHA 30 — yes” evidences nothing months later. The scan evidences what was handed to you.
4. 4Match the name on the card to a person on your site. This is the check that finds a borrowed card. Almost nobody runs it.
5. 5Re-collect at crew change, not at renewal. Cards follow people. A sub swapping in two new hands next month is the event that matters, and no renewal date announces it.

Then file the cards with the rest of that sub's records rather than in a mail thread. When somebody asks about training, it is usually about a job that closed months ago. That is the same reason what your insurance auditor will ask for turns on dates rather than on a current status.

How Sealinn dates a card that carries no date

A safety card is not a certificate, so Sealinn reads a different set of fields off it: the certification type, the discipline, the holder's name, the issuing body, the training provider, the trainer and the certificate number. Sealinn also pulls the issue or completion date, any printed expiry, and a flag for whether an expiry was printed at all. Whether there is a printed expiry is what the rest of this section turns on.

Sealinn then computes an effective expiry, which is the part that matters here. If the card prints an expiry, Sealinn uses the printed date. If it does not — an OSHA 10 or 30, usually — Sealinn adds your own validity window to the issue date, or to the completion date when that is the only one printed. That window is a setting in your requirements, labeled “Safety cert valid for (years, when no expiry is printed)”, and it defaults to 5 years. With no printed expiry and neither date to count from, Sealinn says the card is being treated as indefinite instead of inventing a date for it.

After that a safety card behaves like every other document in the file. Reminders run off the effective expiry: 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before, unless you change them. They start once the card is approved and filed as the current one. Clearing without a human takes three things at once. Every value Sealinn read came back at 95% or better, nothing on the card broke your rules, and no custom rule of yours flagged it. Two fields are treated as critical — the certification type and the holder's name — and they set the confidence score Sealinn shows you. How Sealinn reads a document sets out that routing in full. What Sealinn checks lists the document types the engine handles, plus the fields it reads without checking.

Sealinn does not phone the training provider, because there is nothing public to verify a card against. Sealinn does not know your state's statute or the owner's spec. It normalizes what the card says and applies the window you set. The judgment — whether this person, on this job, in this state, is trained enough to start — stays yours.