Free JSA template and Take 5 template (Excel): what to capture and how to fill them in

A JSA template is a blank job safety analysis form: a table that breaks one task into steps, lists the hazards at each step, and records the controls and who owns them, with a sign-on for the crew. The free Humanz JSA template below is an Excel workbook, with a matching Take 5 template, and neither needs an email address.

Both are the forms a crew would draw up on the tailgate if nobody handed them one, tidied so the columns are already there and the drop-downs stop “be careful” passing as a control. This is general information, not safety advice for a specific job: the WHS regulator where the work happens is the authority, and the site or principal contractor’s own forms take precedence wherever they exist. The JSA vs SWMS guide covers the definitions and the law behind each form. This one is about filling the things in.

Download the free JSA template

Download the Humanz JSA template (Excel, .xlsx). No sign-up, no email gate. It opens in any current version of Excel and imports into Google Sheets (File, then Import).

What’s in it

• JSA sheet. A header block for the job or task, site or location, date, supervisor, the SWMS it sits under if there is one, and any permits or isolations referenced. Below that, a table of up to fifteen task steps with columns for Step, Task step, Hazards, Risk before controls (a drop-down: Low, Medium, High, Extreme), Controls (a drop-down for the hierarchy level: Eliminate, Substitute, Isolate, Engineering, Administrative, PPE, plus a free-text column for the control itself), Risk after controls (the same drop-down) and Responsible. Then a sign-on table for the crew (name, company, signature, date) and a review row (reviewed by, date, reason for review).
• Risk matrix sheet. A standard 5 by 5 likelihood-by-consequence grid, labelled as an example to be replaced by your site’s own matrix. The one on the wall at the site office wins.
• How to use sheet. The instructions in one page, including what the template does not do.

A template makes nothing safe by itself. It does not know your ground, your plant or your crew, and it does not replace a SWMS where the work is high risk construction work. What it gives you is a layout that forces the thinking into the right order, and a drop-down that will not let “PPE” pass as the only answer without you noticing it sits at the bottom of the list.

How to fill in a JSA

The form follows the four moves Safe Work Australia describes for managing any risk: identify hazards, assess risks, control risks, and review the control measures. A JSA writes that down for one task, on the day, with the people doing it.

1. Fill in the header first. Job, site, date, supervisor, the SWMS it sits under, and the number of any permit to work or isolation. A JSA with a blank header is the one that turns up in a folder two years later with nobody able to say which job it belonged to.
2. Break the task into steps. Walk the task in the order it will happen, one line per step. Three to eight covers most jobs; more than ten and you are writing a procedure. Each step is something a worker does (“lift the pump column”), not a goal (“complete the changeover”).
3. Name the hazards at each step. “Electrical” is a category; “pump supply still live at the starter” is a hazard somebody can check. Ask what could go wrong here, what has changed since last time, and what the person on this step cannot see from where they stand.
4. Rate the risk before controls. Use the matrix as a prompt, not a verdict: its job is to make the crew argue about the High ones. If everything comes out Medium, the matrix is being used to avoid a decision.
5. Choose controls from the top of the hierarchy down. WorkSafe Victoria’s hierarchy of control page puts elimination first, then substitution, isolation and engineering, then administrative controls, with PPE as the lowest and least reliable level. A JSA that lists only “spotter”, “toolbox talk” and “gloves” has stopped at the bottom two rungs without asking whether the top ones were available. If a control’s level is Administrative or PPE, add a word on why nothing higher was reasonably practicable.
6. Rate the risk again, and name who owns each control. The after-controls rating should drop; if it does not, the control is decoration. Responsible needs a name, not a role: “the supervisor” is nobody when the supervisor is at the other end of the site.
7. Walk the crew through it, sign on, review when anything changes. Read it out at the toolbox talk or prestart, fix what the office got wrong, then sign on. The review row is for the change that always comes: a different crew, different plant, rain, a service that was not on the plan. A JSA signed in June and still in use in October is a signature, not an analysis.

A worked mini example: replacing a submersible pump at a bore

Illustrative, to show the method rather than a JSA to copy. A two-person maintenance crew is pulling a failed submersible pump from a water bore on a remote site and fitting a replacement. The pump hangs on a column of pipe and cable, lifted with a vehicle-mounted crane; the supply runs from a starter cabinet beside the bore; it is January and the forecast is in the 40s. Whether this is construction work depends on the site. If it is, and the crane truck is moving in the work area, that is a listed category of high risk construction work and a SWMS comes first, with the JSA underneath it.

Two things to notice. The first hazard is a live cable, and its control sits at Isolate, with the paper (the permit) in a supporting role rather than the lead. The heat on step 3 is the one that catches crews who wrote the JSA in the air-conditioned office. A good JSA has the forecast in it.

Download the free Take 5 template

Download the Humanz Take 5 template (Excel, .xlsx). Same deal: no sign-up, no email gate, opens in Excel and imports into Google Sheets.

What’s in it

• Take 5 sheet, laid out as a one-page card. Name, site, task, date and time. The five steps (Stop and think, Look and identify, Assess the risk, Control the hazards, Proceed only if safe), each with a tick box. A common hazard checklist (working at height, mobile plant, manual handling, hazardous substances, electrical, heat, isolation or lone work, environment, other) with a “control in place” column beside each. The question “Can this task be done safely?” with Yes or No, and the instruction that a No means stop and talk to the supervisor. A signature line.
• Take 5 register sheet. A log of completed Take 5s: date, worker, task, hazards found, action taken, supervisor notified. This is the sheet that turns a pocket card into a record you can look back through.
• How to use sheet. One page, including the honest note that a Take 5 is a personal check, not a plan.

How to do a Take 5 that is worth the paper

There is no regulator definition of a Take 5. No WHS regulation names it and no regulator publishes an official version. The five steps on the card are the common industry form, and companies vary the wording. What the regulators do describe is the thinking behind it: the same identify, assess, control and review loop as the JSA, compressed into two minutes by the person about to start.

1. Stop and think. Before touching anything, think the task through from the first thing you will do to the last.
2. Look and identify. Look at the actual work area, not the one in your head. The hazard checklist prompts the categories people forget: the environment, the heat, the fact that you are on your own.
3. Assess the risk. Which of the hazards you found could hurt you today? No matrix needed, just an honest answer about the two or three things that matter.
4. Control the hazards. For each one, what is in place, and is it in place now? “Barricade” ticked while the barricade is still in the ute is a tick, not a control.
5. Proceed only if safe. If any answer is No, the task waits and the supervisor hears about it. That conversation is the point of the form.

What a good Take 5 catches is the gap between the plan and the morning: the plant moved overnight, the crew member who swapped in, the wind that came up, the thing the JSA did not mention because nobody knew. The best versions ask one extra question outright: what is different from the last time you did this? A Take 5 filled in at the smoko table for the whole day is a signature collection, and the register will show it, because every entry will say “no hazards found”. When a Take 5 finds something that cannot be fixed on the spot, or that nearly hurt someone, it goes into a hazard or near-miss report so it can be followed up and, if it turns out to be notifiable, reported to the regulator in time.

When a JSA or Take 5 is the wrong form

Neither is the form the law asks for by name. WorkSafe Victoria’s SWMS guidance says plainly that risk assessments and job safety analyses are not required under legislation, while noting they are useful tools for identifying hazards and assessing risks. The same page, and the model WHS Regulations in the other jurisdictions, require a SWMS before high risk construction work starts.

So the first question on any construction site is whether the task is on the list. Safe Work Australia’s high risk construction work page sets out the categories, including a risk of a person falling more than 2 metres, work in or near a trench deeper than 1.5 metres, work on or near energised electrical services, work where powered mobile plant is moving, and work on or next to a road or rail corridor in use. Work in any of them needs a SWMS before it starts, and the business doing the work must give a copy to the principal contractor. A JSA does not replace it, however well written. The principal contractor WHS duties guide covers the other side of that exchange.

Three more cases where the JSA template is the wrong move:

• The work needs a permit. Hot work, confined space entry, electrical isolation and excavation near services usually run on a permit system with its own form and sign-offs. The JSA can reference the permit but cannot stand in for it.
• The site already has a form. Principal contractors and mine sites run their own JSA, JHA or JSEA layouts, their own risk matrix and their own Take 5 booklet, and those take precedence. Use the Humanz template to prepare, then transfer the thinking to the site’s form.
• The record is about a person, not a task. A JSA is not an induction record, a ticket register or a training sign-off. Whether someone holds a white card or a high risk work licence belongs in the worker’s record, and the construction site compliance checklist lists what else sits there.

Where paper breaks

The template works. Printed, filled in and signed on the tailgate, it does exactly what it is meant to do on the morning. The trouble starts at about 3pm.

The completed form goes missing. The JSA lives in the ute until somebody carries it to the site office, and a share of them never make the trip. A shirt-pocket Take 5 card is designed to be thrown out, and a register nobody fills in is a blank sheet.

Nothing links the form to the job. Six weeks later the question is “which JSA covered the bore on the twelfth of January, and who signed it?” A folder of paper answers that only if someone filed it by date and job, and kept filing when it got busy.

There is no history after an incident. When something goes wrong, the first request from the regulator, the client or the insurer is for the paperwork from before it went wrong: the JSA, the sign-on, the Take 5, the toolbox talk. On paper the history is whatever survived the glovebox, and it is the moment you find out half the Take 5s said “no hazards found” in the same handwriting. Scanning the pile into a PDF fixes none of this: a photo of a form has no link to a job and no searchable fields, now with a filename nobody will remember.

Running them on a phone with Humanz

Humanz is a workforce management platform with a custom form builder, and the JSA and Take 5 are two of the forms it is most often asked to carry. Your admin builds your JSA, Take 5 or SWMS sign-on once, using the fields in the templates above or your site’s own layout: drag-and-drop fields, drop-downs, conditional sections, mandatory questions, and photo and signature capture. The crew completes them in the mobile app, offline if the signal drops, and every submission is timestamped and stored against the job and the worker who submitted it, searchable later. The digital forms guide covers the builder in detail and how to roll a new form out without losing the crew.

That answers the three paper failures. The form cannot go missing, because it is submitted from the spot. It is tied to the job and the person, so “which JSA covered the bore on the twelfth” is a search rather than a scavenger hunt. After an incident, the history is there with the times on it, and because the Take 5 register builds itself from the submissions, the site that never finds a hazard shows up in the report.

One honest limit, and it matters more on this page than most. Humanz stores, timestamps and finds the paperwork. It does not write the JSA, assess the risk or give safety advice, and it does not know whether a bore cover suits your hole. That judgement stays with the crew and the supervisor, and the authority on what the law requires is the WHS regulator where the work happens. The template, on paper or on a phone, is only ever the place the thinking gets written down.

Frequently asked questions

What is a JSA template?

A JSA template is a blank job safety analysis form laid out so a crew can break one task into steps, list the hazards at each step, rate the risk, record the controls and who is responsible for them, and sign on before starting. Good templates add a review row for when conditions change and a drop-down for the hierarchy of control, so PPE is visibly the last resort. The Humanz JSA template is a free Excel workbook with all of that plus an example risk matrix.

Is a JSA a legal requirement in Australia?

No. WorkSafe Victoria’s guidance states that risk assessments and job safety analyses are not required under legislation, though they are useful for identifying hazards and assessing risks. The legal duty is to eliminate or minimise risks so far as is reasonably practicable, and a JSA is one practical way to show that happened. Many sites and principal contractors require one as a condition of working there, which is a contract rule rather than a legal one.

What is the difference between a JSA and a SWMS?

A SWMS is the document the law requires before high risk construction work starts, while a JSA is a planning tool for any task that no regulation requires by name. A JSA often sits under a SWMS to cover the day’s detail, but it cannot replace one for work on the high risk construction work list, such as a fall risk over 2 metres, a trench deeper than 1.5 metres, energised electrical services or moving mobile plant.

What is a Take 5 in safety?

A Take 5 is a quick personal risk check a worker does in the minutes before starting a task. It usually runs through five steps: stop and think, look and identify, assess the risk, control the hazards, and proceed only if safe. There is no regulator definition and no official version, so the wording varies by company, and it is a site or company requirement rather than a legal document.

What should a Take 5 checklist include?

A Take 5 checklist should capture who, where, what and when, then walk the worker through stopping, looking at the actual work area, identifying hazards, confirming each control is in place, and deciding whether the task can be done safely. A short list of common hazard categories helps people remember the ones they overlook, such as heat, lone work and the environment. The most useful addition is a question about what has changed since last time, with a clear instruction that a No means stop and talk to the supervisor.

Who fills in a JSA?

The supervisor usually leads it, with the workers who will do the task contributing the steps and hazards, because they know how the job really goes. Everyone doing the task then signs on to show they have been walked through the controls. A JSA written by someone who will not be on the job, and signed by people who have not read it, has the form of a JSA without the substance.

How long should a JSA be kept?

No regulation sets a retention period for a JSA, because no regulation requires the form by name. A practical yardstick is the rule the model WHS Regulations apply to a SWMS: keep it until the work it covers is finished, and for at least two years if a notifiable incident happens in connection with that work. Many businesses simply keep every completed JSA with the job record, which is easy once the forms are digital and tied to the job.