How often must training be repeated?

"How often do we have to repeat this?" is one of the most common questions a QHSE or training manager gets, and one of the most often answered wrongly. The honest answer is that almost nothing in Benelux law fixes a repeat interval, a handful of specific rules do, and everything in between is set by you and then held against you.

Figures in this guide are as of September 2026: VCA 2026/6.1, IFS Food version 8 and BRCGS Food Safety Issue 9.

The intervals that are actually fixed

That is close to the full list for general frontline operations. Sector rules add their own (electrical work, specific permits, hazardous goods), but the general duties to train and instruct carry no clock.

The rules that set no interval

The Belgian Codex. Art. I.2-21 requires training on entry, on a change of function and when new equipment or technology arrives, "repeated and adapted as risks evolve". That is a trigger rule, not a calendar rule.

The Dutch Arbowet. Article 8 requires effective instruction adapted to each worker's tasks and supervision that it is followed. Effective is a standing condition: if people no longer work to the instruction, it is no longer effective, whatever the date on the record. BHV training under article 15 must be adequate, again without a fixed period; most sites refresh BHV yearly because their own risk inventory says so.

HACCP under Regulation 852/2004. Food handlers must be supervised and instructed or trained in food hygiene in line with their work. No course, duration or interval is named.

BRCGS and IFS. Neither prescribes a refresher interval, whatever a vendor has told you. IFS 3.3.1 requires your training programme to state a frequency, and IFS 3.3.4 expects training content to be reviewed and updated when products, processes or legal requirements change. You are then audited against the frequency you wrote down. Our HACCP guide covers that trap in detail.

No interval is not no obligation

"No fixed interval" does not mean "once is enough". Every rule above has triggers that restart the clock, and those triggers are where most findings come from.

Setting your own interval

The interval you write down becomes the standard you are measured against. Someone once wrote "annual refresher for all staff" because it sounded defensible; with four hundred people across three shifts, agency crews cycling through and a summer peak, by month fourteen the site is eighty people behind its own rule. The auditor needs no external standard for that finding.

Set intervals by risk instead of one number for everyone:

Then count monthly. An interval you check in audit week is one you have already missed. How often toolbox topics should return is in our toolbox guide, and what an auditor wants to see as evidence in our guide on training records.

How Aristotl handles it

Aristotl turns the procedures you already maintain into courses of 3-5 minutes with a knowledge check, which workers complete on their own phone, in their own language. When a trigger fires, a changed procedure or an incident finding, the updated course goes to the sites or teams it applies to, and completion is viewable per person, per site and per version in the platform, so a completion on the old version shows as exactly that. External certificates such as first aid, BHV or VCA sit in one overview with their expiry dates.

Take your own training matrix and mark every interval that comes from law or a scheme and every one your organisation chose. Then check the chosen ones against last month's records.