The Free Health Check-Up for Employees Over 40: Rule 5 Covers Three Sectors, Your State Draft Covers Everyone

Search for the new health check-up rule and you will find the same sentence on twenty different HR sites: under the labour codes, every employer must now provide a free annual health check-up to all employees above the age of forty. It is repeated by payroll vendors, insurance brokers and consultancies, and it is stated flatly, as settled law.

It is not what the rule says.

The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (Central) Rules, 2026 were notified as G.S.R. 345(E) on 8 May 2026. Rule 5 runs to five lines. It names three kinds of work, and factories are not one of them. The draft rules had included factories. The final notification did not.

That correction matters less than what comes after it. The states are writing their own rules right now, and the state drafts kept the wide version. Which means most employers reading this are in the strange position of being quoted a rule that does not bind them, while the rule that will bind them is broader than the one being quoted.

What Rule 5 actually says

The parent duty is section 6(1)(c) of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020. It does not decide anything by itself. It delegates:

Four separate blanks, all left to be filled in by rules. Until a government fills them in, section 6(1)(c) obliges nobody to do anything. The Central Government filled them in on 8 May 2026. Here is rule 5 in full, from the gazette:

Dock work. Building or other construction work. Mines, by the second proviso, through a separate rule. That is the list. An office, a shop, a restaurant, a gym, a hospital and a factory are all absent from it, and the absence of factories is deliberate rather than accidental: the draft central rules circulated for comment had factories in, and the final notification took them out. Every summary written off the draft is still in circulation, which is where the wrong sentence comes from.

The word the rule does not contain

Read sub-rule (1) again and notice what is missing. The heading of the rule says annual. The second proviso refers to annual medical examinations. Sub-rule (1) itself states no frequency at all. It says arrange to conduct a medical examination for an employee who has completed forty years of age, and stops.

In practice nobody is going to win an argument that the rule headed “Annual health examination of employees” means once in a lifetime. Treat it as annual. But the drafting has a practical consequence that is worth planning around: there is no anniversary rule, no due date and no window in the central text. Nothing tells you whether the clock starts on the date of joining, on the birthday, or on 1 January.

The state drafts noticed this gap. Maharashtra's, as summarised by compliance trackers, is reported to fix a window of 120 days from 1 January each year. That is the kind of detail that turns a duty into a calendar entry, and it is the reason the state rule is the one you will actually be audited against.

Employee, not worker, and the difference is your site engineer

Rule 5 says employee. The OSH Code defines “employee” and “worker” as two different things, and the gap between them is exactly the people who never think of themselves as covered by labour rules.

“Worker” excludes people employed in a managerial or administrative capacity, and people in a supervisory capacity drawing above the wage ceiling in the definition. “Employee” has no such exclusion: it reaches supervisory, managerial, administrative, technical and clerical work as well as manual and operational work.

So on a construction site, rule 5 does not stop at the labour force. The forty-four year old site engineer, the project manager, the store in-charge and the safety officer are all employees who have completed forty years of age. If your age mapping only covers the muster roll, it is already incomplete.

FORM-VIII is not a token check-up

The word “check-up” is doing a lot of work in the coverage. It suggests height, weight, blood pressure and a signature. FORM-VIII, prescribed by rule 5(2) and headed “Health Examination (Except mine employees)”, asks for considerably more than that.

Part A is filled by the employee: name, gender, age with date of birth, company, designation, Universal Account Number, Aadhaar number after obtaining consent, employer contact, address, phone, email, current medical illness and medication, and the nature of the job with detail where it is hazardous, physical, chemical, biological or ergonomic.

Part B is the medical officer's, and this is the part that has a price:

That is a full annual health panel including a thyroid test, a lipid profile, liver and kidney function, a chest radiograph and a cardiac trace. Priced per head, on a construction workforce, at a turnover rate where a third of the site can change between two examinations.

The first proviso to rule 5(2) is therefore not a footnote. An employer may avail the facility for medical examination through the Employees' State Insurance Corporation. For an employer already covered by ESI, that is the difference between a budget line and a routing decision, and it is the first thing to check rather than the last.

Whose duty is it when the crew belongs to a contractor

On most construction sites the people over forty are not on your payroll. They are on a contractor's. Rule 5 binds “every employer of dock work, building or other construction work”, and under the codes a contractor is an employer. So the primary duty follows the crew.

The allocation is confirmed by rule 86, which sets out the conditions of a contractor's licence. Clause (1)(iii) lists what the principal employer must provide when contract labour is working at its premises: toilet, washroom, drinking water, bathing facilities if required, changing room, first aid box, canteen and creche. Medical examination is not in that list. Clause (1)(iv) then sweeps up everything else: all other facilities and entitlements shall be provided by the contractor.

First aid box on you. Annual health examination on the contractor. That is a clean split on paper and a messy one on a site, for a reason that has nothing to do with rule 5: you have no way of knowing whether it happened. The certificate goes to the contractor and to the employee. Not to you.

Mines are the exception that shows the drafters thought about this. Rule 60 requires the employer of every mine to ensure that medical examination of every employee including contract labour happens before employment starts and every year after, and that contract labour is given medical facilities at par with regular employees. In mining the duty is pulled back onto the principal. In construction it is not.

Mines run on a different rule, and a harder one

If you are reading this for a mine, rule 5 is not your rule. The second proviso sends you to rule 109, and the regime there is a different order of thing.

Rule 109 requires an initial medical examination of every person seeking employment in a mine and a periodical examination of every person employed, annually, conducted as per FORM-IX rather than FORM-VIII. FORM-IX is issued in triplicate and it is not a record of tests, it is a finding: medically fit for any employment in mines, or suffering from a named condition and medically unfit for employment in a mine, or for employment below ground, or for a particular work.

Around it sit rules the construction sector has no equivalent of. Notice periods before an examination. A show cause procedure for a person who fails to appear. An appellate medical board with a right of re-examination. Retention and transfer of medical certificates when an examining authority is relieved of duty. A requirement that a woman employee be examined by a female qualified medical practitioner. And rule 120, which prohibits employing a person declared unfit.

The practical distinction: in construction the examination produces a record. In mining it produces a decision that can end somebody's employment in that role, with an appeal attached. Do not run one process for both.

The question that decides whether any of this binds you

Here is the part the coverage skips entirely, and it is the part that changes the answer for most readers.

The OSH Code, like all four codes, splits enforcement between a central sphere and a state sphere. The Central Rules apply where the Central Government is the appropriate government: mines, oilfields, major ports, railways, air transport, banking and insurance, central public sector undertakings and a defined list of similar categories. Everything else, which is the overwhelming majority of private employers in India, sits in the state sphere and is governed by rules made by its own state government.

So if you run a construction business in Pune, or a factory in Coimbatore, or a chain of restaurants in Bengaluru, G.S.R. 345(E) is not your rulebook. It is the template your state is drafting against, and it is what an inspector in the central sphere would use, and it is worth reading for exactly that reason. It is not the instrument that binds you.

What the state drafts are doing

This section is second-hand and flagged as such. Neither state draft was read from its gazette while this was written, so nothing below is quoted as rule text. Treat it as a reason to go and read your own, not as a statement of your obligations.

Maharashtra. Draft OSH rules gazetted on 6 May 2026, with a consultation window that ran into June. Compliance trackers summarising them report an annual health examination duty attaching to every worker who has completed forty years of age in every establishment regardless of size, with the examination to be completed within 120 days from 1 January each year, its own state form for the examination and a separate health register, and a fifteen day window for the employer to receive the report. If that survives into the final rules, a Maharashtra factory, shop or office is covered where the central rule would not have covered it.

Karnataka.Draft OSH rules published on 30 January 2026 with objections invited until 9 March 2026. Reported to carry the annual health examination among the duties of the employer, across factories, construction and other sectors rather than the central rule's three.

Other states are at various stages, most of them still in draft. The direction of travel is consistent and it runs the opposite way to the central notification: the states are keeping the wide duty the centre dropped.

What this looks like on a real site

Take a mid-sized contractor running three sites in Maharashtra. Two hundred and forty people across the three, of whom the office believes about thirty are over forty. Two labour contractors supply roughly half the headcount.

Today, in the central sphere reading, rule 5 covers the building work and the number that matters is how many employees have completed forty years of age. Nobody can produce it. Dates of birth exist on joining forms in a folder at each site. The contractors' people have no dates of birth on file with the principal at all, and rule 86(1)(iv) puts their examinations on the contractor, who has not done them and has not been asked.

Now run the same site forward to the Maharashtra rules being finalised in the shape the drafts suggest. The duty widens to every establishment, and a 120 day window from 1 January means the examinations have to be scheduled, conducted and reported inside a fixed quarter rather than whenever there is time. Thirty full FORM-VIII panels is a manageable purchase. Thirty panels that nobody can identify the subjects of, on three sites, with a deadline, is not.

And when an Inspector-cum-Facilitator asks the obvious first question, it is not about the medical reports. It is: show me who was employed here, on what dates, and how old they are. That question is answered by the attendance and employee record or it is not answered at all.

Making the record exist without making it a job

Every duty in this article resolves to the same underlying fact, and it is not a medical fact. It is a records fact: a dated, per-person, per-site register that carries a date of birth.

From that one record you get the list of employees over forty, per site, on any date. You get the joiners who crossed forty since the last cycle, which is the group that quietly falls out of an annual process built as a one-time list. You get the leavers you do not need to examine. You get the evidence of who was actually on the site in the period the certificate covers. And when a state rule lands with a 120 day window, you get a date to schedule against instead of an archaeology exercise across three site offices.

Nobody is going to maintain that as a separate compliance exercise, which is why it usually does not exist. It has to be a by-product of something the business does anyway.

That is the shape of it in Shiftelio for field and site teams: one employee record per person carrying date of birth and site, GPS check-in and check-out per person per site so attendance is verified rather than reconstructed, and contract crews checking in on the same system as direct staff instead of living in a supervisor's notebook. The construction case specifically is in the construction attendance article. It is not a medical product and it will not book a single appointment. It means the list of names exists before somebody asks for it, which is the only part of this that cannot be fixed retrospectively.

Frequently asked questions

Is a free annual health check-up mandatory for all employees above 40 in India?No. Under the OSH Central Rules, 2026, rule 5 applies to employers of dock work and of building or other construction work, and mines are covered separately by rule 109. Factories were in the draft central rules and are not in the notified version. If you are in the state sphere, which nearly every private employer is, your state's rules decide, and several state drafts are wider than the central rule.

Does it cover office and supervisory staff or only labour?Rule 5 says employee, not worker. “Employee” under the Code reaches supervisory, managerial, administrative, technical and clerical work as well as manual work. On a covered site, everyone over forty on the rolls is in scope, not just the muster roll.

Who pays for it?The employer, in full. Section 6(1)(c) says free of costs, rule 5(1) says free of cost, and the Code separately bars levying any charge on an employee for anything provided for safety and health at the workplace. The first proviso to rule 5(2) lets an employer route examinations through the Employees' State Insurance Corporation instead of buying them privately.

What form does the certificate take and who gets it? FORM-VIII, headed Health Examination (Except mine employees), issued by a qualified medical practitioner, provided to both the employer and the employee. Mine employees get FORM-IX under rule 109, issued in triplicate, which records a fit or unfit finding rather than a set of readings.

Our workers are supplied by a labour contractor. Whose duty is it?The contractor's, in construction. Rule 86(1)(iii) puts a listed set of amenities on the principal employer where contract labour works at its premises, and medical examination is not on that list; clause (1)(iv) assigns everything else to the contractor. Mines are the exception: rule 60 requires the mine employer to ensure examinations for every employee including contract labour, at par with regular employees.

How often, and by when?The rule is headed annual and its second proviso refers to annual examinations, but sub-rule (1) fixes no frequency, no anniversary and no window. The central text gives you no due date. Some state drafts do, Maharashtra's reportedly setting 120 days from 1 January. Until your state finalises, pick a cycle, write it down, and be able to show when each person was last examined.

What about hazardous work, regardless of age? Separate question with a separate answer, and not one rule 5 deals with. Rule 5 is the age-based duty. Examinations tied to hazardous processes and to specific operations sit elsewhere in the Code and the rules, and mines carry their own regime end to end under rules 109 to 120.

The bottom line

The rule that is being quoted everywhere does not exist in the form it is being quoted. Rule 5 covers dock work and construction work, mines run on rule 109, and factories were removed between the draft and the notification. If somebody has told you your office or your factory must run health check-ups for everyone over forty under the central rules, they are describing a draft.

And if you take that as permission to stop reading, you will get the timing wrong in the other direction. The states did not drop the wide duty. The drafts on the table are broader than the central rule, and they add the thing the central rule is missing, which is a deadline. The employer who is caught out will not be the one who misread rule 5. It will be the one who read it correctly, concluded it did not apply, and was still unable to produce a list of employees over forty when the state rule landed with a fixed window attached.

For the rest of what changed across all four codes, the 2026 compliance checklist is the place to start, and the other OSH duties that arrive with rosters are in the night shift article. The primary sources here are the text of G.S.R. 345(E) of 8 May 2026 in the Gazette of India for rules 5, 60, 86 and 109 and for FORM-VIII, and section 6 of the OSH Code, 2020 for the parent duty. Registrations, returns and licences under the Code move through the Shram Suvidha Portal. Your own state's draft or final rules are the document that decides your position, and no summary is a substitute for it.