The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020

What it does

The Code is Act No. 37 of 2020. It sets the rules for safety, health and working conditions at work. It covers the licensing and registration of establishments, the duties of employers on the safety and health of those they employ, hours of work and overtime, welfare facilities, the engagement of contract labour and the work of inspectors. It is one of four labour codes and was brought into force with the others on 21 November 2025.

Working time is the provision most readily felt. The site's note on the labour codes, which treats the four codes together, records that working hours are capped at eight in a day and forty-eight in a week, overtime is payable at twice the ordinary rate, and there is a ceiling of 144 hours of overtime in any quarter. The note stresses that the ceiling is a limit and not a cost: exceeding it is a completed contravention and not an expensive choice.

Who it binds

Employers and workers in the establishments the Code covers, which include factories, mines, plantations, docks and the other establishments within its definitions, and contractors and principal employers where contract labour is engaged. The Central Government is the appropriate Government for some establishments and the State Governments for others, and the rules made by each fill in the detail.

What moved out of it

The Code absorbed thirteen earlier statutes and repealed them. They include the Factories Act, 1948, the Mines Act, 1952 and the Plantations Labour Act, 1951, which the site's note on retrenchment names as repealed by this Code on its commencement. The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 and the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979 also went into the Code. A proceeding, licence or liability under one of those Acts is dealt with as the Code's repeal and savings provision allows.

The overlap with the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 is worth noting. The Industrial Relations Code's rules on permission to retrench in the larger establishments use the older definitions of a factory, mine and plantation, and the retrenchment note observes that its section 77(3) has not been updated to the definitions in this Code.

What has changed, and when

The Code was passed in 2020 and brought into force on 21 November 2025. The Central Government notified final rules under all four codes on 8 May 2026, as the labour codes note records, and the rules supply the forms, returns and procedures that the text of the Code leaves to them.

What turns on it in practice

For the employment practice, the Code turns on two obligations that attach as an establishment grows. Hours and overtime are counted against the quarterly ceiling, and a business that absorbs demand by overtime and not by headcount should know its position while the quarter is open and not afterwards. And contract labour raises the question of whose licence the people on the premises work under, which many plants document loosely.

The exposure concentrates differently by sector. For manufacturing and industrial businesses it lies in working hours and contract labour. For technology and services businesses the hours cap applies despite a culture that has treated hours as elastic for salaried staff. For infrastructure and projects, where contract labour is the workforce model and not a supplement to it, the greatest exposure is where the principal employer does not hold current records of who the contractors have engaged.