Three years. A First Aid at Work (FAW) certificate and an Emergency First Aid at Work (EFAW) certificate both run for three years from the date you pass.
The date on the certificate is the one that counts, not the date you booked the course or the date your last one ran out. Put it in the calendar the day it arrives.
Book the requalification before it expires, not after
This is the part that catches people out. The shorter requalification course is only open to you while your existing certificate is still in date. Let it lapse and you are usually looking at sitting the full course again: three days instead of two for FAW.
Awarding bodies differ on whether they allow any grace period after expiry, and it is not something to gamble a booking on. Treat the expiry date as a hard deadline.
Our advice to every workplace we train is simple: book the requalification about three months out. It gives you room to work around holidays, shift patterns and the one person who is always off when you need them.
The annual refresher nobody talks about
Here is the bit most employers have never been told. The Health and Safety Executive recommends that first aiders do a short refresher, normally around three hours, every year during the three year life of the certificate.
It is not a legal requirement and your certificate stays valid without it. But there is a good reason behind it. Skills fade. Compression depth, rate, and the confidence to actually start on a real person all drop off measurably within months of a course. Three years is a long time between practice sessions when the thing you are practising is keeping somebody alive.
If your first aiders have not touched a manikin since the day they qualified, they are certified. That is not the same as ready.
What about the other courses?
Most workplace training runs on the same three year cycle:
- First Aid at Work: 3 years
- Emergency First Aid at Work: 3 years
- Paediatric First Aid: 3 years
- Fire safety and manual handling: refresher periods vary by employer risk assessment, commonly 1 to 3 years
Mental health first aid certificates also typically run for three years, though the expectation is that the skills are used and discussed far more often than that.
How to check what you have got
If you have lost track of who is in date and who is not, the quickest fix is a list: name, course, pass date, expiry. Ten minutes with the certificates in front of you.
If we delivered the training we will have the records, so give us a ring and we can tell you who is due.
Who needs to be trained in the first place
The number of first aiders you need is not fixed by law at a specific figure. It comes out of a first aid needs assessment, which every employer is required to carry out. We cover how that works in a separate article.
