SimplISO › ISO 45001 certification cost
Straight answers, no quote formMost businesses come to ISO 45001 because a main contractor asked for it, not because they went looking. Added to a quality system that already works, it is a far smaller job than the quote forms suggest. Here is the real arithmetic.
Written for UK businesses. Last updated 22 September 2026.
If you already hold ISO 9001, adding ISO 45001 costs about £2,050 in the first year through a non UKAS certification body, then about £1,700 a year after that.
From a standing start with no quality system in place, ISO 9001 and ISO 45001 together come to about £4,144 to first certificate.
If you already hold CHAS, SafeContractor or similar, a good deal of the evidence exists and the work is smaller again.
Every modern ISO management standard is built on the same skeleton, known as the Harmonised Structure (you may have heard it called Annex SL). Context of the organisation, interested parties, leadership, planning, support, operation, performance evaluation, improvement. The clause numbers line up almost exactly.
If you already run ISO 9001 properly, you have built most of ISO 45001 without knowing it. Document control, competence records, the internal audit programme, management review, corrective action and nonconformity handling all carry straight across. You do not build any of it twice.
That is why we ask clients to certify to ISO 9001 first and add the rest onto it. The quality system is the spine. Bolting ISO 45001 onto a spine that already works is a fraction of the effort of building a standalone system, and your certification body audits both in one visit rather than turning up twice and charging twice.
So the useful question is not what ISO 45001 costs. It is what ISO 45001 adds.
Four things move when you add a standard to a system you already run. Your subscription steps up a tier, your consultant internal audit has more ground to cover, the certification body audits the new standard once, and your annual surveillance goes up to match.
| What changes | Non UKAS body | UKAS accredited |
|---|---|---|
| SimplISO subscription | +£100 a month | +£100 a month |
| Consultant internal audit | +£200 a year | +£200 a year |
| Certification body, initial audit | £650 once | £1,700 once |
| Certification body surveillance | +£300 a year | +£1,200 a year |
| First year of the addition | £2,050 | £3,100 |
Every year after that, the addition costs about £1,700 through a non UKAS body, or £2,600 through a UKAS accredited one. That is the whole number. There is no separate consultancy invoice, no day rate and no set up fee.
If you employ people in the UK you already carry health and safety duties, so a good deal of ISO 45001 is evidence you hold somewhere already. Four things are properly new.
Clause 5.4, and the one that fails more audits than any other. You have to show that non managerial workers were consulted, that they took part, and that you removed the things getting in their way. Minutes, toolbox talks, a mechanism people actually use.
You almost certainly have risk assessments. ISO 45001 wants them joined up, covering routine and non routine work, human factors, visitors, contractors and changes to how you operate. Usually a reorganisation rather than a blank page.
A defined process for incidents and near misses that reaches root cause rather than stopping at "not concentrating", feeds corrective action and closes the loop. RIDDOR reporting sits inside it.
The Health and Safety at Work Act, the Management Regulations, COSHH, manual handling, DSE, work at height, PUWER, and CDM if you touch construction. Listed, applied to you, with evidence attached.
Worker consultation, every time. It is the clause with no equivalent in ISO 9001 or ISO 14001, and it cannot be written at a desk the week before the audit. An auditor will ask a member of staff directly what they were consulted about and what changed as a result. If the answer is a blank look, the paperwork behind it does not save you.
The fix is unglamorous. Start it early, run it as a standing item, and keep the minutes. Three months of genuine records beats thirty pages of policy.
This is where the employee side earns its keep, because ISO 45001 contains the single clause that fails more small business audits than any other, and it is a people clause.
| Employee tool | What it evidences |
|---|---|
| Consultation records, surveys, toolbox talks and attendance | Clause 5.4 Consultation and participation of workers. The clause you cannot write up at a desk the week before, because the auditor asks your staff directly. A running record turns the hardest part of the standard into a report you print. |
| Onboarding workflow | Clause 7.3 Awareness. Proof each person knows the health and safety policy, the hazards of their role and how to report a problem. |
| Competence matrix and training log | Clause 7.2 Competence. Who is trained for what, and the evidence behind it. |
| Annual reviews | Clause 7.2 again, the yearly refresh that keeps competence current. |
Holiday booking is not an ISO requirement, and we would never pretend it is. It earns its place for a different reason. It is the thing your staff open the platform for every week, so while they are in there booking leave, the competence records and the training log stay current on their own instead of decaying quietly until an auditor asks to see them.
Of the four standards this is the most commonly demanded rather than chosen, so the commercial case is usually made for you.
A note on the pre qualification schemes. CHAS, SafeContractor, Constructionline and the rest are not the same thing as ISO 45001 and do not replace it, but the evidence overlaps heavily. If you already hold one, a lot of what your assessor asked for is exactly what the certification body will want, which shortens the work.
Everything above assumes ISO 9001 is already in place. If you are starting from nothing and you know you need more than one standard, do them together. One programme, one set of documents, one audit visit.
| What you are certifying | Audit units | Months | To certificate |
|---|---|---|---|
| ISO 9001 on its own | 1 | 4 | £2,196 |
| ISO 9001 plus one other standard | 2 | 6 | £4,144 |
| ISO 9001 plus two others, or 9001 with 27001 | 3 | 8 | £6,492 |
| The full set | 4 | 10 | £9,240 |
An audit unit is one standard, with one exception. ISO 27001 counts as two, because its audit has to cover the Annex A controls as well as the management system. Our pricing calculator runs the same sum with UKAS switched on, and the ISO 9001 cost page breaks the single standard route down line by line.
We are still in our founding period, and the first fifteen registrants get 25% off the whole of their first year, locked in from the first invoice.
Considerably. The two standards share the same underlying structure, so document control, competence records, the internal audit programme, management review and corrective action all carry across unchanged. Adding ISO 45001 to a working ISO 9001 system costs about £2,050 in the first year and £1,700 a year after that through a non UKAS certification body, against £4,144 to build both together from a standing start.
No, they are different things and a customer who asks for one will not usually accept the other. What they do share is evidence. Risk assessments, method statements, training records, insurance and accident records are wanted by both, so if you already hold a pre qualification scheme membership a good deal of the groundwork for ISO 45001 is already done.
Worker consultation and participation, clause 5.4. It has no equivalent in ISO 9001 or ISO 14001 and it cannot be written up at a desk the week before the audit, because the auditor will ask your staff directly what they were consulted about and what changed as a result. Start it early, run it as a standing item and keep the minutes.
Yes. ISO 45001 certification and the legal duty to have access to competent health and safety advice are separate things, and the certificate does not discharge the duty. For most small businesses the adviser and the ISO work sit comfortably together, and the evidence one produces feeds the other.
Check the tender wording, because in construction the answer is more often yes than it is for quality. UKAS accreditation is not a legal requirement, and it costs about £1,700 against £650 for the initial audit of the added standard, with a wider gap again on yearly surveillance. Decide before you start, because switching afterwards means paying for the audits twice.
Twenty minutes on a call and we will tell you what your certification body will charge, what the extra work looks like and whether you need UKAS at all.
Same treatment, real numbers, no quote form.