Forklift Safety and Compliance in Malaysia: What the Law Actually Requires

Ask three people whether a forklift needs a Certificate of Fitness and you will often get three answers. The confusion is not carelessness. It is built into how the Regulations are written, and once you see where the provisions sit, it makes sense.

Where the confusion comes from

The relevant instrument is the Occupational Safety and Health (Plant Requiring Certificate of Fitness) Regulations 2024, P.U.(A) 99/2024. These Regulations replaced the machinery certification regime that previously sat under the Factories and Machinery Act 1967, which was repealed on 1 June 2024.

Regulation 2 defines material handling equipment as a lifting machinery which is power-driven equipment for handling material — and the definition expressly includes forklifts, alongside conveyors, automated storage and retrieval systems, excavators, tractors, dumpers and bulldozers.

Read that alone and the conclusion is obvious: a forklift is lifting machinery, lifting machinery needs a Certificate of Fitness, therefore my forklift needs one.

The carve-out appears nineteen regulations later. Regulation 21 states that the Regulations do not apply to manual lifting machinery, or to lifting machinery specified in the Third Schedule. And paragraph 1 of the Third Schedule reads: lifting machinery for material handling equipment.

So the chain runs: forklift → material handling equipment → excluded by regulation 21 → no Certificate of Fitness required. It takes three steps and a Schedule to get there, which is precisely why so many plants get it wrong in one direction or the other.

What does still need a Certificate of Fitness

Getting the forklift answer right matters less than getting the rest of your plant right. If you have concluded that forklifts are outside the regime, do not extend that conclusion to everything else on your floor. Plant that falls within the Regulations still requires registration, examination and certification — and the penalties for getting it wrong are substantial.

Under the Regulations, dismantling or relocating registered plant without approval, and altering registered plant without approval, each carry a fine of up to RM50,000 or imprisonment of up to one year. Failing to carry out a required comprehensive examination, and permitting a crane to be operated by someone who is not a competent person, each carry a fine of up to RM100,000 or imprisonment of up to one year.

If you are unsure which of your equipment is caught, that is a question worth resolving before an inspection rather than during one. Our EHS audit covers exactly this.

Operator competency: the duty is real, the licence is not

Here is where most online guidance overreaches. You will read that Malaysian forklift operators require a government-issued licence or a statutory competency certificate. That is not what the Regulations say.

P.U.(A) 99/2024 requires a competent person operator in two places only: regulation 12, for steam boilers, and regulation 15, for tower cranes and mobile cranes. Forklifts appear nowhere in those provisions. Malaysia does not issue a forklift licence in the way JPJ issues a driving licence.

That does not mean anyone can climb on. The duty comes from a different direction — the general duties of employers under the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994, which include providing and maintaining plant and systems of work that are safe and without risks to health, and providing the information, instruction, training and supervision necessary to ensure safety.

In practice, this is a higher bar than a licence, not a lower one. A licence is a card in a wallet. A general duty asks you to demonstrate that the operator was competent for this truck, on this site, doing this task — and that you can evidence it. Training through a recognised provider, with records you can produce on request, is how that duty is discharged.

Beware numbers that are not Malaysian law

Search for forklift safety standards and you will find confident, specific figures: aisle markings must be two inches wide, aisles must allow three feet of clearance beyond the widest vehicle, speed must not exceed a particular figure.

Most of these originate in United States standards. They are often sensible engineering practice. They are not Malaysian legal requirements, and citing them as such in your safety documentation creates a problem: an auditor who asks for the source will find there isn't one.

We are not aware of a Malaysian instrument setting a numeric speed limit for forklifts inside premises. The duty is to establish a safe system of work — which means the right limit for your site is an output of your risk assessment, defensible because you can show how you arrived at it, not because you copied it from a foreign standard.

That is the same logic that underpins HIRARC, and since the OSHA (Amendment) Act 2022 came into force on 1 June 2024, conducting a risk assessment is itself a legal duty.

What a defensible forklift regime looks like

Pulling it together, a Malaysian factory operating forklifts should be able to produce:

• A documented HIRARC covering forklift operations specifically — traffic routes, pedestrian interfaces, loading and unloading, battery charging or refuelling, and load stability.
• Operator training records showing who was trained, by whom, on what equipment, and when.
• A maintenance and inspection regime, with records, discharging the duty to provide and maintain safe plant.
• Site rules — speed, segregation, right of way, exclusion zones — derived from your own assessment and communicated to staff and contractors.
• A pedestrian segregation arrangement appropriate to your layout, whether physical barriers, marked walkways or controlled crossing points.

None of that depends on a Certificate of Fitness. All of it depends on being able to show your reasoning.

One area that remains unsettled

We would rather flag an open question than pretend it is closed. When the Factories and Machinery Act 1967 was repealed, the position of the subsidiary regulations made under it was not entirely clear on the face of the legislation. One reading is that they continue to have effect until formally revoked or replaced. This is worth watching if your operations rely on a specific FMA-era regulation, and it is a question to raise with DOSH directly rather than resolve from a blog post — including this one.

Common questions

Related reading: What is HIRARC? and What is DOSH?