Insights
What Is a Formal Hazard Assessment?
A Formal Hazard Assessment (FHA) breaks a recurring task down into its real steps, rates the risk of every hazard along the way, and records the controls in place - built once, in advance, and kept on file as the company's standing reference for that task. It's the planning document an FLHA checks against on site each day.
Published 5 Sep 2026 · The On-Track Team
5 min readKey Takeaways
- An FHA is built in advance for a recurring task; an FLHA is completed on site, that day, by the worker doing the task - they are different evidence, not interchangeable.
- Every hazard gets a Severity rating and a Probability (Likelihood) rating - never left blank - which together produce the Overall Risk Rating.
- Controls are split into three categories: Engineering, Administrative, and PPE - never combined into one blob.
- A compliant FHA has a step sequence - preparation, performing the task, and clean-up - not just a hazard list.
- FHAs are one of the records sampled under a COR or SECOR audit's hazard assessment element.
1. FHA vs FLHA
Both documents assess hazards, and the names get used loosely across provinces and certifying partners - which is exactly why the distinction matters. A Formal Hazard Assessment is written in advance, by a supervisor or safety coordinator, for a task the company performs regularly. It's the standing reference: what the hazards of this job are, how likely and severe each one is, and what controls are in place - reviewed and updated periodically, not rewritten every shift.
A Field Level Hazard Assessment is the opposite in timing: completed by the worker doing the task, on site, immediately before starting, checking whether today's actual conditions still match what the FHA planned for. An auditor asking for FHAs and getting a stack of that day's FLHAs instead - or the reverse - is a common, avoidable gap. For the full detail on the on-site side of this, see our FLHA guide.
Terminology varies, the roles don't
2. What a compliant FHA contains
A properly built FHA identifies the task, the positions who perform it, who assessed it and when, and who reviewed it since. It breaks the task into a real step sequence - preparation and inspection, performing the task itself, and completion and clean-up - because a hazard list with no steps reads as generic rather than built around how the work actually happens. Under each step, every hazard is named, tagged as a safety or health hazard, rated for risk, and matched to controls split into three categories: Engineering, Administrative, and PPE - never combined into one line.
Every hazard gets a rating - no exceptions
3. How the risk rating works
Most Alberta and Western Canadian programs use a two-tier risk rating: Severity (how bad an incident could be) multiplied by Probability, sometimes called Likelihood (how likely it is to happen), producing an Overall Risk Rating. On a simple 1-to-3 scale for each factor, that gives a 1-to-9 result, typically banded into Low, Medium, and High:
| Severity \ Probability | 1 - Unlikely | 2 - Possible | 3 - Likely |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 - Major | 3 | 6 | 9 |
| 2 - Moderate | 2 | 4 | 6 |
| 1 - Minor | 1 | 2 | 3 |
Illustrative 3x3 example - the exact scale and bands vary by certifying partner and by manual.
A small number of programs use a three-tier version instead (exposure, consequence, and probability rated separately) - either is acceptable to most certifying partners, and the right choice is usually whichever one the company can consistently apply, not whichever looks more sophisticated on paper.
4. Why it matters at audit
Formal Hazard Assessments are core evidence sampled under a COR or SECOR audit's hazard assessment element, and a hazard assessment gap can score badly enough to affect the whole audit regardless of how strong the rest of the program is. Auditors are trained to spot the same handful of tells: hazards copied from an unrelated industry template, ratings left blank, controls lumped into one generic line, or an FHA that's actually an FLHA mislabelled to fill a gap. A set of FHAs built around the company's real tasks, equipment, and terminology - reviewed and dated - reads as exactly what it is.
Our Services
Formal Hazard Assessments, built for your actual tasks
Included in every custom safety manual we build, and available as a standalone deliverable if your existing program just needs its hazard assessments brought up to a compliant format.
See custom safety manual options5. Frequently asked
Is a Formal Hazard Assessment the same as an FLHA?
No, and an auditor treats them as two different kinds of evidence. An FHA (Formal Hazard Assessment) is built once, in advance, for a recurring task - it lives in the safety manual as the standing reference. An FLHA (Field Level Hazard Assessment) is completed by the worker on site, immediately before starting, confirming today's actual conditions still match what the FHA anticipated. A mature program needs both: the FHA as the plan, the FLHA as the daily check against it. See our full FLHA guide for that side of it.
What has to be rated on an FHA - can Severity or Probability be left blank?
No. Every hazard on a compliant FHA gets a Severity rating, a Probability (Likelihood) rating, and the Overall Risk Rating those two produce - never left for later or for the client to fill in. A hazard with no rating reads to an auditor as a hazard nobody actually assessed, which is a harder finding than a hazard rated too low.
Do the controls need to be split into categories, or can they be one list?
Split into three: Engineering controls, Administrative controls, and PPE. Lumping them into one control statement is one of the most common ways an otherwise complete FHA reads as thin - it suggests the hierarchy of controls wasn't actually worked through, just listed.
Does every task need its own Formal Hazard Assessment?
Every recurring task with a meaningful hazard profile does - built around the actual steps a crew follows, not a generic industry template. Very similar tasks can often share one assessment if the hazards and controls genuinely don't change between them; the test an auditor applies is whether the assessment on file actually describes how the crew does the work.
Can On-Track build FHAs for an existing safety program, without a full manual rebuild?
Yes. Formal Hazard Assessments are included in every custom safety manual we build, and they're also available as a standalone deliverable for a company that already has a manual and just needs its hazard assessments brought up to a compliant, audit-ready format.