How to Replace Your Lost OSHA Card

OSHA cards are issued by the Department of Labor (DOL) as physical proof that someone successfully completed a 10 or 30-hour course of OSHA’s Outreach Training Program. The program’s purpose is teaching workers to recognize and avoid a range of work-related health and safety hazards.

These cards are given for completion of any one or more of several kinds of 10 and 30-hour courses available for a range of industries and career areas. Obviously enough, an OSHA card is a useful and often important certification to have on hand, and by certain state laws for certain industries, it’s obligatory for some types of workers or supervisors. If you lose your own, or it’s simply damaged beyond readability, you should replace it. Here’s how.

A few important points about replacing lost and damaged OSHA cards

OSHA policies generally only let you replace a lost or stolen card as long as the course that it applied to was taken no more than five years before the data on which you request the replacement. In part, this is because training organizations that provide these cards only legally need to keep records going back five years.

You’ll also need to find out who exactly you should make your replacement request with. This is going to depend on which organization you took your 10 or 30-hour course with and whether the course was taken online or in-person.

Curiously for a large and bureaucratic government agency, OSHA itself doesn’t have a central registry of OSHA certification holders and students. This depends on the course givers themselves and their own records being compliant with OSHA/DOL policies.

Thus, your replacement card will have to come from the organization that gave it to you and whether they can depend on the integrity of their records.

Online OSHA card providers

If your OSHA card was given to you after having completed one of the training courses for it online, you should contact the same online provider that gave you the card and request a new one by providing your personal training details. These include your name, the timeframe in which you completed the course and possibly payment information. With these points in hand, the provider should be able to issue you a new card for a fee.

IN-person OSHA card providers

In the case of in-person OSHA training with a certified Outreach provider, what you should do is much like the advice for online providers above: contact the Outreach organization, offer enough personal information for them to check their records and then ask that they send you your replacement card.

Bear in mind again that OSHA’s own rules don’t obligate either online or offline providers to keep records going back more than 5 years. Some Outreach providers might do so anyhow but if your card is older than that, you might have to retake your specific OSHA course again.

What if you don’t remember your card provider’s name?

If you haven’t taken your OSHA course in several years and don’t have your card or any documentation on hand to verify who certified you, you might not remember their name. This is problematic because, as we said above, OSHA itself can’t help you with its records. If this is your case, try the following.

• Check with your employer or any union you’re a part of. They might have arranged your previous class and can tell you which agency they use.
• Ask any coworkers or friends who might have gone through the same training program as you if they can tell you who their cards come from.
• Look through your old financial and documentation records to see if you noted your training provider’s name anywhere or if the payment for your card appears on your old billing records.

 Remember that replacing your lost or damaged OSHA card usually comes with a fee. Outreach training providers are allowed by OSHA to charge their students for their courses and for any incidentals like replacing lost and stolen cards. These are usually modestly priced though.

On a final note, if you’d like to take your first ever OSHA training course for superior employability and work certification, feel free to contact us at ROI Safety Services for your own consultation. We offer both online and in-person courses, and yes, we also keep excellent records for helping you with future card replacement needs.