Exposure records: how long to keep them and who can see them

This page explains what the rules and common practice call for. Every site is different, and what a survey or a filing needs at your facility is something we work out with you after we see it.

OSHA's standard on access to employee exposure and medical records covers two kinds of records: those that show what workers were exposed to on the job, and their medical records. This standard outlasts every other obligation described on this site. Air monitoring takes a day, while the record lasts a generation.

Most people will tell you to keep these records for "30 years". That answer is only the default. Several substance-specific standards override it, and one common kind of record is left out of it completely.

Retention periods by record type

The background data exception is narrower than it sounds. You can discard the laboratory's raw worksheets after a year only if you have kept all four listed items for the full 30. In practice, keeping the whole report is simpler and cheaper than proving you met the four conditions.

The safety data sheet exception runs the other way and is more generous than the 30-year number suggests. The standard says the sheets themselves "need not be retained for any specified period". You must, however, keep for 30 years a record of what the chemical was, where it was used and when it was used. The chemical use history is the record with the long life, not the sheet.

The medical record retention period has its own exceptions. Three kinds of records fall outside the "employment plus 30 years" rule:

• Health insurance claims that are kept separately
• First aid records of one-time treatment for minor injuries, made on site
• Records of employees who have worked less than 1 year

The last exception applies only where you give the records to the employee when employment ends.

The override that catches people

Read how the standard's list of retention periods opens. The periods apply "unless a specific occupational safety and health standard provides a different period of time", which means a substance-specific standard can set its own period.

The lead standard sets a different period. You must keep lead exposure monitoring records for at least 40 years, or for the duration of employment plus 20 years, whichever is longer.

A blanket 30-year policy for all exposure records violates the lead standard for your lead records. For lead, 40 years or employment plus 20 will usually be the longer period.

The same point applies more broadly. Before you set a destruction date for any record, check the standard for that substance, because it may say something different from the general records standard.

→ Lead exposure monitoring

Noise records follow their own standard

OSHA's noise standard sets its own retention periods, and they are far shorter:

You must keep noise exposure measurements for 2 years, not 30, which surprises people who assume the 30-year rule covers everything.

It also has a practical consequence worth thinking about, because the audiometric record outlives the noise survey by decades. If a hearing loss claim arrives 15 years from now, you will have the audiogram history. You may not have the noise data that would explain or answer it.

We recommend you keep noise survey data far longer than the 2 years the standard requires. It is the only record, made at the time, of what the worker was actually exposed to, and keeping it costs nothing.

→ What a standard threshold shift means · → Noise surveys

Who has a right of access

The standard gives these parties a right of access to the records:

• The employee
• A former employee
• A designated representative, meaning a person or organization the employee authorizes to act for them
• OSHA. The standard has a paragraph headed "OSHA access", which covers representatives of the Assistant Secretary who heads OSHA.

NIOSH is not on that list. It obtains records by a separate route with its own procedures (section 20(b) of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act and a separate federal rule). That is worth knowing, because a NIOSH request is not an employee access request and you do not respond to it the same way.

Unions are covered automatically, for exposure records. This applies to employee exposure records and to analyses that use exposure or medical records. For these, the standard automatically treats a recognized or certified union, which it calls a collective bargaining agent, as the employee's designated representative. The union does not need the employee's written authorization, so no signature is required and you may not demand one.

Medical records are different. For those, the standard requires the employee's written consent.

You must provide access in a reasonable time, place and manner.

The 15-working-day rule. If you cannot provide access within 15 working days of the request, you must tell the requester the reason for the delay and the earliest date you will provide access. Note what this is and is not. It is not a 15-day deadline to hand over the records. It is a 15-day deadline to either hand them over or say when you will. The standard does not specify what form that explanation must take, so putting it in writing is good practice, not a requirement.

The first copy is free. You may not charge for the first copy of a record provided to an employee or designated representative. For later copies of a record you have already provided once, you may charge reasonable administrative costs, and those costs must not discriminate.

There is one more limit. You may not charge a union for its first request for a copy of a record, even where you have already provided that record to someone else. Saying "we gave that to the employee last year" does not let you charge the union for its first request.

In practice, a former employee who asks for their file for the first time gets it at no cost, however large it is.

What counts as an "exposure record"

The definition covers more than most people assume. It includes:

• Monitoring and measuring of a toxic substance or harmful physical agent in the workplace
• Biological monitoring results (tests that show how much of a substance a worker has absorbed)
• Safety data sheets
• Where none of the above exist, any record that identifies a substance or agent an employee has been exposed to

So biological monitoring results are exposure records in their own right, on the full 30-year clock. Safety data sheets are exposure records too, but with the exception described above. What has to last 30 years is the record of what was used, where and when, not the sheet itself.

What goes wrong in practice

Records lost in a sale. The retention obligation transfers with the business. If you buy an operation, you take on the duty to keep records you did not create, and if you sell one, you must hand the records over.

Records held only by the consultant. They are your records, so get copies in their original file format at the end of every project. The retention obligation is yours, and it runs for decades. Ask for the full data files, not only PDFs, for this reason.

No index. A 30-year obligation you cannot search is, in effect, a 30-year obligation you cannot meet. Build the index when the report arrives, not when the request does.

Employees not informed that the records exist. The standard requires you to inform employees that these records exist, where they are kept and how to obtain them, and to tell them about their right of access. This is a standing obligation, not a one-time notice.

When you may not need outside help

Record retention and access are administrative work. They take a policy, a searchable archive and someone who owns the process, and none of that requires an outside consultant. Most workplaces can correct their retention schedule in an afternoon, once someone has checked the standard for each substance for an override.

Outside help is really useful when a monitoring history was never kept properly and has to be reconstructed. Reconstructing it costs far more than retaining the records would have.

→ How to read an industrial hygiene report · → Air monitoring surveys