What occupational safety costs: prices for safety specialists and occupational physicians in Germany

The yardstick: the statutory scope of support

Under DGUV Regulation 2, office and administrative businesses belong to support group III. Basic support is 0.5 hours per employee and year, shared between the occupational safety specialist and the occupational physician, with at least 20 percent on each side. Business-specific support is added on top; its scope is determined by the business itself. Since the revised regulation (in force at the VBG since 1 December 2025) the former floor of 0.2 hours per employee for the physician no longer applies; up to 50 percent of the support may be delivered digitally where the accident insurer allows it in its version; the standard limit is one third. This results in the following mandatory hours by office size:

Fixed hours apply above 20 employees (Annex 2). Up to 20 employees, small-business support without fixed hours applies; up to 50 employees the Unternehmermodell is an alternative.

Business-specific support: what an office actually needs

DGUV Regulation 2 splits support into two parts. Basic support has fixed hours (table above, 25 hours at 50 employees). Business-specific support has no fixed hourly value. The business determines it from a catalogue of task areas and triggers, such as new work equipment, refurbishment or relocation, remote work, pregnancy or employing young people (Annex 2, section 3 of the regulation). Where no trigger applies, no additional effort arises for that period. A flat surcharge on basic support is not required; the need must, however, be determined and documented.

In practice this part is handled very differently. Among the 159 providers with a published price only a few show business-specific support separately, mostly as a separate hourly rate or “as required”. One provider's cost calculator applies as many business-specific hours as basic support to an office with 35 employees (26 plus 26 hours), doubling the price. Public tenders show an even wider range:

The tenders fall into two clearly separate groups. Purely administrative bodies such as universities and town administrations apply 17 to 25 percent of basic support. Municipalities and cultural institutions with workshops, fire services or public traffic sit at 182 to 271 percent, because many hazards beyond office work are added there. The tendered hours from which the surcharges are calculated:

For a pure office this means: basic support is the fixed duty. Additional hours arise only when an occasion triggers them, and the typical office occasions are limited. If an offer contains a high flat surcharge, the reasoning should be requested. For the comparison this study cautiously assumes a 20 percent surcharge so that no offer looks too cheap. At Safety Club business-specific support is counted within the basic support hours: the usual office occasions, such as relocation, new workstations, remote-work rules and maternity protection, are handled within those hours and not charged on top.

Why hourly rates alone are not comparable

The support hours under DGUV Regulation 2 describe the legal minimum scope of support, not its price. Besides the hours many providers charge separately for services without which a business does not meet its duties: the risk assessment as a document, safety training for staff, the safety committee, operating instructions, the hazardous substances register, travel to visits, and set-up and administration fees. Comparing hourly rates alone therefore often means comparing incomplete offers. For an office with 50 employees the cost breaks down as follows:

The specialist's support hours form the largest block. Among single services, training weighs most: online training for all 50 employees costs a median of 938 € a year; for comparison, basic occupational medical support costs 736 €. The risk assessment including mental stress comes to 416 €, set-up and administration fees to 146 €. In total, single services add up to 1,600 € a year.

The calculation rests on the single prices in the following table. Besides the median it shows the spread: the middle half of prices and the confidence interval of the median indicate how robust a value is. Services with few prices have correspondingly wide intervals.

What complete support costs per year

For offices with 10 to 250 employees the study adds up what complete support under the ASiG and DGUV Regulation 2 costs if every service is bought at the median market price. Assumptions: support hours as above (basic support plus 20 percent business-specific), on-site visits by size, one risk assessment per work area (one at 25, five at 250 employees), online safety training for all employees. One-off services are spread over three years, the usual minimum term. Services with fewer than five comparable prices, such as the safety committee, the annual report and the hazardous substances register, are left out; the total is therefore more likely too low than too high. Up to 20 employees DGUV Regulation 2 sets no fixed support hours; the figures for 10 employees serve as orientation.

Annual cost rises from 1,284 € at 10 to 22,096 € at 250 employees. The share of single services is highest in small offices: at 10 employees they account for 43 percent of the cost, at 250 employees for 29 percent. The following table breaks the totals down by cost component:

Assessment: for 50 employees complete support costs a median of 4,857 € a year (97 € per employee); between cheaper and more expensive providers the range runs from 3,841 € to 7,365 €. The hours-only calculation is the floor, the sum of all single prices the ceiling. A concrete offer lies in between, depending on what the base price contains. Every offer should therefore state which of these services it covers.

Per employee, the cost of complete support falls with office size from 128 € to 88 € a year. The reason is one-off services and fees, which are spread over more employees. Hours and travel per employee stay almost constant at 63 € to 74 €, because the mandatory hours grow with headcount.

Duties outside the support contract

Some duties lie outside the support by specialist and physician and come on top with every provider: training fire safety helpers (usually 5 percent of employees, refreshed every three to five years), the screen-work health check offer (to be offered at least every three years, participation is voluntary; assumption: 20 percent take it up), testing portable electrical equipment (assumption: four devices per workstation, every 24 months) and escape and rescue plans. Course fees for company first aiders are usually paid by the accident insurer; the business then bears only the working time. The market prices of these services:

These prices apply per person, per device or per plan and do not arise every year. For the total cost the study therefore works out how many units an office needs, what one round costs and how often it is due; the cost per round is spread over the years until it is repeated. Using an office with 50 employees as an example:

All amounts in the following table are costs for the whole business, converted to one year. At 50 employees it comes to 947 € a year, mainly for equipment testing (538 €) and the health check offer (227 €); in the year a round takes place, the full cost per round is due. The last row shows the cost per employee. This cost arises regardless of which provider takes on the support.

Market structure: 8 provider types compared

The market is highly fragmented. A comparison portal counted around 1,700 occupational safety providers in Germany in spring 2026. With 1,037 providers analysed from every federal state and every provider type, this study covers a large part of them. The distribution by type and the share with a published price:

Regional service firms (401) and individual specialists (337) together make up 71 percent of the providers analysed. These are the groups that rarely publish prices: of the regional service firms, 33 state a figure (8 percent); of the individual specialists, 46 (14 percent); of 204 occupational health services, 27 (13 percent), mostly only for health checks. Of 24 online providers, by contrast, 15 publish a price (62 percent). Whoever states a price almost always states an entry price for small businesses; hardly any provider publishes a complete annual price for the standard support of an office. The table adds the most common pricing models and the usual range of hourly rates for each provider type:

Provider type profiles

• Nationwide large providers (corporate groups, certifiers, investor-led groups): specialist and physician from one source, many locations, client portals. Prices almost only on request or in the terms and conditions: nominally moderate hourly rates, plus travel time by the hour, minimum call-offs per order, set-up and administration fees, three-year minimum terms. Strength: capacity and the physician. Weakness: the price only appears in the quote.
• Regional service firms: engineering offices and mid-sized companies with one to a few locations. Mostly hourly rate or annual flat fee, travel within a radius included, a personal contact. Physician often via a partner.
• Individual specialists: freelancers with the most transparent prices. Hourly rate plus surcharges for preparation and follow-up, travel per kilometre or hour. Cover and the physician are organised by the client.
• Online providers and platforms: package tiers and monthly prices for small businesses, often combined with software for risk assessment and training. The lowest entry prices in the market come from this group. The scope only becomes clear from the package descriptions: walkthroughs and training sessions are often capped, the physician is brokered.
• Occupational health services: physician practices, occupational health centres and online physicians. Billing by the hour or per employee, plus registration or administration fees, health checks per person. The physician is the market's bottleneck: around a third of practising occupational physicians are 60 or older.
• Association, chamber and insurer models: framework agreements for members, services of the accident insurers, chamber and guild models. Inexpensive per head but usable only within the respective group and not transferable to other businesses.

Pricing models at a glance

The providers use 10 different pricing models. They only become comparable once converted to the same hours. The distribution among providers with a published price:

The most common are flat fees by size (36 providers) and hourly rates (28), followed by per-employee prices (15), package tiers (13) and one-off packages (12). Flat fees and package tiers rarely state the hours included; with an hourly rate the scope is clear, but the additional costs often are not. The table describes how each model works:

Hourly rates compared

26 providers state an hourly rate for the occupational safety specialist. The median is 90 € net, the middle half sits between 78 and 102 €, the range runs from 50 to 155 €. For the physician 26 providers state a rate: median 147 €, middle half 135 to 160 €. The physician therefore costs about 1.6 times the specialist. Public tenders confirm the order of magnitude: budgets and tendered hours imply about 92 bis 113 € per specialist hour and 141 bis 202 € per physician hour, usually including travel.

A low hourly rate says little about the annual price. What matters is what is charged besides the hour: travel, surcharges, minimum call-offs and billing increments (amounts under hidden cost drivers).

Flat fees and per-employee prices

27 providers advertise a monthly price, mostly for businesses up to 20 employees. The lowest is 11 €, the median 65 €, the highest 500 € a month; 9 of these prices are below 50 €. 12 providers charge per employee and year, from 10 to 82 € (median 29 €), mainly online physicians, insurer services and association models.

Worked example: an offer “from 49 € a month” comes to 588 € a year. At the median hourly rate of 90 € that corresponds to about 6.6 specialist hours. An office with 25 employees needs 10 specialist hours and 2.5 physician hours for basic support alone. Such prices therefore either cover only the appointment, or the hours are billed separately. Both are usually found in the small print, for example as “optional services billed by time spent” or “depending on hazard class and number of employees”.

Cost of the same support by business size

For comparability the study converts all hourly-rate offers to the mandatory hours of an office (method below). Once the same hours are applied, providers sit close together:

Differences between provider types are small as well. For 50 employees the medians of the individual types lie between 3,130 € and 3,895 € a year. The range within a type is clearly larger than the gap between types:

Assessment: the smaller the business, the more travel weighs: in the hourly calculation it makes up about 19 percent of the price at 10 employees and about 5 percent at 250 employees. Flat packages are often more expensive than the hourly calculation for small businesses and cheaper at 100 or 250 employees, because the package price does not grow with size. It then remains open how many hours are included. A package for 250 employees at 3,500 € corresponds arithmetically to less than 30 € per mandatory specialist hour. That matches no published hourly rate and should be checked in the quote.

Scope of services: what the price includes

The biggest differences between offers lie not in the hourly rate but in the scope of services. The analysis covers what providers with a price include in their published terms:

The high share without any statement stands out: 83 percent of providers say nothing about the risk assessment, 82 percent nothing about training. The physician is explicitly included by 45 percent, travel by only 5 percent. For comparison purposes, anything an offer does not explicitly name is best treated as not included until it is confirmed in writing. The table shows the absolute numbers; “brokered or within radius” means the physician is only brokered, or travel is included only up to a distance.

Hidden cost drivers

• Travel: travel time at the full or a reduced hourly rate (65 to 110 € per hour at large providers), mileage of mostly 0.40 to 0.75 € per kilometre, or travel included only up to a distance of 50 kilometres.
• Preparation and follow-up: surcharges of 25 to 30 percent on the time on site; annual reports per started quarter hour.
• Minimum call-off and billing increments: 5 hours per order, at least 2 hours on site, billing per started hour.
• Single services: risk assessment at a median of about 400 € each, online training at a median of about 19 € per employee and year, screen-work health check mostly 57 to 80 € per person, sometimes plus an organisation fee per appointment.
• Fees: administration or registration fees of 10 to 300 € a year or about 15 € per employee, set-up fees of 35 to 1,500 € (median 199 €).
• Cancellation: a median of about 66 € per cancelled appointment, in single cases up to 1,000 € or the full fee for short-notice cancellation.
• Term and escalation: minimum terms stated by 27 providers (1 month: 1, 3 months: 1, 6 months: 1, 12 months: 14, 24 months: 6, 36 months: 3, 60 months: 1), price adjustments of up to 5 percent a year, sometimes without a special right of termination (9 providers with an explicit escalation clause).

What public bodies pay

Public clients have to tender but rarely state hourly rates. Where budget and tendered hours are published together, the rate can be derived. The values sit in the same range as the published list prices but usually include travel: travel time is generally not paid separately in tenders.

Appointment and actual support

A low price is only good value if the service is actually delivered. There is no nationwide measurement of this, but there are official samples. According to the GDA company survey 2023/24, of businesses under 50 employees that are not in the Unternehmermodell, only 51 percent have occupational safety support and 33 percent occupational medical support. Where state authorities looked, there were appointments without activity: in 38 inspected businesses in standard support, 66 percent had no walkthrough by the physician and 45 percent none by the specialist (state industrial physician of Hesse, 2015 to 2018). In 468 inspected medical practices with an engaged physician, only 46 percent had at least one walkthrough (industrial medical service of Lower Saxony). The authorities inspect on average around eight in 1,000 businesses a year.

For the business this means: responsibility stays with the employer. An appointment certificate alone does not fulfil the duty; what can be evidenced are support hours, walkthrough reports, the risk assessment and the annual report. Only 3 of the 159 providers with a price explicitly commit to a statement of hours. A contractually agreed statement provides clarity here.

How Safety Club calculates

Safety Club uses the same hours this study uses as its yardstick: 0.5 hours of basic support per employee and year in support group III, with business-specific support counted within these hours and delivered as part of them, split 80 percent specialist and 20 percent physician, the specialist half on site and half digital, one visit per started eight hours on site. Travel costs are part of the fixed price. Risk assessment including the assessment of mental stress, walkthroughs, organisation of training, hazardous substances register and operating instructions, support of the safety committee, organisation of first aiders, fire safety helpers and safety officers, and documentation in the client portal are part of the fixed price. The physician is in the same contract. Every support hour is evidenced in the portal. There are no set-up or administration fees. Duties outside the support contract (training courses, health checks, equipment testing, escape and rescue plans) and an in-depth employee survey on mental stress are offered separately, as with every provider. First contact to signature: five working days at most. Start of on-site support: within ten working days. Compared with market prices for an office with 100 employees:

The full quote follows the free initial consultation on the page about the external occupational safety specialist.

Safety Club compared with the market

Safety Club's fixed price is compared with the market for the same mandatory scope: basic and business-specific support, travel and the services included in Safety Club's fixed price (risk assessment including mental stress, training, operating instructions, no fees; the hazardous substances register is not included for lack of comparable market prices). The market side comes exclusively from this study's public data; Safety Club itself is not included in the market statistics.

Compared with the market median, Safety Club is 36 to 45 percent cheaper depending on business size, and 21 to 29 percent cheaper than the cheapest quarter of providers. The gap does not come from the hourly rate but from the single services being included in the fixed price. At 10 employees a minimum price applies: there Safety Club is 22 % cheaper than the median and 7 % more expensive than the cheapest quarter. By provider type, each compared with the type's median:

The result applies to all office and administrative industries in support group III, such as tax advice, agencies, IT, consulting and administration: mandatory hours and market prices are the same there. Businesses in other support groups need their own calculation. The support-hours calculator works out the mandatory scope for your own business, the quote calculator the price.

Checklist: ten questions for every offer

1. Are the hours per provider and year stated in writing in the offer, separated into basic and business-specific support?
2. Is the occupational physician included, only brokered, or not covered at all?
3. Travel: included, only within a radius, per hour or per kilometre?
4. Which surcharges apply for preparation and follow-up, documentation, administration, set-up?
5. Are risk assessment, training, safety committee and health checks in the price or charged per item?
6. Is there a minimum call-off per visit, and in which increments is time billed?
7. Minimum term, notice period, automatic renewal?
8. Price escalation clause with or without a special right of termination?
9. Are a statement of hours and an annual report agreed, and who owns the documentation if you switch?
10. What is the total price over the term, converted per employee and year?

Data basis and method

Responsibility: research and analysis are the responsibility of Hugo Hoffstadt, founder of Safety Club. Questions and reports of errors are welcome at info@safetyclub.de; corrections go into the next edition.

Conflict of interest: Safety Club is itself a provider of occupational safety and occupational medical support. Safety Club is therefore not included in any market statistic in this study, no provider is named and every assumption is disclosed. Offers that we received in confidence are not part of the published figures.

Process in five steps:

1. Identify providers: directories and business listings by city in all 16 federal states, comparison portals, lists of chambers, guilds and associations, procurement platforms and a continuously maintained competitor list.
2. Record prices: per provider the home page, pricing and service pages, terms and conditions and price lists. Figures verbatim with source and retrieval date; values from search snippets are marked separately.
3. Record single services: prices for risk assessment, training, operating instructions, travel, fees, health checks and training courses, each with its unit.
4. Public tenders: notices and awards with amounts and hours, with hourly rates derived from them.
5. Analyse: reconcile duplicates, standardise units, compute medians, quartiles and confidence intervals, convert hourly offers to the same mandatory hours, model total costs by office size.

The study covers 1,037 providers of occupational safety and occupational medical support in Germany in 8 provider types (see market structure). Only public sources were analysed, including price lists as PDF, shop pages and framework agreements of associations and chambers. There were no enquiries, no use of price calculators and no logins. Retrieved in October 2026 (as of 2 November 2026).

• Providers without a published price count too. 878 of the 1,037 providers (85 percent) state no figure. They are recorded as “on request” so that the picture of price transparency is complete.
• Figures were taken verbatim, net, as they appear on the page. “From” prices count as the lower figure. Our own calculations are marked as such.
• Normalisation: for comparison, every hourly-rate offer is converted to an office in support group III: 0.5 hours of basic support per employee and year, split 80 percent specialist and 20 percent physician, plus 20 percent business-specific support, plus travel per visit. Where a provider states no physician rate we use 160 to 185 €; where no travel cost is stated, 55 € per visit. Both are noted in the tables.
• Single services and total cost: in addition, 376 prices for single services were recorded (risk assessment, training, safety committee, travel, fees, health checks, training courses). For each service we show the median, the middle half and a confidence interval of the median (bootstrap). The total cost applies the median to each service, with one-off services spread over three years; the range uses the lower and upper quartile.
• Anonymisation: all providers are anonymised and grouped into types broad enough that no single provider is identifiable.
• Updates: the study is repeated annually; the next edition appears in autumn 2027.
• Limits: published prices are list prices, not negotiated prices. What a package contains is often only roughly described. The data basis is not a random selection but covers what can be found publicly, with a focus on providers for office and administrative businesses.

Table of all measures

The overview summarises the distribution of every price measure collected: number of values, median with 95 percent confidence interval, mean, standard deviation, quartiles and extremes. With skewed price distributions the median is more meaningful than the mean.

Request the dataset

We provide the complete dataset as an Excel file on request: all 1,037 providers with type, pricing model, hourly rates, flat fees and included services, plus the prices of single services, the total-cost model by office size and the public tenders. The dataset is fully anonymised: it contains no names and no domains, and every provider carries a random ID. We review each request and then send you the file by email.

Sources

• Prices and contract terms: websites, pricing pages, terms and conditions, price lists and shop pages of 1,037 providers, retrieved in October 2026. Without individual references for reasons of anonymisation.
• Legal basis: Occupational Safety Act (ASiG), DGUV Regulation 2 with Annex 2 (support hours, support groups) as revised in 2024/25, in force at the VBG since 1 December 2025, and DGUV Regulation 3 (testing of electrical equipment).
• GDA company survey 2023/24 (DGUV forum 9/2025) on the prevalence of occupational safety and occupational medical support.
• Regional council of Darmstadt, state industrial physician: occupational safety deficiencies in cleaning businesses (inspections 2015 to 2018).
• Industrial medical service of Lower Saxony: support in medical practices (468 practices).
• German Medical Association, physician statistics 2025 (occupational medicine specialists by age).
• Federal Ministry of Labour, interim report on the minimum inspection rate (inspections per 1,000 businesses).
• Public tenders: TED and the federal states' procurement platforms, 31 awards with euro values.

Note on the analysis

Every provider presents prices and services differently. Not every figure could therefore be assigned unambiguously: for the risk assessment, for example, it was often unclear whether a price covered a single assessment, several work areas or a package when offered separately. Such differences can statistically distort individual measures. The study reflects the publicly available information as of October 2026. All information without guarantee.

Frequently asked questions