📋 Part of our complete series: Welding Fumes Assessment Australia: The Complete Guide
A welding fumes risk assessment is a legal requirement for every Australian business where welding, cutting, or metal grinding occurs. Under the model WHS Regulations, a PCBU must assess the risk of hazardous substance exposure — including welding fumes — before implementing controls. Without a documented risk assessment, you cannot demonstrate compliance, you cannot select the right controls, and you cannot protect your workers from preventable lung disease, cancer, and neurological harm. This guide explains exactly what a compliant risk assessment involves and how to conduct one. For more information, see our guide to chemical hazards and workplace exposure standards.
What Is a Welding Fumes Risk Assessment?
A welding fumes risk assessment is a systematic process for identifying, evaluating, and controlling the risks arising from exposure to welding fumes in the workplace. It is the foundational document from which all other welding fume management activities flow — air monitoring, control selection, health monitoring, and training are all informed by the risk assessment findings.
Under the model Work Health and Safety Regulations (adopted by most Australian jurisdictions), a PCBU conducting work involving hazardous chemicals must manage the risk by following the hierarchy of controls. Before any controls can be selected, the PCBU must first understand the nature and extent of the hazard — that is, they must conduct a risk assessment. For welding fumes specifically, the SafeWork Australia Code of Practice: Welding Processes 2021 provides detailed guidance on what a compliant risk assessment should cover and how to document it.
A risk assessment for welding fumes is not a one-time administrative exercise. It must be kept current and reviewed whenever the work changes, when new information becomes available (such as updated WES values), when monitoring results indicate that controls are not working, or at intervals not exceeding five years.
Why Risk Assessment Matters Under Australian WHS Law
The January 2024 reduction in the welding fume WES from 5 mg/m³ to 1 mg/m³ fundamentally changed the risk landscape for Australian welding workplaces. Many businesses that had previously conducted risk assessments and concluded that their controls were adequate now need to revisit those conclusions in light of the new, much more stringent standard.
From a legal standpoint, the risk assessment is the primary document that demonstrates a PCBU’s exercise of their duty of care. A WHS regulator investigating a respiratory disease claim or conducting a proactive inspection will ask for the risk assessment. If none exists, or if it is clearly out of date, the PCBU is exposed to significant legal and financial consequences. More importantly, without a current risk assessment, workers are not being properly protected against a Group 1 carcinogen that causes lung cancer, manganism, COPD, and other serious diseases.
The risk assessment also enables proportionate action. Not all welding operations carry the same risk — a TIG welder working with mild steel in a well-ventilated workshop faces a very different exposure profile than a FCAW welder working with stainless steel in a confined space. A properly structured risk assessment identifies where the priority risks lie and ensures that the most intensive controls and monitoring are directed at the operations that need them most.
The Five-Step Welding Fumes Risk Assessment Process
A compliant welding fumes risk assessment follows a structured five-step process aligned with the SafeWork Australia Code of Practice and standard occupational hygiene practice.
Step 1: Identify the Hazards
Hazard identification involves documenting every welding-related operation in the workplace that could generate harmful airborne contaminants. This step requires a physical walkthrough of the workplace, interviews with workers and supervisors, and review of relevant documentation including safety data sheets (SDS), maintenance records, and any previous monitoring reports.
For each identified operation, the assessment should document: the welding or cutting process used (MIG, TIG, stick, FCAW, plasma cutting, oxy-fuel cutting, grinding); the base materials and their surface condition (painted, galvanised, coated); the consumables used (electrode type, wire composition, flux composition); the typical duration and frequency of the task; the workspace characteristics (open air, naturally ventilated, mechanically ventilated, confined); and the number and proximity of workers involved — including both the primary operator and any bystanders.
The hazard identification step should also consider non-obvious hazard sources. Surface coatings, plating, and treatments often receive less attention than the base metal, but can generate significant additional hazards. Welding through paint containing lead, epoxy, or chromate primers can produce highly toxic fumes at concentrations well in excess of relevant WES values. Cutting galvanised steelwork generates zinc oxide in quantities sufficient to cause metal fume fever. Any operation involving a material of unknown composition should be treated as high-risk pending investigation.
Step 2: Assess the Risks
For each identified hazard, the risk assessment must evaluate the likelihood and consequence of harm. In the context of welding fumes, this involves estimating the likely exposure level relative to the WES, and considering the potential health consequences of that exposure.
Exposure estimation at this stage may be qualitative or semi-quantitative. The assessor reviews available evidence — published fume generation data for each process and material, data from similar operations, any existing monitoring results — and uses professional judgment to classify the likely exposure level as low (likely well below WES), moderate (possibly near WES), or high (likely at or above WES). Where there is uncertainty about whether exposures are within acceptable limits, the precautionary principle applies: treat the situation as higher risk until monitoring data confirms otherwise.
The AIOH Occupational Exposure Assessment Framework and the UK’s COSHH Essentials Welding Supplement provide useful structured tools for semi-quantitative exposure estimation. These tools combine process, task, and environment characteristics into a numerical estimate of likely exposure, providing a more systematic basis for risk ranking than pure qualitative assessment.
For operations assessed as moderate or high risk, personal air monitoring is required to obtain quantitative exposure data. The risk assessment at this stage determines the priority and urgency of the monitoring program — high-risk operations should be monitored before lower-risk operations, and monitoring should be conducted promptly where the risk assessment indicates likely WES exceedances.
Step 3: Select and Implement Controls
Control selection follows the hierarchy of controls in descending order of effectiveness. The hierarchy requires that higher-order controls (elimination, substitution, isolation, engineering) be considered and implemented before lower-order controls (administrative, RPE) are relied upon. RPE is never an appropriate primary control for welding fumes — it can supplement engineering controls but cannot replace them as the principal risk management measure.
Elimination means removing the welding hazard entirely — for example, replacing site welding with factory-fabricated or prefabricated assemblies, or using mechanical joining methods (bolting, riveting) instead of welding where structurally appropriate. True elimination is often not practicable in welding-intensive industries, but the option should always be examined.
Substitution means replacing a higher-hazard process or material with a lower-hazard alternative that achieves the same functional outcome. Practical substitutions include: switching from FCAW to GMAW (MIG) for applications where both are technically suitable; using low-manganese welding consumables in place of standard grades where performance requirements are met; using water-cooled welding guns or torches that run cooler and generate less fume; or using alternative cutting methods (cold cutting, waterjet, laser) where access and cost allow.
Isolation involves physically separating the welding hazard from workers. Dedicated welding bays with permanent extraction systems, welding screens, and controlled access reduce the number of workers exposed and limit the spread of fumes through the workplace. Temporal isolation — scheduling high-fume operations during periods when other workers are absent — is an administrative form of isolation that can supplement physical measures.
Engineering controls are the primary and most reliable means of achieving WES compliance in enclosed welding environments. Local exhaust ventilation (LEV) captures welding fumes at or near the source before they enter the worker’s breathing zone. A properly designed, installed, commissioned, and maintained LEV system can achieve greater than 80% reduction in personal exposure. The design of LEV for welding should follow AS 1668.1, AS 4600, and the guidance in the SafeWork Australia Code of Practice on Welding Processes.
Administrative controls supplement engineering controls but cannot substitute for them. Relevant administrative measures include job rotation to limit individual exposure duration, task scheduling to minimise peak exposures, training in work positioning (keeping the head out of the fume plume), and supervision to ensure compliance with safe work procedures.
RPE is required as a final supplementary layer where engineering controls alone cannot achieve full WES compliance, or as a temporary measure during control improvement. RPE selection must be based on the specific fume components present and the required assigned protection factor (APF). For total welding fume control, a P2 half-face respirator (APF 10) is the minimum standard. For stainless steel welding with Cr(VI) risk, combination P2/A2 cartridges or a PAPR (APF 50) may be necessary. All RPE programs must include formal fit testing, maintenance procedures, and documented training.
Step 4: Document the Assessment
The risk assessment must be documented in writing. A documented assessment serves three purposes: it demonstrates the PCBU’s exercise of their duty of care, it provides a baseline for future review and comparison, and it communicates the findings and required actions to supervisors, workers, and safety representatives.
A compliant welding fumes risk assessment document should include: the date of the assessment and the names and qualifications of the assessors; a description of all operations assessed; the hazard identification findings including materials, processes, and environment; the exposure risk evaluation including any quantitative monitoring data; the control measures identified and selected; implementation responsibilities and timelines; the review trigger criteria and next review date; and sign-off by a senior person with accountability for WHS in the organisation.
Supporting documents — SDS, monitoring reports, LEV commissioning records — should be referenced in the risk assessment and retained as part of the WHS management system. Records related to hazardous substance exposure must be retained for a minimum of 30 years under WHS Regulations.
Step 5: Review and Update
A risk assessment must be reviewed and, where necessary, updated to ensure that it reflects current conditions and remains an accurate basis for risk management decisions. The SafeWork Australia Code of Practice on Welding Processes identifies the following as triggers for review:
- A change in the welding process, materials, consumables, or workspace
- New information about the health effects of welding fumes (such as a WES revision)
- A request by a worker health and safety representative
- Following an incident or near-miss involving welding fume exposure
- When monitoring results indicate that control measures are not adequately protecting workers
- At intervals not exceeding five years even if none of the above triggers have occurred
The review process should involve the relevant workers and supervisors, not just the safety manager or external consultant. Workers who perform welding tasks have direct knowledge of work conditions and variations that may not be apparent from documentation alone.
Risk Assessment vs Air Monitoring — How They Work Together
Risk assessment and air monitoring are complementary tools, not alternatives. The risk assessment provides the framework for understanding and managing the hazard; air monitoring provides the quantitative data needed to validate exposure estimates and verify control effectiveness.
The typical sequence is: risk assessment first to identify high-risk operations and prioritise monitoring resources; then targeted air monitoring of the highest-risk SEGs; then review of the risk assessment in light of monitoring results to confirm or revise the control strategy. This cycle repeats at intervals determined by the monitoring results and the rate of change in workplace conditions.
Where monitoring results indicate that a WES is exceeded, the risk assessment must be updated to reflect this finding and to document the control improvements required. Follow-up monitoring after control implementation provides the evidence that revised controls are working. This evidence is a critical component of the PCBU’s due diligence documentation.
Common Risk Assessment Findings for Welding Operations
In our experience conducting welding fumes assessments across Australian industry, the most common findings that require control improvement include:
Inadequate or absent LEV: Many workplaces rely on general ventilation or natural airflow without dedicated extraction at welding stations. This is rarely sufficient to achieve the 1 mg/m³ WES in enclosed environments. The risk assessment finding is typically a recommendation to design and install LEV, accompanied by interim RPE requirements.
LEV that is not maintained or positioned correctly: Even where LEV is installed, it frequently underperforms because extraction arms are not positioned close enough to the arc, filters are not changed on schedule, or ducts are kinked or partially blocked. A risk assessment should include an assessment of installed LEV performance, not just its existence.
Stainless steel welding without Cr(VI)-specific controls: Many risk assessments treat all welding operations identically, without applying the more stringent controls required for stainless steel. Given the IARC Group 1 classification of Cr(VI) and its WES of 0.01 mg/m³, stainless steel welding requires a separate risk assessment pathway with more intensive monitoring and controls.
RPE as the primary control: Reliance on P2 respirators as the sole or primary exposure control for welding fumes is not consistent with Australian WHS legislation or the Code of Practice. A risk assessment finding that RPE is the primary control will typically be flagged as a non-compliance requiring engineering control investment.
Contractors not covered by the assessment: Host PCBUs frequently overlook the exposure of visiting contractors who perform welding on their premises. The risk assessment must account for all workers under the PCBU’s control and influence, including subcontractors.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is qualified to conduct a welding fumes risk assessment?
A risk assessment for welding fumes requires knowledge of welding processes, hazardous substance chemistry, occupational health effects, WHS legislation, and exposure control methodology. The most appropriate person to conduct or lead a welding fumes risk assessment is a Certified Occupational Hygienist (COH) from the AIOH, potentially supported by site personnel with operational knowledge of the welding activities. For smaller, lower-risk operations, a suitably trained workplace safety officer with access to published guidance may conduct a preliminary assessment, but complex or high-risk operations should always involve an experienced occupational hygienist.
Do I need a risk assessment for outdoor welding?
Yes. The WHS duty of care and the WES apply regardless of whether welding is conducted indoors or outdoors. Outdoor conditions may provide better natural ventilation in many circumstances, but there are situations — sheltered areas, confined excavations, still air days, welding in the lee of buildings or structures — where outdoor exposures can be comparable to indoor levels. The risk assessment for outdoor welding must consider the variability of environmental conditions and ensure that controls are in place for adverse scenarios.
How long does a risk assessment remain valid?
A risk assessment must be reviewed at intervals not exceeding five years, and more frequently whenever any of the review triggers described above occur. In practice, for high-risk welding operations (stainless steel, FCAW, confined space), annual review is prudent. The 2024 WES change means any risk assessment conducted before January 2024 that used the old 5 mg/m³ WES as a reference point is effectively out of date and requires immediate updating.
Can I use a generic risk assessment template?
Generic templates can provide a useful starting point and checklist structure, but they cannot substitute for a site-specific assessment. A compliant risk assessment must be based on the actual processes, materials, workers, and conditions at your specific workplace. Completing a template without conducting a proper site walkthrough, process review, and hazard characterisation will not produce a document that meets Australian WHS requirements or that provides a meaningful basis for control decisions.
Commission a Welding Fumes Risk Assessment
OccHygiene’s occupational hygienists provide comprehensive welding fumes risk assessments for Australian businesses across all industry sectors. Our assessments are conducted in accordance with the SafeWork Australia Code of Practice on Welding Processes and the AIOH Code of Practice for Occupational Hygiene Practice in Australia.
Every assessment includes a physical site walkthrough, detailed hazard identification, exposure risk evaluation, prioritised control recommendations, and a documented assessment report suitable for WHS compliance purposes. Where air monitoring data is needed to support the risk evaluation, we integrate monitoring seamlessly into the assessment program.
