Malaysia’s tower crane certificates now answer to a workplace statute, not a factory one

▌  INDUSTRY BRIEFING  ·  SEPTEMBER 2026  ·  MALAYSIA OSH

Malaysia’s tower crane certificates now answer to a workplace statute, not a factory one

Malaysia repealed its factory law and rewrote its workplace law on the same morning. On 1 June 2024, two statutes and two sets of regulations took effect together: the Occupational Safety and Health (Amendment) Act 2022 [Act A1648], the Factories and Machinery (Repeal) Act 2022 [Act 835], the Occupational Safety and Health (Plant Requiring Certificate of Fitness) Regulations 2024 [P.U.(A) 99/2024] and the Occupational Safety and Health (Licensed Person) Order 2024 [P.U.(A) 100/2024]. Commencement for the two Acts was appointed by Gazette Notifications P.U.(B) 127/2024 and P.U.(B) 128/2024, both dated 2 April 2024. A later layer, the Occupational Safety and Health (Special Scheme of Inspection) Regulations 2025 [P.U.(A) 25/2025], was gazetted on 20 January 2025 and replaced the risk-based inspection regulations made in 2014 under the old factory law.

The tower crane did not change. The statute that inspects it did. The certificate of fitness — the document that keeps a crane legal to lift — is now issued under section 27D of the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994 [Act 514] rather than under the Factories and Machinery Act 1967 [Act 139], and the inspectors, the inspection cycle and the penalties all sit somewhere new. For a lifting supplier, the practical consequence is that the compliance file now travels with the machine into a regime the buyer is still learning.

▌  01  THE TWO DATES

▌  IN FORCE SINCE 1 JUNE 2024  On that date Act A1648 and Act 835 came into operation, appointed by P.U.(B) 128/2024 and P.U.(B) 127/2024 respectively. The Factories and Machinery Act 1967, which had regulated machinery in factories since 1967 as Act 139, was repealed the same day. Any registration, approval, notice, direction, certificate of fitness, special scheme of inspection or certificate of competency issued under the repealed Act is, from that date, dealt with under the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994.

▌  THE SECOND LAYER: 20 JANUARY 2025  The Special Scheme of Inspection Regulations 2025 [P.U.(A) 25/2025] were gazetted on 20 January 2025, replacing the Factories and Machinery (Special Scheme of Inspection) (Risk-Based Inspection) Regulations 2014. They create two classes of scheme — class A for a steam boiler and a pressure vessel, class B for all plant requiring a certificate of fitness, which is where lifting machinery sits — and let an occupier take over part of the inspection burden that used to sit with DOSH.

▌  AND THE DATE THAT ACTUALLY APPLIES TO YOU  There is no single national deadline left to diarise. A certificate of fitness issued under P.U.(A) 99/2024 is valid for fifteen months from the date of inspection, and an application for a special scheme of inspection must be lodged at least six months before the current certificate expires. Both clocks are per plant, so the answer to “when does this reach me” is written on your own certificate, not on a government notice board.

▌  02  WHAT REPLACED WHAT

▌  THE FACTORY LAW IS GONE, THE DUTY IS NOT  Act 835 repealed Act 139 in full. The blanket requirement to register a factory disappears with it, and oversight now attaches to plant that requires a certificate of fitness rather than to the building it stands in. Certificates, approvals and special schemes of inspection already issued carried over into the workplace statute rather than lapsing.

▌  A CERTIFICATE OF FITNESS IS NOW A NAMED THING  The amendment wrote “certificate of fitness” into section 3 as a certificate issued under section 27D, and defined “competent person” by reference to registration under section 31C. Those two definitions are the hooks a lifting supplier has to hang documentation on, because they are what an inspector will ask you to produce.

▌  “ALL PLACES OF WORK” NOW MEANS WHAT IT SAYS  Section 1(2) was replaced with the words “this Act shall apply to all places of work throughout Malaysia including in the public services and statutory authorities”. Before 1 June 2024 the Act reached only the industries listed in the First Schedule; the carve-outs that remain are narrow, and lifting on a public-sector site is no longer outside the perimeter.

▌  THE PRINCIPAL IS NOW A DUTY HOLDER  “Principal” and “contractor” were added to section 3, and a principal must look after the safety and health of contractors, subcontractors and their employees engaged in the work. Where erection, climbing and inspection are subcontracted — normal on a Malaysian crane job — the duty runs up the chain as well as down to the site office.

▌  03  THE INSPECTION CYCLE, IN NUMBERS

▌  FIFTEEN MONTHS PER CERTIFICATE  P.U.(A) 99/2024, regulation 5(6): a certificate of fitness is valid for a period of fifteen months from the date of inspection. Fifteen, not twelve — and the extra quarter is what keeps a certificate alive when an inspection date slips.

▌  THE PERIODICAL INSPECTION WINDOW  Regulation 6 puts the periodical inspection in the hands of an officer or a licensed person. The date may not be earlier than the first day of the twelfth month counting from the month of the previous inspection, and the occupier must be given at least fourteen days’ written notice. That is the whole window: not convenient, just fixed.

▌  WHO SIGNS, AND IN HOW LONG  The Licensed Person Order 2024 [P.U.(A) 100/2024] was made under section 7A(2). A licensed person must issue the certificate of fitness within seven days once all the requirements are satisfied. The First Schedule of P.U.(A) 99/2024 names SIRIM QAS International Sdn. Bhd. among the authorised inspecting bodies, so the signature on a Malaysian certificate is no longer only a DOSH officer’s.

▌  LIFTING MACHINERY IS A NAMED CATEGORY  Regulation 4(1)(l) requires a tower crane or a passenger hoist, before installation, to be inspected by a competent person for foundation, structural integrity and component integrity. Regulation 5(2)(d) requires lifting machinery to be load-tested at the load the design verification specifies, with every safety device functionally tested. A load-moment limiter and an anti-collision layer are on that list, not beside it.

▌  THE TOWER CRANE HAS A LEGAL DEFINITION  P.U.(A) 99/2024 defines a tower crane as “a lifting machinery which is a crane with a boom or jib which is mounted on a vertical tower to raise and lower a suspended load and for the movement of such loads by changing the radius or slewing”. Read a specification sheet against that sentence, not against the marketing name.

▌  THIRTY DAYS ON A TRANSFER  Regulation 5(5) requires notification within thirty days when plant requiring a certificate of fitness is sold, leased, transferred or permanently taken out of use. A used crane moving between sites therefore changes hands with a deadline attached to it.

▌  MAINTENANCE IS ON THE SCHEDULE  The Eleventh Schedule of P.U.(A) 99/2024 sets out maintenance programmes for listed equipment, and a tower crane is named on it alongside lifts, escalators, walkalators, launching gantries, quay cranes, suspended access equipment and passenger hoists. A maintenance regime is now a schedule item, not a recommendation in a manual.

▌  04  THE NEW OPTION: SPECIAL SCHEME OF INSPECTION

▌  TWO CLASSES, ONE THAT MATTERS HERE  Class A covers a steam boiler and a pressure vessel. Class B covers all plant requiring a certificate of fitness — which is the class that lifting machinery falls into.

▌  A HUNDRED AND TWENTY MONTHS, OR A HUNDRED AND EIGHTY  An approved class A scheme runs for 120 months from the date of approval and a class B scheme for 180 months, unless revoked or terminated earlier. Fifteen years is the horizon: this is not a twelve-month arrangement that has to be renewed every year.

▌  SIX MONTHS’ NOTICE, ON EVIDENCE  An application must be submitted at least six months before the certificate of fitness expires, and it has to come with a risk-based inspection plan built on the plant’s own operating data rather than on a calendar. The dossier is the application.

▌  THE TRADE-OFF  The scheme reduces DOSH’s direct inspection role and moves responsibility onto the occupier. It is an option, not an obligation — but a site that takes it owns the assumptions inside its own inspection plan.

▌  05  THE PENALTIES

▌  TEN TIMES THE CEILING  The maximum fine for a breach of an employer’s general duty rose from RM50,000 to RM500,000, with imprisonment of up to two years, or both. For a single failed control on a lifting operation, the arithmetic changed by an order of magnitude.

▌  THE TIERS BELOW MOVED WITH IT  Duties on manufacturers and suppliers now carry up to RM200,000 where the figure had been RM20,000, and the employee-side duty moved from RM1,000 to RM2,000. The amendment lifted the whole ladder rather than one rung of it.

▌  THE COORDINATOR THRESHOLD  New section 29A requires an employer with five or more employees at a workplace that does not need a safety and health officer to appoint an occupational safety and health coordinator. That is a named person with a statutory role, and on a smaller site it may be the first safety appointment anyone has ever made.

▌  THE RIGHT TO STOP  New section 26A lets an employee remove themselves from “imminent danger” — a serious risk of death or serious bodily injury — where the employer has not removed the hazard, and protects them from retaliation for doing so. On a crane job, that is a stop-work right written into the statute rather than into a site rule.

▌  06  WHAT IT MEANS WHEN YOU SPECIFY OR BUY

●  Who signs the certificate of fitness for the crane you are delivering — a DOSH officer or a licensed person — and is that step on the delivery schedule?

●  Which inspection starts the fifteen-month clock, and will the certificate still be live at the far end of the project?

●  Does the regulation 5(2)(d) load test cover every safety device on the machine, including the monitoring functions, or only the mechanical ones?

●  If the crane is sold, leased or moved to another site, whose thirty-day notification is that?

●  Is the maintenance programme the Eleventh Schedule expects the same one that ships in the manual?

●  Does the buyer need an OSH coordinator under section 29A, and is anyone actually named to it?

▌  07  WHAT TO WATCH

●  Enforcement has to catch up with the new ceiling. A tenfold penalty is a paper change until DOSH starts issuing it, and the department’s public work with PETRONAS on the SSI Regulations, launched on 12 August 2025, shows where its attention is heading.

●  The register of competent persons under section 31C decides capacity. If the pool of registered competent persons for lifting machinery does not grow, inspection queues become the constraint rather than the rules.

●  The special scheme of inspection will be watched for whether it spreads from the energy and process industries into lifting fleets. It was built with a national oil company in the room; whether a tower crane owner takes the same route is the open question.

●  Transition cases will keep surfacing. Certificates, approvals and pending applications from the factory-law era continue to be dealt with under OSHA 1994, so the boundary between the two regimes will be tested case by case.

●  Liability now travels with the contract. The Act reaches the principal as well as the employer, so a crane incident can pull in the party that engaged the lifting contractor — not just the party that owned the machine.

This briefing summarises Malaysian national rules. It is not legal advice, and local rules still govern your site.

ABOUT

Shandong Zhinuo (ZNAQ) designs and manufactures tower crane safety monitoring systems and lifting-safety hardware for export markets, including load-moment limiting, zone-control and anti-collision functions that are increasingly software-defined. We follow how national plant-inspection regimes move from prescriptive factory law to risk-based workplace law, and build technical documentation to the stricter of the routes a product may fall under.

▌  CONTACT  shandongzhinuo@outlook.com  +86 176 6371 0314 · en.znaqkj.com

SOURCES

Laws of Malaysia, Occupational Safety and Health (Amendment) Act 2022 [Act A1648] — lom.agc.gov.my

Laws of Malaysia, Factories and Machinery (Repeal) Act 2022 [Act 835] — lom.agc.gov.my

Occupational Safety and Health (Plant Requiring Certificate of Fitness) Regulations 2024 [P.U.(A) 99/2024] — lom.agc.gov.my

Occupational Safety and Health (Licensed Person) Order 2024 [P.U.(A) 100/2024] — lom.agc.gov.my

Occupational Safety and Health (Special Scheme of Inspection) Regulations 2025 [P.U.(A) 25/2025] — lom.agc.gov.my

Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH / JKKP) — dosh.gov.my

PETRONAS media release, launch of the SSI Regulations 2025, 12 August 2025 — petronas.com

Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu, NO&T Asia Legal Review No. 84, July 2024 — nagashima.com