HAVS — Hand-Arm Vibration Syndrome: Trades Guide

What HAVS Actually Does to Your Hands

Every time you pick up a breaker, an angle grinder, or a hammer drill, vibration travels straight from the tool into your hand, up through your wrist, and into your arm. Do that for a few hours a week over a few years and it starts to damage the small blood vessels, nerves, muscles, and joints in your fingers and hands. That damage is what's known as Hand-Arm Vibration Syndrome, or HAVS.

It doesn't show up overnight. Most people notice it first as tingling or numbness in the fingers after a day on vibrating tools, the kind of thing that wears off by the next morning and gets ignored. Over time, that recovery stops happening. The tingling sticks around longer. Cold weather starts to trigger symptoms even when you're not holding a tool at all.

The condition most people associate with HAVS is vibration white finger. Fingers turn white, then sometimes blue, as the blood supply cuts off, then red and painful as it comes back. It's usually triggered by cold or wet conditions and can happen at work, at home, or just standing outside on a cold morning. Alongside that, grip strength drops. Fine motor tasks get harder, doing up a shirt button, holding small fixings, gripping a pencil for marking out. Some tradespeople start dropping tools without meaning to because they can't feel or grip them properly anymore.

Here's the part that matters most. Once HAVS sets in, it's permanent. There's no treatment that reverses nerve or blood vessel damage once it's happened. The only thing you can do once symptoms appear is stop things getting worse, by cutting exposure right down or coming off vibrating tools altogether. For a lot of tradespeople, that means the end of doing the job they've built a career around, not because they got hurt in an accident, but because years of "normal" tool use quietly wore their hands out.

The Law — Control of Vibration at Work Regulations 2005

The Control of Vibration at Work Regulations 2005 are the piece of law that covers this. They set out two figures you need to know, both measured as an 8-hour energy-weighted average, written as A(8).

The Exposure Action Value (EAV) is 2.5 m/s² A(8). This is the level where things kick in. If a worker's daily exposure reaches this, you need to have assessed the risk, given them information on what HAVS is and how to spot it, and started putting controls in place to bring exposure down.

The Exposure Limit Value (ELV) is 5.0 m/s² A(8). This is the absolute ceiling. Exposure must be reduced so it doesn't go above this figure, and if it does, you need to work out why and fix it, not just note it down and carry on.

These duties don't only sit with big employers running large sites. If you're a self-employed tradesperson working for yourself, the same regulations apply to you. There's nobody else responsible for assessing your exposure and putting controls in place. That job falls on you.

Which Tools Put You at Risk?

Vibration figures vary a lot between makes and models, and manufacturers are required to publish a vibration magnitude value for each tool, usually found in the manual or on the HSE's own tool database. As a rough guide, here's how common trade tools stack up and how that translates into safe daily use.

Notice how wide some of those ranges are. A well-maintained, modern breaker with good anti-vibration mounts can sit at the low end. An old, worn one with a cracked mount or a blunt bit can push well past the top of the range. The make and condition of the tool matters as much as the type of tool.

How to Work Out Your Exposure

The regulations use a points system to work out daily exposure, and it's worth understanding rather than treating it as a black box. The formula is: points per hour = 100 x (vibration in m/s² divided by 2.5) squared. A daily total of 400 points is where you hit the Exposure Limit Value.

At the EAV of 2.5 m/s², that works out to 100 points per hour, meaning you could use that tool for up to 4 hours before hitting the daily limit. At the ELV of 5.0 m/s², that's 400 points per hour, which means the daily limit is used up in a single hour.

The squared part of the formula is what catches people out. Vibration doesn't add up in a straight line, it ramps up fast. Take a breaker running at 15 m/s², well within the typical range from the table above, used for a single hour. That's 100 x (15 / 2.5) squared, which comes out at 3600 points. That's nine times the daily limit, from one hour on one tool.

That's why "I only used it for a bit" doesn't tell you much on its own. A short spell on a high-vibration tool can eat up a whole day's allowance faster than a long spell on a lower-vibration one. And if a worker uses more than one vibrating tool in a day, breaker in the morning, grinder in the afternoon, those points get added together, not assessed separately.

Working this out properly should feed into your wider paperwork, not sit as a separate exercise nobody looks at again. It belongs alongside the vibration hazard in your risk assessment, with the tools, exposure times, and controls recorded against the task.

Practical Controls — Reducing Your Risk on Site

The regulations expect you to work through a hierarchy of controls, starting with the options that cut vibration at source rather than jumping straight to gloves or shorter shifts. Elimination and substitution come first, if a task can be done without a vibrating tool at all, or with a lower-vibration alternative, that's the best option going. Hand demolition instead of a breaker on a small job, or a hydraulic tool instead of a pneumatic one, can remove or cut the risk before you even get to managing exposure.

Where the tool itself is the only option, engineering controls come next. Choosing low-vibration tools when kit gets replaced, ones with built-in dampening and anti-vibration mounts, is one of the most effective long-term changes you can make. Keeping tools well maintained matters just as much. A worn mount, a loose fitting, or a blunt blade or bit forces the tool to work harder and pushes vibration levels up, sometimes well past what the manufacturer's figures suggest.

Administrative controls fill the gap after that. Job rotation spreads exposure across the team rather than loading it onto one person doing all the breaker work every day. Limiting the time any one person spends on a high-vibration tool in a single day, and building in breaks away from vibrating tools, keeps individual exposure under the limits worked out earlier. Letting fingers warm up between spells on cold, vibrating kit also helps, since cold hands are more vulnerable to damage.

PPE sits at the bottom of that list, and it's worth being honest about why.

Anti-Vibration Gloves — Why They Are Not the Answer

Anti-vibration gloves get sold as a straightforward fix, and plenty of sites treat them as job done once every worker's got a pair. The problem is where the padding actually sits. These gloves reduce vibration transmitted through the palm. They do very little for the fingers, and the fingers are where most of the nerve and blood vessel damage caused by HAVS actually happens.

That doesn't mean gloves are pointless. They add a small layer of protection and help keep hands warm, which matters given how much cold makes symptoms worse. But if anti-vibration gloves are the main control on a job involving breakers or grinders, that job is not properly controlled, whatever the paperwork says. Gloves are a supplement to the controls above, not a substitute for them.

A lot of the mistakes that lead to higher HAVS risk on site are cheap to avoid once you know to look for them.

Health Surveillance — Catching It Early

Health surveillance exists because HAVS is entirely preventable if it's caught while symptoms are still mild. Once a worker is exposed at or above the action value, health surveillance isn't optional, it's a legal duty. There are four recognised tiers, and most workers only ever need to go through the first couple.

Tier 1 is a baseline questionnaire, filled in before someone starts regular work with vibrating tools, so there's something to compare against later. Tier 2 is an annual questionnaire, repeated each year to pick up any change in symptoms early. If Tier 2 flags anything, Tier 3 brings in a qualified person, often an occupational health nurse, to carry out a more detailed check. If that check raises concerns, Tier 4 is referral to a doctor for full diagnosis.

The point of this staged approach is to catch problems while a change of task, a bit of job rotation, or tighter controls can still make a real difference, rather than waiting until someone's reporting permanent numbness. A health surveillance programme that gets filed away and never acted on isn't meeting the point of the regulations, even if every form's been filled in on time.

There's a reporting duty that follows on from this too. HAVS becomes reportable under RIDDOR once a doctor has diagnosed it and confirmed it was likely caused by the person's work. When that happens, it needs reporting within 10 days using form F2508A. Our guide to RIDDOR reporting requirements covers what else needs reporting and the deadlines involved.

Worth keeping in mind too that some workers are more susceptible than others. Smokers, people who work regularly in cold environments, and those with existing circulation issues tend to see symptoms develop faster and worse than average. None of that changes the legal limits, but it's a reason to take early symptoms in any individual seriously rather than assuming their exposure "must still be fine" because it's within the numbers.

Frequently Asked Questions