Last updated on 18 August 2026.
In brief
There is no South African regulation that tells an employer to manage psychosocial risk. There is also no regulation that says they may ignore it. The duty sits where most unnamed duties sit, in the general duty in section 8 of the Occupational Health and Safety Act to provide a working environment that is safe and without risk to the health of employees. Health includes mental health. In 2026 the international position moved decisively: the International Labour Organization put more than 840,000 deaths a year on psychosocial risk factors, the draft of ISO 45001:2027 introduced work-related well-being as a defined term, and the United Kingdom's regulator issued enforcement against an employer for failing to manage work-related stress. This article sets out what is actually established, what is not, and what a South African employer can reasonably do now without waiting for a regulation that may be years away.
What is established
The international evidence base is no longer soft. The International Labour Organization devoted World Day for Safety and Health at Work 2026 to the psychosocial working environment, publishing the report "The Psychosocial Working Environment: Global Developments and Pathways to Action". In the accompanying statement of 24 Apr 2026, Director-General Gilbert Houngbo linked psychosocial risk factors at work, among them job strain, effort and reward imbalance, long working hours and harassment, to more than 840,000 deaths a year worldwide through cardiovascular disease and mental disorders. [1] Independent reporting of the same report puts the economic loss at about 1.37 percent of global GDP a year and records that 23 percent of workers have experienced violence or harassment at work. [2]
The standard is changing to match. The Draft International Standard for ISO 45001:2027, released in mid-2026 and out for ballot until 08 Sep 2026, adds three new definitions, among them work-related well-being, revises the definition of occupational health and safety risk, and introduces new requirements for occupational health and for a controlled return to work after injury or ill health. [3][4] Publication is expected in 2027, with a three-year transition expected after that. [4] For a certified organisation this is the point at which an auditor stops asking whether psychosocial risk is mentioned in the policy and starts asking to see the assessment, the controls and the review.
Regulators are already enforcing on it, elsewhere. The United Kingdom's Health and Safety Executive issued a Notice of Contravention to the University of Birmingham on 11 Dec 2025 for failures in managing work-related stress, citing inadequate stress risk assessments, a failure to implement the employer's own stress policy, weak control measures and no effective monitoring or review. [5] The scale behind that action is documented: HSE statistics recorded 964,000 workers suffering work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, and 22.1 million working days lost, so that stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 62 percent of all working days lost to work-related ill health. [6] In July 2026 the same regulator reported a record low of 126 worker deaths for 2025/26 and named mental health and stress management an explicit priority for 2026. [7][8] The pattern is worth reading carefully, because it is the pattern South Africa is being pushed toward: as physical fatalities fall in a mature system, the regulator's attention moves to psychological risk.
What is not established
There is no South African regulation on psychosocial risk. No instrument under the OHS Act names it, prescribes an assessment, sets a standard or attaches a penalty. Nothing in the current legislative pipeline, the Draft Construction Regulations, the Physical Agents and Noise Exposure Regulations, or the phased COIDA rollout, creates one. An employer who searches the regulations for the words will not find them.
What exists instead is section 8 of the OHS Act, the general duty to provide and maintain, as far as is reasonably practicable, a working environment that is safe and without risk to the health of employees. That duty is not limited to machinery, and health is not limited to the body. Whether a South African court or inspector would apply section 8 to a psychosocial hazard has not, as far as we can establish, been tested. We therefore state the point as an interpretation, not as settled law.
GRC Shop view
Our view is that the regulation will arrive late and the audit will arrive early, and that the audit is what most employers will meet first. The ISO 45001:2027 transition is dated and certain. A South African psychosocial regulation is neither. An employer who waits for the regulation will be answering an auditor's question with an empty file, and an employer who is already exporting, tendering or supplying into a certified supply chain will meet the question sooner still.
Our second view is that the general duty is a thinner shield than employers assume. Section 8 has always been the provision that catches what the regulations did not think to name. It is difficult to argue that a duty to keep a working environment without risk to health stops at the point where the harm becomes psychological, particularly once the employer knew, or ought to have known, that a hazard existed. The immigration enforcement climate, which we treat in detail in our audit and inspection findings article, is the clearest current example: workforce fear, absenteeism and tension around enforcement flashpoints are now foreseeable, and a foreseeable harm is exactly what a risk assessment exists to catch.
What we would do now, and what we would not. We would name psychosocial hazards in the risk assessment rather than in the policy, because a policy is a statement and a risk assessment is a record. We would identify the specific hazards that apply, which for most South African SMEs means workload and long hours, harassment and interpersonal conflict, job insecurity, exposure to violence or crime, and the fear generated by enforcement operations. We would attach a control and a review date to each. We would not buy a wellness programme and call it a control, because a benefit is not a control, and an auditor will say so.
This section is opinion, clearly marked as such. The facts above it stand on their own sources.
Abbreviations
- COIDA: Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act
- DIS: Draft International Standard
- GDP: gross domestic product
- HSE: Health and Safety Executive (United Kingdom)
- ILO: International Labour Organization
- ISO: International Organization for Standardization
- OHS: Occupational Health and Safety
- 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] International Labour Organization, "Safe work, healthy workplaces: Tackling psychosocial risks at work", 24 Apr 2026. https://www.ilo.org/resource/statement/safe-work-healthy-workplaces-tackling-psychosocial-risks-work
[2] British Safety Council, "ILO report: psychosocial risks are now a critical occupational safety challenge", 2026. https://www.britsafe.org/safety-management/2026/ilo-report-psychosocial-risks-are-now-a-critical-occupational-safety-challenge
[3] DNV, "Draft Version of ISO 45001:2027 Released", 2026. https://www.dnv.com/news/2026/draft-version-of-iso-45001-released/
[4] LRQA, "ISO 45001 revision update: DIS ballot now open", Jun 2026. https://www.lrqa.com/en-au/latest-news/iso-45001-revision-update-dis-ballot-now-open/
[5] Health and Safety Executive, "Work-related stress enforcement", 2025 to 2026. https://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/
[6] Health and Safety Executive, "Health and safety statistics: key figures for Great Britain 2024 to 2025 (work-related stress, depression or anxiety)", 2025. https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overview.htm
[7] Health and Safety Executive, "Work-related fatal injuries in Great Britain", Jul 2026. https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/fatals-overview.htm
[8] British Safety Council, "Britain records lowest-ever annual worker fatalities, HSE statistics show", Jul 2026. https://www.britsafe.org/safety-management/2026/britain-records-lowest-ever-annual-worker-fatalities-hse-statistics-show