Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute

Documents on the CPSC Standard

Summary: Some of the documents published by the Consumer Product Safety Commission related to its bicycle helmet standard.

The standard is officially referred to as "16 CFR Part 1203"

CPSC has a clear and understandable summary of the bike helmet regulations on their website. It is the best place to start to get familiar with the requirements and how their standard is applied.

Here is the CPSC official accredited test labs

The GovInfo site has a legal copy of the standard, as it appeared in the Federal Register in 1998, with all the formal language. Since then it has been modified only once, with a letter to manufacturers interpreting the language on projections.

For additional background if you need it, back when the standard was adopted CPSC put up the full briefing package that was prepared for the Commissioners to aid in making the decision on their helmet standard. It has useful background if you are trying to understand how the standard came into being. We have a link below to the documents we saved at the time. (At one time you could find the documents in five sections of a FOIA request. They were in Adobe .pdf format. We do not see them any more on the web, but we have them below.)

BHSI's Collection

We have on our server a number of documents collected as the Consumer Product Safety Commission was developing its standard. Some are copies of those on the CPSC site.

• The final helmet standard as a .pdf file.
  
  
• The final standard as text.
  
  
• A letter modifying that standard with an interpretation.
  
  
• The regulation summary mention above.
  
  
• The law that forced the Commission to develop a bicycle helmet standard.
  
  
• The first draft standard.
  
  
• The second draft.
  
  
• CPSC's Supplementary Material for briefings on that draft.
  
  
• A summary of changes in the second draft.
  
  
• Our formal comments on the draft.
  
  
• Our April, 1995, comments on what we thought it still needed
  
  
• The CPSC notice implementing the interim standard
  
  
• Our 1996 comments on adding reflectivity and lowering the impact fail criterion for toddler helmets to 250g.
  
  
• The third and final draft, approved on February 5, 1998.
  
  
• Our comments on the final draft.
  
  
• Three of our Update newsletters on the standard in early 1998.
  
  
• A letter from CPSC on how they will enforce the standard.
  
  
• A page about CPSC recall rules and enforcement penalties.
  
  
• A report of serious legal consequences for a manufacturer ignoring a CPSC Rule.
  
  
• How CPSC can act to replace a non-working voluntary standard with a law..
  
  
• A page of photos of the CPSC helmet test lab.
  
  
• How to Send a Defective Helmet to CPSC
  
  
• Our June, 2003 request under the Freedom of Information Act for a list of all recent CPSC helmet compliance cases. In a ridiculous attempt to avoid answering, they referred us to the list of recalls on their web page, knowing that most compliance cases do not end up as recalls. We asked for the list again, but never got it.

Our page on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

Our page on Reporting product safety problems to CPSC.