COSHH is the set of regulations that make an employer control exposure to substances that can harm health at work. Most people arriving at this question are not looking for the expansion of the acronym, they are working out whether it applies to the products in their store cupboard and what they have to do about them. This page answers it in that order: what the regulations cover, what they ask you to do, and the substances that look like they should be in scope and are dealt with somewhere else entirely.
What COSHH covers, and what it deliberately does not
COSHH covers substances hazardous to health used in or arising from work: the chemicals you buy, but also the dusts, fumes, mists, vapours and biological agents that a process creates. That last half is the part firms miss, because nobody purchases wood dust or welding fume and so neither appears on an inventory built from invoices. What COSHH does not cover is a short and important list, which includes asbestos, lead and radioactive materials, each of which has its own regulations and its own duties, and none of which is made safer by being written into a COSHH file.
The duty is to assess, then to control, then to keep proving it
The regulations do not ask you to hold safety data sheets. They ask you not to carry on work liable to expose employees to a substance hazardous to health unless a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risk has been made, and then to prevent or adequately control that exposure. The sheet is an input to the assessment, not a substitute for it, and a folder of sheets with no assessments in it is the single most common way a firm believes it has done COSHH and has not.
Proportion is written into it, which is why one size does not fit your inventory
Assessing a labelled cleaning product used occasionally with gloves is a different piece of work to assessing a solvent used all day in a booth with local exhaust ventilation and health surveillance behind it. The regulator's guidance is explicit that the effort should be proportionate to the risk. The free COSHH assessment worksheet on this site splits an inventory three ways for exactly that reason, and then shows you how much of the total cost sits in the long tail rather than in the difficult few.
The part that decides how long it takes is the paperwork you cannot find
Every assessment starts from the supplier's safety data sheet, and most firms discover partway through that a meaningful share of their substances have no sheet on file. Chasing those is not assessing, it is administration, and it is usually the largest single block of time in a first pass. Counting it before you start is the difference between an estimate that holds and one that quietly doubles.
Questions people ask about coshh meaning
What does COSHH stand for?
The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations. The current version is the 2002 regulations as amended. The expansion is worth exactly one sentence; what matters is that the duty is to control exposure, and that the assessment is what proves you decided how.
Do I need a COSHH assessment for ordinary cleaning products?
If they are used at work and can harm health, they are in scope, but the assessment should be proportionate. For many everyday products the honest assessment is short: this is what it is, this is how it is used here, this is the control, this is what to do if it goes wrong. It still has to exist and it still has to be reviewed.
Does COSHH cover asbestos?
No. Asbestos, lead and radioactive substances are each covered by their own regulations, and putting them in a COSHH file does not discharge those duties. If asbestos is present in your premises, the duty to manage it sits elsewhere and needs its own arrangements.