How long is a First Aid at Work certificate valid?

A First Aid at Work (FAW) certificate is valid for 3 years — and so is an Emergency First Aid at Work (EFAW) certificate. FAW is the 3-day qualification, EFAW the 1-day version. Requalify before the expiry date: once the certificate lapses, the holder no longer counts as a first-aider, and there is no statutory grace period.

FAW and EFAW: which is which

• FAW — the full 3-day course, for first-aiders in higher-risk workplaces such as construction sites, workshops and transport yards. Valid 3 years.
• EFAW — the 1-day course covering emergency essentials, typically sufficient for lower-risk workplaces. Also valid 3 years.

Which one you need — and how many people should hold it — follows from your first-aid needs assessment. Under the Health and Safety (First-Aid) Regulations 1981, every employer must assess their first-aid needs based on hazards, workforce size, shift patterns, lone and remote working, and provide first-aiders accordingly. For most construction and transport firms, that assessment points to FAW, with enough qualified people to cover holidays, sickness and split sites.

Renewal: requalify before the date, refresh every year

• FAW renewal is a 2-day requalification course, taken before the current certificate expires. It resets validity for another 3 years.
• EFAW renewal means retaking the 1-day course.
• In between, HSE strongly recommends an annual refresher — a half-day skills update — because resuscitation and bandaging skills fade faster than a 3-year cycle assumes. It's a recommendation rather than a legal duty, but it's the difference between a certificate on paper and a first-aider who still knows what to do.

No statutory grace period

The date on the certificate is the date that counts. Once it has passed, the holder should not be counted as a first-aider — even if the requalification course is already booked for next week. If they were the person named in your needs assessment, your workplace may be short of legally required cover from that day.

There's a second, practical cliff edge: training providers generally accept candidates onto the shorter 2-day FAW requalification only while the certificate is in date or has lapsed by no more than about a month. Leave it longer and it's the full 3-day course again — more cost, more days off the job. (The same pattern, even stricter, applies to SMSTS and SSSTS, where the refresher door closes on the expiry date itself.)

What a lapsed certificate costs in practice

• A gap in legal cover. If your needs assessment says you need a first-aider on site and your only qualified person has lapsed, you're non-compliant until someone requalifies.
• Turned away at the gate. Principal contractors routinely require proof of first-aid cover; a lapsed certificate can hold up a whole crew's start on site.
• The escalation cost. A missed date turns 2 days of training into 3, at short notice, when courses near you may be booked out for weeks.

Three years is exactly long enough to forget

First aid dates fail quietly: three years is too long for anyone to hold in their head and too irregular to sit in a routine. Most firms track them in a training matrix next to CSCS cards and Driver CPC deadlines — which works only if someone checks it weekly, every week, including the busy ones. Our free training matrix template gets the list in order; a tool like Certly does the watching, emailing you 90, 60 and 30 days before each certificate expires — enough time to book the 2-day requalification instead of the 3-day restart. Try it free.