Twelve months is the number most people quote. It is right for a lot of plant and wrong for everything that lifts a person or forms part of a lifting assembly. Here is the interval that actually applies to each class of equipment, and where the six-month rule comes from.
Ask five contractors how often a crane needs inspecting and you will get twelve months from all five. Ask about the man basket hanging off it, or the slings between the hook and the load, and the answers scatter. The interval is not one number. It follows what the equipment does, not what it costs.
The intervals we work to
| Equipment | Interval | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile, crawler and tower cranes | 12 months | Thorough examination of the lifting appliance, plus a functional test through the operating range. |
| Forklifts, telehandlers, reach stackers | 12 months | Examined as a lift truck, with fork wear measurement and mast condition. |
| Scissor lifts, boom lifts, mast climbers, cradles | 6 months | The machine lifts people. The shorter interval reflects the consequence of failure. |
| Man baskets and personnel platforms | 6 months | Same reason, and the suspension bridle is examined as lifting gear in its own right. |
| Slings, shackles, eyebolts, chain blocks, beams | 6 months | Lifting accessories wear fast, get abused and are easy to swap between sites. |
| Harnesses, lanyards, self-retracting lifelines | 6 months | Fall protection is single-use in an arrest event and degrades in UV and heat. |
| Erected scaffold | 7 days | Before first use, after alteration, after severe weather, and at intervals not exceeding seven days. |
| Earthmoving plant, generators, compressors, tankers | 12 months | Condition-based examination of the machine and its safety devices. |
Where the six-month rule comes from
The split between six and twelve months traces back to LOLER Regulation 9 in the UK, which set six months for equipment used to lift people and for lifting accessories, and twelve months for other lifting equipment. Saudi industrial clients did not adopt LOLER as law, but their contractor HSE requirements imported the same logic, and Aramco GI 7.028 works on the same principle for lifting equipment inspection and testing. If your client HSE manual names a shorter interval, that shorter interval wins.
The interval is a ceiling, not a target
A certificate valid until March does not mean the machine is fit in February. Three things reset the clock regardless of the date on the sticker:
- Any repair or modification to a load bearing part.
- Any incident where the equipment was overloaded, dropped, struck or involved in an arrest.
- Any period of storage or transport where the equipment left your control and came back without paperwork.
In each of those cases the equipment gets re-examined before it works again, and a new certificate number is issued. The old one stays in the registry showing what it was, which is exactly what an auditor wants to see.
Daily and pre-use checks are separate
None of the above replaces the operator's pre-use check. A third-party certificate says the machine was fit on the day an examiner looked at it. The daily check says the operator looked at it this morning. Sites that treat the annual certificate as a substitute for the daily check are the sites where a defect runs for eleven months.
We inspect and certify plant and lifting equipment across the Kingdom, and every certificate is verifiable online the moment it is issued.