Does OSHA 10 Expire? OSHA 30 Card Renewal Rules

Last updated August 2026.

No. A federal OSHA 10 or OSHA 30 card issued by the US Department of Labor does not expire. OSHA treats Outreach Training as valid indefinitely and has no national renewal schedule. What does expire is your eligibility elsewhere: several states and cities require training completed within the last five years, most general contractors set their own three to five year refresh policy, and a lost card can only be replaced within five years of the class, once.

That gap between "never expires" and "your site supervisor turned you away this morning" is where almost all the confusion lives. The card is a permanent record of a class you attended. It is not a permit, and nobody promised the people running the jobsite would accept it forever.

Does OSHA 10 expire?

Federally, no. The Department of Labor card you receive after completing a 10-hour Outreach course carries no expiration date, and OSHA does not require anyone to retake the course after three years, five years, or any other interval. If you took OSHA 10 in 2009 and still have the card, it is still a genuine federal card.

The practical answer is different. OSHA created Outreach Training as voluntary orientation, so the federal government does not mandate it in the first place. The parties that actually require the card, meaning states, municipalities, general contractors, project owners, unions and insurers, are free to set their own recency rules, and most of them do. When somebody tells you your OSHA 10 "expired," they mean it no longer satisfies their requirement, not that OSHA revoked it.

Does OSHA 30 expire?

Same answer. The OSHA 30 DOL card has no federal expiration date. It is the longer supervisory version of the same Outreach program, aimed at foremen, superintendents and safety leads rather than entry-level workers, and it follows the identical federal policy.

OSHA 30 tends to run into recency rules more often than OSHA 10, because it is usually a supervisor-level credential attached to a contractor license or a prequalification packet. Philadelphia, for example, requires licensed construction contractors to keep at least one supervisor on staff who completed an OSHA 30 course within the past five years. That is a rolling requirement on the company, not on the individual card.

OSHA 10 and OSHA 30 renewal rules by state

This is the part worth bookmarking. State mandates fall into two groups: a handful that tie OSHA 10 to public works contracts above a dollar threshold, and a smaller group that impose an actual renewal interval. The thresholds vary enormously, from $10,000 in Massachusetts to $250,000 in New York State.

Two cautions on reading that table. "No state interval set" does not mean nobody will ask you to retrain; it means the obligation comes from the contract or the contractor rather than the statute. And these rules change with legislative sessions, so verify against the state labor department before you build a training calendar on them. Miami has also been reported to apply a five-year renewal rule, which is worth confirming locally if you work there.

Why employers require OSHA 10 renewal every 3 to 5 years anyway

Ask a safety director why they make people retake a course the government says is valid for life and you will get a reasonable answer. Standards get revised. A card from 2011 predates several significant updates, including the current silica and fall protection enforcement posture. Somebody who sat through ten hours of slides a decade ago and has not thought about it since is not meaningfully trained, whatever the card says.

There is a second, blunter reason: insurers and project owners price risk on documentation. A general contractor bidding a large commercial job is often required to show that every worker on site has current training, and "current" is defined in the contract. Three to five years is the common window. It costs the GC nothing to impose it and it removes an argument later.

So if you run a crew, the federal answer is close to irrelevant to your planning. Pick a refresh interval, usually five years, write it into your safety program, and hold to it. That policy, not the card, is what an auditor or a claims adjuster will read.

How long is OSHA 10 good for on a replacement card?

Here is the rule almost nobody knows until they need it, and it is the strongest practical argument for tracking cards centrally. A replacement OSHA card can only be issued if the class was taken within the last five years, and only one replacement is allowed per student per class. Beyond five years, or after you have already used your one replacement, the only way to get a card is to take the course again.

OSHA also does not mail replacements to students. You have to go back to the authorized Outreach trainer or training organization that ran your original course. If that trainer has retired, moved, or the training company has folded, you are retaking the class regardless of how recent it was.

The effect is a card that technically never expires but practically becomes unrecoverable after five years. A worker who loses a 2018 card in 2026 has a valid credential they cannot prove. On a jobsite that requires documentation at the gate, unprovable and expired amount to the same thing. Keeping a scanned copy and a dated record of every completion is the cheap insurance here.

Which OSHA training does have to be repeated every year?

Worth separating clearly, because conflating the two is how compliance programs end up with the wrong calendar. Outreach cards (OSHA 10 and 30) have no renewal requirement. A number of specific OSHA standards absolutely do require annual retraining, and those are enforceable.

The annual ones include noise exposure under 1910.95(k)(2), respiratory protection under 1910.134(k)(5), bloodborne pathogens under 1910.1030(g)(2)(ii), HAZWOPER refreshers, fire extinguisher training under 1910.157(g)(2) and (g)(4), and access to exposure records under 1910.1020(g)(1). Others that people assume are annual are not: powered industrial truck operators need an evaluation at least every three years under 1910.178(l), while hazard communication, lockout/tagout, PPE and fall protection are triggered by events like a new hazard, new equipment, or evidence that retraining is needed rather than by the calendar. The full breakdown is in our guide to OSHA annual training requirements, and safety training requirements covers the wider set.

Retention is its own trap. Bloodborne pathogens training records must be kept three years under 1910.1030(h)(2)(ii), but employee exposure records must be kept for thirty years under 1910.1020. Most platforms default to keeping records for about two.

How to keep track of OSHA cards across a crew

For one person, a photo of the card in your phone is enough. For a company, the problem is different: you need to know, on any given morning, which of 180 people have training a specific project will accept, and which of them are about to fall outside your five-year policy.

Spreadsheets fail at this in a predictable way. They record the completion date but nobody recalculates the expiry, so the sheet is accurate the day it is built and slowly stops being true. Multi-employer sites make it worse, since the general contractor is asking about subcontractor crews too. Most contractors doing public works end up maintaining the same folder of paperwork for every sub: OSHA cards, licenses, and certificates of insurance kept current for each subcontractor, all of which go stale on different dates.

What actually works is a system that stores the completion date, applies your renewal policy to calculate a review date per person, and warns you before it arrives rather than after. That is what certification tracking software does, and it is why we built expiry alerts into OSHA training software rather than leaving it as a report someone remembers to run. If you also deliver the underlying courses in-house, safety training software keeps delivery and the record in one place, so the audit trail is a by-product rather than a project. For the mechanics of setting it up, see how to track employee certifications.

Common questions

How long is an OSHA 10 card good for?

Indefinitely at the federal level, because the DOL card carries no expiration date. In practice it is good for as long as the party asking to see it accepts it, which is commonly five years. Nevada, Connecticut, New York City and Philadelphia all apply five-year rules, and many general contractors apply the same window by contract.

Do I need to renew my OSHA 10 certification?

Only if a state, city, employer or project owner requires it. Federal OSHA never will. Check three things in order: the state where the work happens, the municipality if it is New York City or Philadelphia, and the contract or site rules for the specific project. The strictest of those governs.

Does OSHA 30 expire after 5 years?

The card itself does not. Five years is the recency window several jurisdictions and most contractors apply, and it is also the deadline for getting a replacement card issued. So while the credential is permanent, treating OSHA 30 as a five-year cycle matches how it is enforced almost everywhere.

What happens if my OSHA card is more than 5 years old?

The card stays valid federally and you can keep using it wherever it is accepted. What you lose is the ability to replace it if it is lost or damaged, since replacements are only issued within five years of the class. You may also fall outside state or contractor recency rules, in which case you retake the course.

Is OSHA 10 or OSHA 30 required by law?

Not by federal law. OSHA Outreach Training is voluntary at the federal level. It becomes mandatory through state statutes covering public works, city ordinances such as New York City's Local Law 196, collective bargaining agreements, or private contract terms. That is why the same worker can be fully compliant in one state and turned away in another.

Can I take OSHA 10 twice?

Yes, and it is the normal route when a card falls outside a five-year window or a replacement is no longer available. There is no restriction on retaking Outreach Training, and the new class produces a new DOL card with a new completion date, which resets you against any recency rule.