OSHA Color Standards – A Floor Marking Guide

The idea of OSHA color standards is to help businesses make decisions when it comes to how to mark their facilities for maximum efficiency and more importantly, safety. Standards technically do not exist. Though guides are available to help you make logical choices when applying floor marking in your facility.

While there are other guides available, we would like our customers and anyone considering purchasing materials from us to have this guide at close proximity. This will help you make informed choices when it comes to purchasing Heskins safety products.

OSHA Color Standards

We hope this OSHA color standards guide makes it relatively easy for you to mark out your warehouse, factory, distribution center or any other facility that requires floor demarcation. We produce products in the following OSHA approved colors:

Yellow – Denotes areas where caution must be undertaken. Used for aisles, walkways and docking bays. Often these routes will be through or part of a working process, ensuring that people are kept aware of any potential hazards such as forklifts or ledges. Also used to mark physical, and sometimes static, objects so they cannot be missed. These could include trip and striking hazards.

Red – Signals danger and relating to fire. In relation to fire, red denotes areas where firefighting equipment is stored, to highlight a fire exit (often red/white hazard markings) or marks an area such as a hatch that must be kept clear at all times. For other uses, it will warn people or vehicles to stop, possibly due to a busy throughway.

Blue – Marks out important information in factories and warehouses. Also used to zone equipment that is out of order or work that is in a process.

Green – The color used to mark out safe routes or first aid point. These can be included on safety instructions, equipment and locations.

Orange – Used as a color to mark out warnings, often in areas where vehicles operate constantly. Creating a system with orange, yellow, red and green can create an exceptionally safe and efficient traffic system.

Black/Yellow – Areas that are potential health hazards or must be traversed with caution are often marked with black/yellow hazard markings. Often areas under maintenance or storing dangerous chemicals would feature these color markings clearly.

Red/White – As previously mentioned, this color combination will be found marking areas that can be kept clear. Emergency access or electrical points with these markings are easily seen helping people use them effectively and safely.

Fluorescent and photoluminescent colors are also available and can easily be integrated into a system should they be necessary.

Color Variations and Heskins Custom Options

Variation is always possible depending on working practices, but it is advisable to stick to these guides as best as possible. As these colors have seemingly gained an almost universal understanding when used in the correct areas to stray too far could have detrimental effects.

As mentioned, we produce Heskins anti-slip and floor marking products in all of these approved colors to allow you to acquire and create a complete 5S floor marking system for your facility. This will help you to define key areas and keep safety and efficiency to a maximum.

Heskins can produce custom color options should you wish to also tie in your OSHA color standards coordinated floor marking system with branding. Dependent on MOQ’s we are happy to discuss the creation of our products in any color matching Pantone or RAL references.

You can view our range of products on the Heskins website. Should you have any more questions you can contact the sales team by phone, email, live chat or the contact us form on the website. We would be happy to hear from you.