What Jobs Require OSHA 10? The Honest Answer

If you are reading this because a job posting asked for an OSHA 10 card, start with the fact that changes how you read every other page on this subject: OSHA does not require it. Not for your trade, not for anyone's. When the requirement is real it comes from somewhere else, and which somewhere decides whether you need the 10-hour or the 30-hour course and who is supposed to pay for it. The fastest way to check your own situation is the state requirement finder.

OSHA requires this of nobody

The agency says so on the program's own page:

It is important to note that this is a voluntary program and does not meet the training requirements for any OSHA standards.

The same page is equally blunt about what you receive at the end:

None of the courses within the Outreach Training Program is considered a certification.

Both sentences were read on OSHA's Outreach Training Program page on August 8, 2026. They are worth holding onto, because a large share of what is written about "OSHA 10 certification" describes a federal job requirement that does not exist. What exists is a voluntary awareness course, a completion card issued by the Department of Labor through an authorized trainer, and a market of employers and lawmakers who decided to require that card themselves.

That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to find out who is actually asking, because that is the person whose rules you have to satisfy.

Three places a real requirement comes from

1. State and city law

This is the only category where the answer is written down and enforceable, and it is where a job title genuinely does decide the outcome.

Nevada is the clearest example in the country. Under NRS 618.983 a construction worker has 15 days from being hired to obtain an OSHA-10 completion card, and the state does not treat the deadline as advisory:

If a construction worker other than a supervisory employee fails to present his or her employer with a current and valid completion card for an OSHA-10 course not later than 15 days after being hired, the employer shall suspend or terminate his or her employment.

The part almost no guide mentions is that Nevada did not stop at construction. The state program lists four:

There are 4 industries in the state of Nevada that are required by the Nevada Revised statutes (NRS or state law) to obtain OSHA 10 or 30 hour cards.

Those four are construction, conventions, cannabis, and entertainment. If you set up trade show booths in Las Vegas, work in a dispensary, or run stage rigging, you are in a category that a national listicle about construction trades will never tell you about. The full rule, with the statute and the dates, is on our Nevada requirements page.

New York City works differently and catches people out for the opposite reason. There an OSHA card by itself is not enough: Local Law 196 requires a Site Safety Training card, and those come from a registry the city maintains separately from OSHA's. The detail is on the New York City page.

2. Whoever owns the job

Most of the time nobody is invoking a statute. A general contractor makes the card a condition of being on the site, an owner writes it into the contract, or a staffing agency puts it in the posting because their client asked. This is a private requirement, and it is every bit as binding on you as a law is, with one practical difference: it is negotiable about timing and about who pays, in a way a statute is not.

3. Your union or apprenticeship

Many programs build the 10-hour course into intake and cover the cost. If you are in one, ask before you buy anything.

The trades where it comes up, and what we will not claim

Construction is where the card is asked for most, and general industry versions come up in warehousing and manufacturing. That much is uncontroversial.

What we are not going to do is publish a ranked list of the five trades that "require" OSHA 10, because we have not measured how often each trade is asked and neither has anyone else writing those lists. The ranking is invented, and inventing it would make an employer's preference look like a rule. Where a rule genuinely exists, it is a statute, we quote it, and we date it.

What to do with a posting that asks for it

1. Find out whether a law applies where you will work. If it does, the law decides the course and the deadline, and nothing else overrides it.
2. If no law applies, ask the employer or the general contractor which version they want: Construction or General Industry, 10-hour or 30-hour. These are different courses and the wrong one is a full loss.
3. Ask who pays before you pay. Employers and unions frequently cover it, and Nevada offers it at no charge through the state.
4. Only then buy, and buy from a trainer the Department of Labor authorizes. We keep that list, read from OSHA's own page, with the date we checked it.

The short version: no job requires OSHA 10 because OSHA says so. Plenty of jobs require it because a state, a city, a contractor, or a union says so, and those are four different conversations with four different answers about deadlines and money.