Workplace health and safety compliance in Fiji: what the law actually requires of employers

The short answer

Every employer in Fiji must ensure the health and safety at work of all its workers under section 9 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1996, and the regulations turn that duty into specific things you have to do: identify hazards and control risks, write a health and safety policy with your workers, train everyone in an appropriate language, notify the Chief Health and Safety Inspector of accidents within 48 hours, keep an accident record at the workplace, establish a committee once you employ 20 or more workers, register a workplace of 20 or more each year, and — since 1 August 2024 — make the workplace available for inspection and audit every year if the business is classed high risk, or every three years if low risk.

Breaching the core employer duty carries a fine of up to $100,000 for a corporation. Directors and executive officers can be personally liable where an offence happened with their consent or through their wilful neglect. The rest of this page goes through each obligation with the section or regulation it comes from, so you can check it against the Laws of Fiji yourself, and then deals with the part nobody writes about: how to actually run this across a business spread over several islands.

Where the government is focusing now

The most concrete recent change is in the law itself: Legal Notice 22 of 2024 amended the General Workplace Conditions Regulations from 1 August 2024 to require a scheduled inspection and audit of every listed workplace — annually for high-risk businesses, three-yearly for low-risk ones — with a certificate of compliance at the end of it. That converts what was a general duty into a dated cycle with a regulator on site, and it is the single change most likely to reach an employer who has not been visited before.

Around that, three things can be sourced to the Minister for Employment, Productivity and Workplace Relations, Agni Deo Singh. In September 2023 the Ministry said it was reviewing a draft construction regulation, a draft plant regulation, a draft noise code of practice and a draft amusement-ride regulation, citing 1,825 accident notifications received by the Accident Compensation Commission of Fiji since January of that year, figures the Minister called "quite alarming". In September 2025, answering questions in Parliament on the Ministry taking over accident-compensation claims, he said that OHS inspectors "now have greater powers to enforce safety standards and penalize non-compliant employers" and described the Ministry as "directly linking compensation with enforcement". And on 28 April 2026, at the World Day for Safety and Health at Work in Suva, he said the Government was set to strengthen its occupational health and safety framework "with new regulations aimed at improving workplace monitoring, early intervention and worker support systems", with particular emphasis on psychosocial hazards.

What we could not source: any of the 2023 draft regulations having been gazetted as at September 2026, the text of the regulations foreshadowed in April 2026, or any published inspection-campaign statistics. If a client or a consultant tells you a "crackdown" is under way, ask them for the gazette notice. The verifiable position is that the inspection-and-audit cycle is already law, that the Minister has repeatedly signalled more regulation, and that enforcement and compensation now sit in the same Ministry. That is enough reason to get the standing obligations in order without waiting for the next announcement.

The Act and who it covers

The Health and Safety at Work Act 1996 applies to all workplaces in Fiji, including its territorial waters and Fiji-registered ships and aircraft, with the sole exclusion of workplaces and operations connected with the Mining Act, Quarries Act, Explosives Act and Petroleum (Exploration and Exploitation) Act. It commenced on 1 November 1996 (with the inspection and penalty parts following on 1 November 1997), was amended in 1996 and 2003, and was consolidated in the 2016 revised edition of the laws. It is administered by the Ministry of Employment, Productivity and Workplace Relations through its Occupational Health and Safety Division, usually referred to as the National Occupational Health and Safety Service, or NOHSS.

The structure will be familiar to anyone who knows the Australian or New Zealand Acts of the same era. Part 2 sets general duties: employers to workers (section 9), employers and the self-employed to non-workers (section 10), persons in control of workplaces (section 11), manufacturers, importers, suppliers and installers (section 12), and workers themselves (section 13). Part 3 covers workplace arrangements — representatives and committees. Part 4 covers notification and records. Parts 7 and 8 give inspectors their powers, including improvement, prohibition and penalty notices. Six sets of regulations sit underneath: Administration (1997), Training (1997), Representatives and Committees (1997), General Workplace Conditions (2003), Control of Hazardous Substances (2006) and Diving (2006).

Workers have duties too. Under section 13, every worker must take reasonable care not to create or increase a risk to anyone at the workplace, must cooperate with the employer so the employer can meet its own duties, and must use the equipment supplied for their protection in accordance with instructions. That matters for the way you write procedures: the law expects you to instruct, and expects them to follow.

The employer duties, one by one

Section 9(1) is the whole duty in one line: "Every employer shall ensure the health and safety at work of all his or her workers." Section 9(2) then lists the ways you breach it, and the regulations add the specifics. Read together, they amount to six things an inspector will expect to see.

A written policy, developed with your workers

Section 9(2)(f) requires you to develop, in consultation with your workers, a policy relating to health and safety at work that enables effective cooperation between employer and workers and provides "adequate mechanisms for reviewing the effectiveness of the measures or the redesigning of the said policy whenever appropriate". The policy is also the first supporting document the Ministry asks for when you apply for a general workplace inspection. A policy copied from a template and never reviewed satisfies neither the wording nor the inspector.

Hazard identification, risk assessment and control

Regulation 66(1) of the General Workplace Conditions Regulations requires every employer to "undertake the necessary hazard identification and risk assessment, and implement risk control measures to eliminate or minimise to as far as is practicable any OHS risks" arising from the undertaking, for workers and for anyone else within the workplace. The Regulations then set specific standards for particular hazards — confined spaces (with a written entry permit kept for at least a year), manual handling, noise, electrical work, falls (with six-monthly inspection of fall-protection systems by a competent person), dangerous substances, hazardous work requiring lock-out and tag-out procedures, and remote or isolated work.

Information, instruction, training and supervision — in appropriate languages

Section 9(2)(c) requires you to provide "in appropriate languages, such information, instruction, training and supervision as may be necessary". The phrase is not decorative: in a workforce that may speak Fijian, Fiji Hindi and English in the same crew, a procedure that exists only in one of them is a procedure some of your workers have not been given. The Training Regulations 1997 add, at regulation 6, that all persons at a workplace shall undergo health and safety training so as to perform their task safely — workers without supervisory responsibilities, supervisors, and managers or owners alike.

Emergency procedures, tested every six months

Regulation 34 requires adequate shutdown and evacuation procedures, with the arrangements kept on display, one or more trained responsible persons to oversee an emergency and use first-attack firefighting equipment, and testing of the evacuation procedures at least once every six months. The training of those responsible persons must be undertaken by the National Fire Authority, which the Regulations name as "the sole authority for fire safety requirements" — which is why an NFA certificate is on the Ministry's inspection checklist.

First aid, inspected quarterly and recorded

Regulations 45 to 52 require first aid supplies (the minimum is in Schedule 1), a trained person in charge of them, facilities that are marked and signposted, quarterly inspection of the supplies, and a register of every first aid treatment given — its nature, date and time, the name and signature of the person treated, and the injury — kept with or as part of the accident register.

Safe plant, safe premises, safe systems of work

The remainder of section 9(2) covers plant and systems of work, the use, handling, storage and transport of plant and substances, the condition of the workplace and its access and egress, and the working environment and welfare facilities. Regulation 66(2), added in 2024, restates the plant and systems-of-work duty in the Regulations so that it sits alongside the inspection cycle.

Representatives and committees

Where you employ 20 or more workers at a workplace, section 18 requires you to establish a health and safety committee for that workplace, and not doing so is an offence with a fine of up to $10,000 for a corporation or $5,000 otherwise. Below 20, section 16 allows a majority of the workers to appoint a health and safety representative — it is their choice, not yours to refuse.

The Representatives and Committees Regulations 1997 govern how a committee runs, and the details are the kind an inspector checks:

• Composition. At least half the members must be elected by the workers (section 19(2)); the employer's nominees must include someone with the authority to give effect to what the committee resolves; the size is agreed between employer and elected worker representatives, but not fewer than six members (regulation 7).
• Representation. Shifts, work groups, geographical location, occupations and the hazards present must all be considered in setting the committee's make-up — which for a business with sites on more than one island is a live question, not a formality.
• Meetings. At least once every three months, on paid time, with an agenda circulated at least three working days ahead (regulation 11).
• Minutes. Kept for not less than seven years, held by the employer for safekeeping, accessible to members, and displayed at the workplace where workers can read them.
• Terms and training. Worker representatives serve two-year terms; the employer must train representatives and members, without loss of pay, in committee functions, the applicable regulations, inspection and hazard control, accident investigation, problem solving and communication (regulation 12).

Section 20 gives the committee its functions — facilitating cooperation, helping to formulate and review health and safety practices and policies, investigating unsafe matters, and requesting an inspector where it cannot resolve them — and section 21 obliges the employer to support it. A committee whose minutes cannot be produced for the last seven years, or which last met eight months ago, is a finding waiting to be written.

Accidents: notify within 48 hours, record at the workplace

Section 26 of the Act requires the employer to notify prescribed accidents and other matters, and regulation 6 of the Administration Regulations 1997 prescribes them broadly: any accident, incident or disease at a workplace, "whether or not it causes the death of, or bodily injury to, any person", and any other matter affecting the health or safety of any person. The employer must give the Chief Health and Safety Inspector written notice in Form OHSF 1 "as soon as possible, and in any event not later than 48 hours after the occurrence". Where the injury is serious, immediate notice by the most expedient means comes first, and the written notice follows.

Three further rules sit in the same regulation. The notice must give the name, residence and age of anyone killed, injured or made ill, the nature and circumstances of the event, and enough detail for an inspector to find the exact place. Until an inspector has visited the scene and completed an inquiry, nobody may do anything likely to prevent discovery of the cause, except to care for the injured — so the site is preserved, and photographs before anything moves are worth taking. And a breach of the regulation carries a fine of up to $10,000 for a corporation or $5,000 otherwise.

Separately from notification, section 28 and regulation 7 require every employer to maintain a record at the workplace, in Form OHSF 2, of every accident, disease and incident. For an accident the record must show the date, the date it was notified to the Chief Inspector, the name, sex, age and occupation of anyone injured, the likely causes, the period of incapacity and the remedial action taken; for a disease, the disease and the examining medical practitioner; for an incident with no injury, the cause, the details and the remedial action. Read those fields carefully: the form expects a cause and a remedy for every entry, which means the record is a corrective-action register as well as a log.

Registering the workplace

Under section 29 of the Act and regulation 8 of the Administration Regulations, an employer or appointed manager who occupies, uses or manages a workplace of a type listed in Schedule 1 of those Regulations, in which 20 or more persons are employed, must notify the Chief Health and Safety Inspector of the workplace's particulars on Form OHSF 3, with the prescribed fee, and must continue to give notice no later than 31 March each year with amended particulars on Form OHSF 4. A certificate of registration is issued for each workplace. Failure carries a fine of up to $5,000.

Schedule 1 is not a short list of dangerous trades. It runs to more than 120 classes, from poultry farming, forestry and fishing through every kind of manufacturing, construction, wholesale and retail, transport and storage, banking and insurance, professional services, hospitals, restaurants and hotels, and ends with "business without a fixed workplace". Assume you are on it and check, rather than the reverse.

In practice the registration runs through the Ministry's general workplace inspection service, which the Government's businessNOW portal describes as an application or renewal for a general workplace inspection with NOHSS, "in compliance with HASAWA 1996 and its subsidiary legislations", open to all companies or businesses. The supporting documents it lists are your company OHS policy, your National Fire Authority certificate and your emergency evacuation plan, with a fee schedule from $180 to $540 and a stated turnaround of five to seven working days. Those three documents are, not coincidentally, the first three obligations in the section above.

The inspection and audit cycle since August 2024

Since 1 August 2024, regulation 66(3) of the General Workplace Conditions Regulations has required every employer to ensure that each workplace under its control listed in Schedule 2 "is inspected and audited by a health and safety inspector" — every year where the workplace or nature of business is listed as high risk, and every three years where it is listed as low risk. An inspector may also inspect and audit at any other time. On the strength of the inspection and audit, the Chief Health and Safety Inspector may issue a certificate of compliance, may cancel a low-risk certificate where the business is subsequently found to be high risk, and in that case the annual requirement applies.

Schedule 2 lists 59 high-risk and 61 low-risk classes of business. Some of the allocations are worth knowing before you assume which side you fall on:

Two observations. First, a low-risk classification changes the frequency of the visit, not the duties: the policy, the risk assessments, the training records, the 48-hour notices, the committee minutes and the first aid register are all still required, and they are what the inspector will read when the visit comes. Second, the certificate of compliance is discretionary — the regulation says the Chief Inspector "may" issue it — so the sensible aim is not to pass the visit but to be able to show, on any day, the evidence the visit will ask for.

Penalties and notices

The Act attaches its own maximum fine to each duty, and the pattern is a corporate figure and a lower figure for anyone else. As at the consolidated text of September 2026:

• Sections 9 and 10 — the general duties to workers and to non-workers: up to $100,000 for a corporation or $10,000 in any other case.
• Section 18 — failing to establish a committee: up to $10,000 or $5,000. The same figures apply under section 19 to breaches of the composition rules.
• Section 26 and Administration regulation 6 — failing to notify an accident: up to $10,000 or $5,000.
• Section 29 and regulation 8 — failing to register a workplace: up to $5,000.
• General Workplace Conditions regulation 65 — any breach of those Regulations without its own penalty: up to $20,000 for a corporation or $2,000 otherwise; workers, up to $200.
• Section 66 — where no penalty is specified: $15,000 for a corporation or $1,000 otherwise, rising to $100,000 or $10,000 where the contravention was in fact likely to cause death or bodily injury. The court may apply the fine for the benefit of the injured or deceased person or their family.

Section 67 reaches individuals. Where a corporation's offence is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or attributable to wilful neglect by, an officer — a director, secretary or executive officer, or anyone whose directions the directors are accustomed to act on — that officer is also guilty and liable to the same penalty. And inspectors do not need a court for the first response: Part 8 gives them improvement notices, prohibition notices and penalty notices, with the forms prescribed in the Administration Regulations.

Running this across islands

Fiji is more than 330 islands, and while almost 90 per cent of the population lives on Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, a great deal of the economy — resorts, plantations, fishing, inter-island shipping, construction on outer-island projects — does not. Every obligation above attaches to a workplace, and a business with six workplaces has six sets of committee minutes, six accident records, six evacuation tests a year and six registrations. The law does not scale down because head office is a flight away.

That produces three recurring failures, all of them administrative rather than technical:

1. 1.The 48-hour notice is missed because the news travels slowly. An injury on a Wednesday afternoon at a site with patchy coverage reaches the safety manager on Friday. The regulation counts from the occurrence, not from when head office found out.
2. 2.The record exists, but not at the workplace. Regulation 7 requires the OHSF 2 record to be maintained at the workplace. A central spreadsheet in Suva does not satisfy that if the site cannot produce it when an inspector arrives unannounced under regulation 66(4).
3. 3.Evidence is generated for the visit, not from the work. Six-monthly evacuation tests, quarterly first-aid inspections, three-monthly committee meetings and two-yearly representative elections are all dated obligations. When they are reconstructed the week before an audit, the dates do not line up and the inspector notices.

This is the place where the choice between paper, spreadsheets and software genuinely matters, and it is worth being factual about why. Connectivity on outer islands and remote sites is intermittent, so a web-only system that needs a live connection to record an incident fails at exactly the moment it is needed, and staff revert to paper that is then re-keyed late or not at all. A system that works offline — capturing the incident, the photographs and the first-aid entry on the device and synchronising when a connection returns — removes the delay between the event and the record, which is what the 48-hour clock, the site-preservation rule and the "at the workplace" requirement all turn on. That is not a marketing point; it is the practical difference between a record dated the day of the event and one dated the day the boat came in.

Whatever you use, the design test is simple: can the supervisor on the most remote site log an incident, take the photographs and see the remedial action assigned to a named person, without a signal and without calling anyone? If not, the record will be late, and late is the finding.

Tourism, construction and agriculture

Three sectors carry most of Fiji's workplace risk and each meets the law in a slightly different place. The duties are the same; what differs is which regulation bites hardest and how often the inspector is scheduled to arrive.

Tourism and hospitality

"Restaurants, hotels and accommodation" is classified low risk in Schedule 2, so the scheduled inspection and audit is three-yearly rather than annual. That does not reduce the duties, and the ones that matter most in a resort are section 10 — the duty to people who are not your workers, which includes every guest on the premises — regulation 34's six-monthly evacuation tests with NFA-trained wardens, the first-aid register under regulation 52, and regulation 56 on remote or isolated work, which prohibits requiring a worker to perform hazardous work alone and requires a reliable system of regular direct communication with anyone working remote from others. A resort on its own island with boat crews, dive operations and night staff is the case the regulation was written for; diving work has its own 2006 Regulations on top.

Construction

Building construction, non-building construction, bricklaying and tiling and the other special construction trades are all high risk in Schedule 2, so the inspection and audit is annual. The General Workplace Conditions Regulations already cover the hazards that dominate construction — falls under regulation 55 (including the six-monthly inspection of harnesses, lines and anchorages by a competent person), confined spaces with written entry permits, electrical work near exposed cables, hazardous work with lock-out and tag-out, and traffic control — and the Ministry said in September 2023 that a dedicated construction regulation was in draft. Until one is gazetted, those general provisions are the standard, and a principal contractor should expect the inspector to ask for the risk assessments and the training records of subcontractors as well as its own.

Agriculture, forestry and fishing

Schedule 2 splits the sector. Poultry farming, forestry and logging, and fishing are high risk and annual; fruit growing, vegetable growing, cereal grains, sheep, cattle and pigs, and other agriculture are low risk and three-yearly. Sugar manufacture and meat processing are high risk. Across all of them, the provisions most often engaged are remote or isolated work, the manual handling risk assessment and control requirements in regulations 39 to 42, the control of hazardous substances under the 2006 Regulations, and section 9(2)(c)'s requirement for training and information "in appropriate languages" for a workforce that is often seasonal and multilingual. The workplace-registration duty applies once 20 or more people are employed at the workplace, and Schedule 1 of the Administration Regulations lists all of these activities.

Where we come in

Teammate App is our product, so treat this section as what it is. The obligations above resolve into records: a policy with a review history, risk assessments with named controls, training records in the language they were delivered in, an accident and incident register with a cause and a remedial action against every entry, first-aid entries, committee minutes for seven years, and dated evidence of evacuation tests, first-aid inspections and fall-protection checks. That is what our platform is built to hold — 15 modules across risk, incidents, audits, actions, training, contractors, assets and documents, aligned to ISO 45001, 9001 and 14001, on web, iOS and Android, and working offline so a record made on an outer island is dated the day it happened. Our own information security management system is certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 by Telarc under JAS-ANZ accreditation, and customer data is hosted in Australia on AWS Sydney.

What software cannot do is comply for you. The Chief Health and Safety Inspector issues the certificate of compliance on the strength of an inspection and audit of your workplace, not of your records system, and no product can make an evacuation test happen on time or a committee meet. A system keeps the evidence current and findable. The work it evidences is still yours.

Questions we get asked