Last updated on 18 August 2026.
In brief
On 06 September 2026 two familiar pieces of South African occupational health and safety law are repealed in their entirety. The Environmental Regulations for Workplaces, 1987 and the Noise-Induced Hearing Loss Regulations, 2003 fall away, and the Physical Agents Regulations, 2024 and the Noise Exposure Regulations, 2024 take their place. This is not a consultation, a draft or a proposal. It is a date, fixed by the regulations themselves, and it is close. The new instruments are heavier than the ones they replace, and they are heavier in a particular direction: they turn occupational health from something an employer does into something an employer must be able to prove, on a schedule, for forty years.
What is actually changing
Both instruments were published in Government Gazette 52226 on 06 March 2025, under sections 43(1)(a) and (b) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993. [1][2] Notice 5952 promulgated the Physical Agents Regulations, 2024. Notice 5953 promulgated the Noise Exposure Regulations, 2024. [1][3]
Neither took immediate full effect. Regulation 21 of the Physical Agents Regulations provides that the Environmental Regulations for Workplaces, 1987 are repealed 18 months after promulgation. Regulation 18 of the Noise Exposure Regulations does the same for the Noise-Induced Hearing Loss Regulations, 2003. Eighteen months from 06 March 2025 is 06 September 2026. [1][2][4] On that date the old regulations are repealed in their entirety, and the new ones stand alone.
Two independent law firms, ENSafrica and Webber Wentzel, arrive at the same date from the same regulations. [1][2] We treat it as settled.
The scope is wider than most employers assume
The phrase "physical agents" sounds narrow and technical. It is not. The regulations define a physical agent as a source of energy which may result in injury or disease after exposure, and expressly include cold stress, heat stress, vibration, non-ionising radiation and illumination. [1][2] Indoor air quality is separately covered. [2]
Read plainly, that means the new regulations reach the lighting levels in a warehouse aisle, the heat in a kitchen or a roof space, the cold in a chiller, the vibration in a hand tool or a forklift seat, and the air in an office with a struggling ventilation system. Very few workplaces fall outside all of these.
The Noise Exposure Regulations apply where people are exposed to continuous or impulse noise at or above the noise-rating limit or the noise action level, and to designers, manufacturers, importers and suppliers of plant and machinery for workplace use. [1][2] Those last two terms carry more weight than they appear to, and they are the subject of the next section.
The second number
Most South African safety practitioners can quote one number: 85 dBA. Under the Noise-Induced Hearing Loss Regulations, 2003 that was effectively the whole test. Exposure at or above an 8-hour rating level of 85 dBA triggered the duties, and the regulations gave no consideration to combined or compounding hazards at all. [4]
The Noise Exposure Regulations, 2024 keep 85 dBA as the noise-rating limit, and add a second, lower trigger beneath it. The "noise action level" is an 8-hour rating level at or above 82 dBA for continuous noise, or a peak of 135 dBC for impulse noise. [4] It bites where employees are exposed at that level together with ototoxic chemical agents or whole-body vibration, that is, chemicals and vibration that compound hearing damage. [4]
The practical consequence is easy to miss. A workplace measured at 83 dBA sat outside the old regulations entirely. It may sit inside the new ones, if there is vibrating plant or solvent use in the same space. Workshops, warehouses with materials handling equipment, spray booths, laundries and food production lines are the obvious candidates, but the test is the combination of exposures, not the industry.
The regulations also reach beyond employers. Designers, manufacturers, importers and suppliers of plant and machinery now carry duties to minimise noise risk and to provide noise emission data, an obligation absent from the 2003 regulations entirely. [4] If you buy or specify equipment, that data is something you can now ask for.
What the new duties actually require
The new regulations replace a compliance style built on general standards with one built on documented, repeating, dated activity. [2]
- A documented risk assessment by a competent person, at least every two years.
- Where the assessment shows exposure at or above the limits, an exposure monitoring programme, conducted by a competent person. For noise, that monitoring must be done by an approved noise inspection authority, at least every two years.
- A documented medical screening programme where the risk assessment identifies the need, or where the employee is a "vulnerable employee", a new category defined as an employee at higher risk of injury, disease or complications from exposure. [2][4]
- Medical screening carried out by an Occupational Medicine Practitioner immediately before an employee starts work, then at intervals the practitioner sets but not exceeding two years, and again on exit unless screening was done within the previous six months.
- A documented system of medical surveillance overseen by an Occupational Medicine Practitioner, with the employee's written informed consent.
- For noise, audiometry for any employee who may be exposed, conducted under the Code of Practice for Audiometry. [3]
- Elimination of exposure at source so far as is reasonably practicable, and where that is not practicable, reduction below the occupational exposure limits through a prescribed hierarchy of controls, with the controls themselves inspected and tested by a competent person at intervals not exceeding two years. [2]
- Consultation with health and safety representatives and the health and safety committee before assessments, monitoring and surveillance, and disclosure of the documented outcomes to them.
- Training that includes practical and theoretical knowledge of the sources of exposure, the risks, the controls, the personal precautions and how to access one's own records, with refresher training annually. Training is no longer a once-off event. [2]
- Retention of records of training, risk assessments, action plans, monitoring, measurements, medical screening, surveillance and control maintenance for forty years, available on demand to the health and safety representative, the committee or an inspector. [2][4]
Three changes that are easy to overlook
Beyond the list above, three shifts are worth naming on their own, because none has an equivalent in the 2003 regulations. [4]
Audiometry is restructured, not carried over. The 2003 regulations required baseline, periodic and exit audiograms, with periodic testing annually for the first three years and then extendable to every two years. The 2024 regulations separate medical screening, which is overseen by an Occupational Medicine Practitioner and requires written informed consent, from medical surveillance. They then introduce entry, initial and periodic audiometric testing as distinct categories, with frequencies that vary according to exposure level. A Code of Practice for Audiometry is incorporated directly into the regulatory framework rather than left to guidance. [3][4] An employer who simply continues the old testing rhythm will not automatically be compliant.
The penalties roughly double. The maximum term of imprisonment for an offence rises from six months under the 2003 regulations to twelve months under the 2024 regulations, with an additional daily penalty for each day a contravention continues. [4][3]
A Noise Technical Committee is established to advise on codes, standards and training requirements. [4] Employers cannot influence it directly, but it means the technical detail beneath these regulations should be expected to move, and a compliance approach built on a single snapshot of the current standards will age.
The two-year and forty-year problem
Read the duties list again and notice its shape. Almost every duty is either a cycle or an archive.
The cycles are two-yearly (risk assessment, exposure monitoring, medical screening intervals, control inspection) and annual (refresher training). The archive is forty years. A duty that repeats on a two-year cycle is exactly the kind of duty that quietly lapses, because nothing in the working week reminds anyone of it and the person who did it last time has often moved on. A record that must survive forty years is exactly the kind of record that does not survive a laptop change, an office move, or the departure of the safety officer who kept the folder.
An inspector arriving in 2027 will not ask whether the workplace is safe. They will ask for the dated risk assessment, the monitoring report, the audiometry results, the training register with this year's refresher on it, and the consent forms. Those are documents with dates, and dates are the easiest thing in the world for an inspector to check and the hardest thing in the world for a paper system to keep current.
The open questions, and what to do about them
The transitional position has become less clear over time, not more.
Webber Wentzel noted an ambiguity early: it is not clear whether both sets of regulations apply concurrently until 06 September 2026, or whether the new Physical Agents Regulations only take effect on that date. Their advice, and it is the right advice, is that employers should begin implementation now, so far as is reasonably practicable, in order to be fully compliant by the effective date. [2]
ENSafrica has since taken that argument further. Because the Noise Exposure Regulations carried no express commencement clause, they "commenced" on 06 March 2025 by operation of section 13(1) of the Interpretation Act, 1957. But the 2003 regulations remain in force until 06 September 2026, and the two instruments conflict in several places, to the point that conduct which complies with the old regulations could constitute an offence under the new ones. ENSafrica argues that a court may therefore find that although the 2024 regulations commenced, there was no intention to enforce them before the 2003 regulations are repealed, since the Minister cannot have intended employers to comply with two conflicting instruments simultaneously. [4]
A third loose end arrived in 2026. On 20 March 2026, Notice 7292 in Government Gazette 54405 granted an exemption from regulation 8(3) of the Noise Exposure Regulations, permitting employers to use Type 2 personal noise exposure meters when determining noise zones for single-seat mobile plant that does not operate from a fixed location, subject to seven conditions covering instrument accuracy, microphone placement, measurement duration and conversion to an 8-hour equivalent. [4] The exemption runs for three years from 02 February 2026, or until withdrawn. ENSafrica's view is that the notice adds to the existing uncertainty rather than resolving it, and that the Minister should withdraw it and publish two separate notices, one setting out clear transitional arrangements and one re-issuing the exemption with its withdrawal terms stated properly. [4]
There is a fourth, narrower loose end that predates all of this. The same gazette that carried the two main instruments also carried Notice 5954, amending the General Safety Regulations. ENSafrica describes that notice as unclear, contradictory and confusing, and takes the view that the Department of Employment and Labour should withdraw it and promulgate a proper one. [1] So the General Safety Regulations position is less settled than the two main instruments.
Our view on all four. None of them is a reason to wait. Every one concerns either the period before 06 September 2026, which is now a matter of weeks, or a narrow measurement question. The repeal date itself has never been in dispute, and no party to any of these arguments suggests otherwise. The practical answer is unchanged: build the cycle now, so that on 06 September the evidence trail already exists, rather than waiting to discover which reading a court eventually prefers.
GRC Shop view
Our view is that this transition, not the Construction Regulations and not the OHS Amendment Bill, is the compliance event that will most visibly separate South African employers over the next twelve months, and that it is being badly under-noticed.
The reason is structural. Most of what an SME calls its health and safety system is a set of documents that were correct on the day they were signed. The new regulations are indifferent to documents that were correct once. They ask for a cycle that is currently running and an archive that has not lost anything in forty years. Those two demands are close to impossible to meet with folders, spreadsheets and the memory of whoever holds the safety portfolio this year, and they are ordinary to meet with a living record that knows what is due, what has expired, and where the evidence is.
The 82 dBA action level sharpens the same point in a different direction. It means the question is no longer "how loud is it here", answerable once with a meter, but "how loud is it here, and what else are these people exposed to at the same time", which is a question about combined exposures that has to be re-asked as processes, chemicals and equipment change. That is a record-keeping problem before it is an acoustics problem.
We also expect this architecture, dated assessment, monitoring, surveillance, refresher training, long retention, to become the template for the wider OHS reform rather than an exception to it. Employers who build the habit for physical agents and noise now will find the rest of the decade's regulation asks them for the same shape of proof.
None of this changes who owns the duty. The employer must appoint the competent person, commission the monitoring, engage the Occupational Medicine Practitioner and run the training. What a platform can do is make sure nothing in that cycle silently lapses, and that when an inspector asks, the evidence trail is there and dated.
If you want your compliance record to be live rather than historical before September, start here: https://www.grcshop.co.za/get-a-quote
Abbreviations
- dBA: A-weighted decibels, used for continuous noise
- dBC: C-weighted decibels, used for peak or impulse noise
- OEL: occupational exposure limit
- OHS: Occupational Health and Safety
- OHSA: Occupational Health and Safety Act 85 of 1993
- OMP: Occupational Medicine Practitioner
- PPE: personal protective equipment
- SME: small and medium enterprise
References
The sources below are external links to third-party websites. We link only to publicly accessible pages and check periodically that the links still work.
[1] ENSafrica, "South Africa: Occupational Health and Safety Act, 1993 (OHASA), Physical Agents Regulations 2024, Noise Exposure Regulations 2024, and Amendment of the General Safety Regulations 2025", 11 Mar 2025. https://www.ensafrica.com/news/detail/9836/south-africa-occupational-health-and-safety-a
[2] Webber Wentzel, "Recent amendments to the Occupational Health and Safety Act: new regulations", 2025. https://www.webberwentzel.com/News/Pages/recent-amendments-to-the-occupational-health-and-safety-act-new-regulations.aspx
[3] South African Government, "Occupational Health and Safety Act: Noise Exposure Regulations 2024, Code of Practice for Audiometry and explanatory notes, Government Gazette 52226", 06 Mar 2025. https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/202503/52226gon5953.pdf
[4] ENSafrica (Willem le Roux and Bianca Nolan), "Occupational Health and Safety Act, 1993: Noise Exposure Regulations, 2024, Exemption from the provisions of Regulation 8(3)", 20 Apr 2026. https://www.mondaq.com/southafrica/health-safety/1772102/occupational-health-and-safety-act-1993-noise-exposure-regulations-2024-exemption-from-the-provisions-of-regulation-83