Health and Safety in Mexico: 6 Duties for Offices and Remote Teams
Mexico has quietly become one of the more demanding places in the world to be an office employer, and for reasons that will surprise anyone who assumes Latin American regulation is lighter than European.
Two official standards do most of the work. One made psychosocial risk assessment a documented legal obligation years before most of Europe caught up. The other regulates the safety and health conditions of people working from home in a level of detail that has no British or American equivalent at all.
For firms nearshoring finance, technology or professional operations into Mexico City, Guadalajara or Monterrey, or simply employing remote staff there, these are the two things to understand.
1. Psychosocial risk assessment is a documented obligation
NOM-035 came into force in stages from 2019 and requires employers to identify, analyse and prevent psychosocial risk factors, to prevent workplace violence, and to promote a favourable organisational environment.
Three points define it. There is a written policy requirement covering all three of those objects. There is an assessment requirement delivered through prescribed reference guides rather than an instrument of your own design. And there are records: the results, the control measures adopted where the results indicate them, and the names of workers who underwent clinical examination after exposure was established.
The official text is published by the labour secretariat and is available through its standards library.
This predates comparable European obligations by several years, which is worth saying plainly to anyone who assumes the direction of travel runs the other way.
2. What you must do depends on headcount, in three bands
The structure is tiered, and the tiers matter for planning.
Workplaces with up to fifteen workers have the policy and prevention obligations, including measures relating to severe traumatic events, without the questionnaire-based assessment requirement.
Workplaces with between sixteen and fifty workers must carry out the identification and analysis of psychosocial risk factors, and it must include all workers rather than a sample.
Workplaces with more than fifty workers must do that and additionally evaluate the organisational environment, with sampling permitted at that scale.
A nearshore operation crossing fifty people therefore acquires a second assessment obligation, and one crossing fifteen acquires the first. Neither arrives with a notification.
3. Complaints route outward, and confidentially
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A specific obligation that sits awkwardly with how many groups handle internal reporting.
Complaints relating to workplace violence and discrimination are to be referred to the competent authority, with confidentiality guaranteed. That is a different design from a purely internal grievance process, and it needs to be reflected in local procedure rather than assumed to be covered by a group policy.
4. Remote work has its own standard, and it is prescriptive
The provision most relevant to technology and financial firms, and the one that most reliably surprises foreign parents.
NOM-037 was published in June 2023 and took effect in December 2023, complementing the 2021 labour law reform that formally regulated telework. It applies to workplaces with people working under the telework arrangement, and it sets conditions for the place where that work is actually done: connectivity, and safety and health conditions with particular emphasis on the state of electrical installations, lighting, ventilation and ergonomics. The official text is published through the federal gazette record.
Employer obligations include maintaining an updated and confidential list of teleworkers, a written telework policy, a list of the computing and ergonomic equipment provided to each person, and a verification checklist of safety and health conditions at the telework location applied on a periodic basis.
Read that last one carefully. The employer is expected to establish the condition of a place it does not own or control. The standard resolves this by allowing the joint safety and hygiene commission to conduct a physical check where the worker agrees, or alternatively by applying the checklist. Either way, the position is not that homeworking is outside your scope.
5. The obligations that surround the checklist
Several further requirements sit alongside it and are easy to miss.
Changes of modality between on-site and telework are to be documented, and mechanisms for reversing telework to on-site working are to be established. Medical examinations are to be practised for teleworkers with follow-up on accident notices. And there is a requirement to have mechanisms in place for cases of family violence, which reflects the reality that the workplace is now someone's home and has no counterpart in most other jurisdictions.
For a group running remote hiring across several countries, this is the clearest example of why a single homeworking policy does not travel. The Mexican arrangement is not a stricter version of a British one. It is a different instrument with its own artefacts.
6. Enforcement is documentary and specific
The labour secretariat inspects, and accredited inspection units can assess compliance with these standards.
What is examined is evidence: the written policies, the assessment results, the control measures adopted, the records of examinations, the teleworker list, the equipment list, the completed checklists. An organisation that has done the work informally and holds nothing is in the same position as one that has done nothing, because the standards are framed around documented outputs.
The labour secretariat publishes guidance through gob.mx. Confirm current requirements and any updates through local advice, since these standards have been amended and supplemented since introduction.
What a Mexican operation needs
| Duty | Trigger | Common gap in a foreign-owned entity | |---|---|---| | Psychosocial policy | Any workplace with workers | Group wellbeing policy assumed sufficient | | Identification and analysis | 16 or more workers, all workers included | Not performed | | Organisational environment evaluation | More than 50 workers | Not performed after crossing the threshold | | Complaint referral | Any workplace | Handled entirely internally | | Telework policy and lists | Any teleworkers | No policy, no equipment list | | Telework condition checks | Any teleworkers | Never attempted | | Records | All of the above | Work done informally, nothing retained |
The third and sixth rows are the two most likely to be missing in a fast-growing nearshore operation, because both attach on growth or on a working pattern that was adopted without anyone revisiting compliance.
Mexico in a group context
The useful thing about Mexico is how badly it fits the assumption that compliance obligations are strictest in northern Europe.
Several European systems reach psychosocial risk through their general assessment duty rather than through a dedicated instrument, and very few regulate the physical conditions of homeworking with a prescribed checklist. A group that has built its standard around European practice will find Mexico requires artefacts it has never produced, while a group that has built around Mexico will find European entities require documents Mexico does not use.
The workable pattern is the one that holds everywhere: local obligations discharged under local law by people qualified there, feeding one group view of what is current and outstanding. That is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits confirm each entity satisfies its own national test rather than a translated group standard.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite coordinates locally qualified practitioners so that Mexican obligations are met under Mexican standards, in the prescribed form, while your group keeps one point of contact across every country. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with finance and banking, IT and software and professional services organisations, which describes most nearshore operations in Mexico.
Our global health and safety consultants handle the jurisdictions that usually accompany a Mexican entity, and our international health and safety consultants can establish what is outstanding locally. If you employ people in Mexico and have never completed a psychosocial assessment or a telework checklist, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
