This page assumes you have already established that you are a PCBU. If you have not, start with does WHS law apply to your organisation, because a volunteer association that employs nobody has no duty here to size.
What the law actually asks
Required
The duty is to provide first aid that is adequate for your workplace, having regard to its hazards, its size and its location. It is a risk based duty. It is not a duty to hit a ratio.
That matters more than it sounds. Two organisations with the same headcount can owe different arrangements, and an organisation that meets the ratio can still be inadequate if its hazards or its distance from help say so. The ratio is a starting point that a regulator publishes to make a risk based duty workable. It is not the duty.
The numbers everyone quotes
| Workplace | Suggested provision | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Low risk | 1 first aider for every 50 workers | Recommended |
| High risk | 1 first aider for every 25 workers | Recommended |
| High risk, without timely access to medical or ambulance services | At least 1 first aider for every 10 workers | Recommended |
Safe Work Australia, model Code of Practice: First aid in the workplace. Your jurisdiction publishes its own adopted copy, for example SafeWork NSW and SafeWork SA. Checked 9 September 2026. Victoria uses different figures, see states and territories.
What a Code of Practice is, and is not
An approved code of practice is not the legislation. It is practical guidance on how to achieve the standard the legislation sets. Under work health and safety law it can be admitted in court proceedings and used as evidence of what was known about a hazard and what was reasonably practicable to do about it.
Two consequences follow, and they point in opposite directions.
- You are not automatically in breach for having fewer first aiders than the ratio suggests, if you can show your arrangements are adequate for your actual workplace
- You are not automatically safe for having hit the ratio, if your hazards, your location or your hours mean the arrangement does not work in practice
Most commercial pages on this subject present the ratio as a compliance threshold. It is better understood as the position you will be measured against if something goes wrong and you have not documented a reason for doing something different.
The gap in the guidance
Where the Code stops
The Code gives a reduced figure of one first aider per ten workers for a high risk workplace that lacks timely access to medical or ambulance services. It gives no equivalent figure for a low risk workplace with the same access problem.
This affects community organisations more than it affects most employers, because a great many of them operate in exactly that space. A rural hall, a regional sports ground, a bush camp site or a remote community service can be genuinely low risk in the nature of its activity while being a long way from an ambulance.
The honest position is that the Code does not answer this. Anyone who gives you a confident number for it is inventing one. What you can do instead is treat it as the risk based question it is: how long would help actually take to arrive, what could plausibly happen in that time, and what would somebody on site need to be able to do. Write down the answer and the reasoning. That record is what makes the decision defensible, and it is worth more than any ratio.
The requirement that gets missed
Coverage is not a headcount, it is availability. The Code expects first aid equipment, facilities and first aiders to be accessible to workers whenever they work, which includes night shifts, overtime and weekend work, and it expects access to be practical in large, multi floor or remote workplaces where getting to the kit takes time.
For a community organisation this usually bites in one of three ways.
- The trained person works weekdays and the activity happens on Saturday
- The kit lives in a locked office and the activity happens on the field
- One trained person covers everything, so their annual leave is also the organisation's coverage gap
Two trained people is often the practical minimum for an organisation with a single trained person, not because a ratio says so, but because one person cannot cover a roster and cannot treat themselves.
Who you count
If your organisation is a PCBU, the model laws treat volunteers as workers. They count in the arrangement you are sizing, and they are owed the duty. A service with three paid staff and sixty volunteers is not a three person problem.
Members of the public are a separate consideration again. The ratios are framed around workers. Where you also have patrons, spectators, participants or clients on site, the risk based duty covers the risks your work creates for them, and the number of people present is part of what makes an arrangement adequate.
Safe Work Australia, first aid and the model Code of Practice above. Volunteers as workers, Safe Work Australia, volunteers WHS duties. Checked 9 September 2026.
A note on calculators
There are free first aid requirements calculators available, including one published by FairWork Mate. They apply the ratios above to a headcount. That is genuinely useful for the straightforward case and there is no reason to build another one.
What a calculator cannot do is tell you whether your workplace is low or high risk, whether your access to emergency services is timely, or whether your arrangement holds up on a Saturday. Those are the parts that decide the answer, and they are the parts this page is about.
Continue
Disclosure
Published by SKLD Training, which sells first aid and CPR training, on behalf of Allens Training Pty Ltd, RTO 90909. Full disclosure.
Instruments on this page checked 9 September 2026. This is a description of public instruments, not legal advice.