When does a fall-protection harness need to be retired?

Ask five people when a harness expires and you will get five answers, all delivered with total confidence. The reason is that they are answering different questions from different documents, and only one of those documents is the law.

When does a fall-protection harness need to be retired?

Immediately after any fall or shock load, and whenever an inspection finds damage. Those two triggers are not in dispute anywhere.

The calendar question has no single answer, and anyone who gives you one without asking what brand you own is guessing.

Does OSHA set an expiry date?

No. This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth being exact.

29 CFR 1926.502(d)(21) requires that personal fall arrest systems be inspected prior to each use for wear, damage and other deterioration, with defective components removed from service. 1926.502(d)(19) requires that any component subjected to impact loading be removed from service immediately and not used again until a competent person has determined it undamaged and suitable for reuse. General industry says the same thing in different words at 1910.140(c)(17) and (c)(18).

Nowhere in either does a number of years appear. Every calendar limit you have heard is a manufacturer’s.

That is not a loophole. OSHA is regulating the condition of the equipment, and condition is not a function of age alone — a harness stored properly and used twice is not the same object as one that lived in a truck bed through five summers.

So what do the manufacturers actually say?

They disagree, and the disagreement is structural rather than sloppy.

Manufacturer	Textile limit	Clock starts	Metal
Petzl	10 years	Date of manufacture	Indefinite
CMC	10 years	Date of manufacture	—
CAMP	10 years, or 12 from manufacture — whichever is sooner	First use	Unlimited
Skylotec	10 years, max 2 years pre-delivery storage	Delivery to end user	—
ISC	Up to 10 years	—	Indefinite
FallTech	No preset limit	—	—

Read the middle column again, because it is the practical trap. For the same harness bought two years after it was made, those rules produce retirement dates up to four years apart. Petzl’s clock started in the factory; CAMP’s starts the day you first clip in; Skylotec’s starts when it reaches you and separately caps how long it may sit on a shelf first.

There is also a clean split by origin. The European houses — Petzl, CAMP, Skylotec, ISC — all publish the ten-year textile figure, which follows a CE convention. FallTech, an American manufacturer, states plainly that it has no preset limit on its products’ service life. 3M’s ten-year statement appears in a technical bulletin explicitly headed for the Europe region.

Neither camp is wrong. They are answering to different regulatory cultures.

What about the five-year rule everyone quotes?

There isn’t one. We went looking and could not substantiate it in OSHA’s rules, in OSHA’s guidance, or in the published instructions of any major harness manufacturer.

The nearest thing to a five-year figure in manufacturer documentation is CAMP’s, and it applies to via ferrata energy-absorbing sets — a recreational climbing product with a shock-absorbing element, not a work harness. Somewhere in the retelling, that became “harnesses expire in five years.”

If your employer’s policy says five years, that is a legitimate internal policy and you should follow it. It is just not a regulation and not a manufacturer’s spec.

What actually retires a harness before its date?

The event list, which is where the real risk sits. Petzl’s own retirement criteria are the clearest published version:

• It is over ten years old and made of plastic or textiles.
• It has been subjected to a major fall or load.
• It fails inspection, or you have any doubt as to its reliability.
• You do not know its full usage history.
• It has become obsolete due to changes in legislation, standards, technique, or incompatibility with other equipment.

That fourth one deserves its own line. A harness with an unknown history is retired, not discounted. It is the reason buying used fall-protection PPE is a bad idea no matter how good it looks, and the reason a harness that has been out of your control — lent out, left on a job site, inherited with a truck — has a documentation problem rather than a wear problem.

CMC words it the same way, and so does Skylotec, which additionally requires written approval from a competent person before equipment returns to use after a fall.

How often does someone else have to look at it?

At least every twelve months, by a competent person who is not the user — in addition to the check you do before every use.

Twelve months is now close to universal: Petzl, 3M, Skylotec, CAMP, ISC and FallTech all state it. Guardian moved to twelve months from six within recent memory, citing the ANSI Z359 requirement that a competent or qualified person other than the user inspect annually.

Treat it as a floor rather than a ceiling. 3M states that inspection may need to be carried out more frequently than once per year, and FallTech’s own manuals table shorter intervals — quarterly to semiannual — for severe or continuous use. A harness worn daily on a demolition job and a harness used twice a year for roof access are not on the same schedule.

Does the ten-year clock cover the buckles?

No, and this is a common misreading. Petzl, CAMP and ISC all state that metal products have unlimited or indefinite lifespan, subject to inspection. Petzl changed metal from ten years to indefinite in 2008 and made the change retroactive to products manufactured before that date.

So a “ten-year harness lifespan” statement governs webbing, stitching and plastic hardware. The metal is judged on condition — which, given that metal is where corrosion and deformation show up visibly, is the more honest test anyway.

The same logic runs through the rest of a system. Rope and connectors each carry their own rules, and a kit retired as a unit on the harness’s date will throw away serviceable hardware while a kit retired piecemeal needs real record-keeping. Pick one and document it.

The practical version

1. Find the instructions for your specific harness and read the retirement section. Not a competitor’s, not an article — including this one.
2. Write the in-service date on the harness the day it is issued, because three of the six manufacturers above start the clock somewhere other than the factory.
3. Retire on the event, not the anniversary. A fall, a failed inspection, or an unknown history retires a harness the same day, regardless of age.
4. Book the annual inspection and treat the interval as a floor.

The regulator asks whether the equipment is fit to arrest a fall. The manufacturer’s date is the manufacturer’s best estimate of when it stops being able to answer that question for you — and the estimates differ because the question is genuinely hard, not because someone is being careless.