Maximum Legal Weight Manual Handling

When lifting at work, certain guidelines and techniques should be implemented as far as possible. This can reduce the risk of injury in certain circumstances. Training in these procedures is the responsibility of your employer as part of their legal duty of care. If you have suffered an injury due to the employer`s negligence, because you have exceeded the maximum weight that must be lifted at work, the extent of your injury is one of the factors that determine the compensation you could receive. According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), a man should not lift anything heavier than 25kg, while the safe lifting weight for a woman is no heavier than 16kg. However, the HSE said these were general guidelines rather than safe limits for lifting. He added that lifting weights below these amounts carries a low risk of injury. This highlights the need to evaluate manual handling operations on an individual basis and helps explain why regulations are reluctant to set a “safe lifting weight” or a “maximum manual handling weight”. There are no specific limits to manual handling and lifting at work, as it depends on a variety of factors, such as the nature of the task and the individual skills of the employee. In addition to the weight of the load, you should also consider factors such as the environment in which you lift, where the load is held on your body and carries the distance. For a summary of heavy vehicle laws in the workplace, please contact our lawyers who can quickly and easily tell you if you can make a claim. As mentioned in the previous section, the weight of the load is not the only factor to consider when asking “What is the maximum weight limit I can lift at work?” If you look at a load of, say, 10 kg, one could take it for certain that this single load will be lifted once.

But what if there were 10 or 100 10 kg loads that had to be moved, and if they had to be transported through narrow spaces or over long distances? Risk assessments vary from workplace to workplace. The Health and Safety Executive offers excellent risk assessment resources that break down the different steps and requirements of a risk assessment and help simplify the manual processing of risk assessments. In addition, exceeding the recommended weight limit can cause musculoskeletal disorders. As you can see below, 470,000 new or long-term work-related musculoskeletal disorders were reported in 2020-2021. 162,000 of them were reported during this year. If you`d like to learn more about manual handling, check out our manual handling training. If you have any further questions about workplace safety, please do not hesitate to contact us and we will do our best to help you. Since each manual handling complaint is unique, we recommend that you use these numbers as a guide. Once you have spoken to a member of our team and your claim has been properly investigated, we should be able to give you a more accurate estimate of compensation.

If you would like to discuss a manual processing complaint immediately, please call 0800 073 8804 today or use our live chat feature. To learn more about lifting injury claims, please read our guide to manual claims processing. It shows that at elbow height, the maximum a man should wear is 20 kg, while for a woman it is 13 kg. Also, a man at shoulder height should carry no more than 10 kg, while a woman should carry only 7 kg. Beckett & Co Solicitors handles claims for injuries caused by lifting or manual handling at work and we are happy to discuss your potential claim free of charge. As stated above, there is no legal limit to what you can raise. However, to reduce the risk of accidents or injuries during manual handling, a quick load inspection to determine the level of risk can help protect yourself and others. HSE Manual Handling Assessment Tables (MAC) help service owners assess the most common risk factors associated with raising and lowering, transporting and team handling.

It uses a variety of illustrations and infographics to show how different factors increase risk levels and how each area of risk requires careful consideration of how to protect people`s well-being.