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Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute

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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.


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

Our page on Reporting product safety problems to CPSC.