Construction Informer

I did a post a few years ago about hard hats and I wanted to focus it more about hard hat colors, but it got a little murky so I decided to just do a post on the colors. It is the companies that decide what colors of hard hats to use for their workforces and what meaning to assign to the colors. Government entities such as transportation departments do the same thing. On very large projects that have huge numbers of workers on site at the same time, the owners of the project might decide the hard hat colors that will be used during the job. Other times the general contractor-in-charge will decide.

Most construction firms provide hard hats of various colors to their workforces and many also have hats available on site for use by visitors such as bank officials, owner representatives and insurance and code inspectors. The color of the hard hat is often assigned based on the work the person does.

In many places white is used by managers, owners, inspectors and others who are visiting the site. Yellow is often assigned to the rank and file laborers and crafts people who are not supervisors. Red might be assigned to an individual who has advanced training in first aid or those who are in the electrical trades. Companies will sometimes have stripes baked into multiple hard hats of the same color to denote specific trades or specialties. So a yellow hat with two stripes might identify a carpenter while one with three could be a mason. Others will add markings to the hard hats to distinguish new employees so they can be watched more closely to help protect them from accidents while they become acquainted with the hazards of a site.

Many companies use just one hard hat color and everyone wears it. Some companies will even attempt to assign value to the wearer of certain colored hats by making them gold, platinum or silver. Other companies may only require hard hats and not specify any particular color for any particular position or skill. In most cases however, hard hat colors are used to denote the function the person carries out, either in the company, or at the job site.