Compliance & standards
What is a duty rating?
Duty rating is the everyday term for what a scaffold is built to carry — light, general or heavy duty. It corresponds to the load class the scaffold was designed and set out to.
Duty is how the load class gets talked about on site. A scaffold for a painter and a scaffold for a bricklayer carrying material are different structures, and the difference is set at design rather than negotiated on the day.
The everyday names — light, general, heavy — sit alongside the numbered classes in BS EN 12811-1 rather than replacing them. Where it matters contractually, the class is the unambiguous reference; where it matters on site, the name is what gets said.
The rating is also what the handover certificate and the scaffold tag should carry, because it is the single most useful thing for somebody about to use the scaffold to know. A platform that looks identical to another can have half the permitted load.
Where a scaffold is going to be used for something heavier than it was rated for, the answer is a design decision and often a physical change — not a conversation about whether it will probably be fine.
What goes wrong on site
- The duty on the tag not matching the duty on the certificate, because the two were filled in by different people.
- A scaffold used for storage of material when it was rated for access.
- The rating omitted from the handover altogether, leaving the user to guess.