The short answer
From $29,328 to $586,550 MXN per infraction
Article 992 of Mexico's Ley Federal del Trabajo sets the penalty at 250 to 5,000 UMA per infraction. With the 2026 daily UMA at $117.31 pesos, that range is the figures above.
Which is the part almost nobody explains: $586,550 is not "the NOM-035 fine". It is the top of the range, for one infraction, at this year's UMA. It is not typical, not fixed, and not once.
Search for NOM-035 fines and you will find the same number repeated across dozens of pages, usually with no indication of where it came from. That makes it useless for the only thing that matters when an inspection is announced: estimating your real exposure and deciding what to do about it this week.
This article takes the number apart. Where it comes from, why it moves every February, what multiplies it, and what an inspector actually looks at.
Disclaimer: this is information, not legal advice. Determining a sanction is the labour authority's job and depends on the facts of each case. Consult a Mexican labour attorney or a compliance adviser for your own situation.
Where the figure comes from
NOM-035 publishes no fines. The fines come from the Ley Federal del Trabajo, which penalises failures to meet occupational health and safety standards and expresses the penalty in UMA rather than in pesos. That is why the number moves on its own each year without anyone amending the law.
Two practical consequences of the penalty being denominated in UMA rather than pesos. First, any peso figure expires in February: an article quoting pesos without saying which UMA value produced them is not telling you which year it is describing. Second, the range is deliberately wide — the authority grades the sanction by severity, recurrence and the conditions of the work centre, so the ceiling is not the starting point.
What actually multiplies the exposure
The most expensive misreading is treating the ceiling as the total. It is not, because the penalty applies per infraction — and in the cases sanctioned per affected worker, per worker as well.
A visit that records three separate failures — the wrong instrument was applied, no documented action plan exists, no evidence that results were communicated — does not charge one ceiling. It charges three amounts inside the range. Which is why the honest way to estimate exposure is to multiply the range by the number of chargeable infractions, rather than read the ceiling once and feel either calm or terrified depending on the mood.
| Infractions charged | Minimum exposure | Maximum exposure |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $29,328 | $586,550 |
| 2 | $58,656 | $1,173,100 |
| 3 | $87,984 | $1,759,650 |
Those amounts are not a prediction of what you will be charged. They are the size of the risk you are carrying while the file is incomplete. The distinction matters, and it is why Bloomder never presents fine exposure as a saving in its finance report — the outcome of an inspection belongs to the STPS, and counting a fine that never happened as money saved is the fastest way for a report to lose a finance director's confidence.
What an inspector checks
Four things. And after years of looking at these files, the first is rarely the one that is missing.
1. That the applied instrument is the right one
Reference Guide II at work centres with up to 50 people, Guide III above 50. Applying the short one at a 200-person plant is not "almost compliant" — it is not having applied the instrument the standard requires. Both are published here in full, free, so you can check which one you used.
2. That records have been kept
At least 12 months at work centres with up to 50 workers, at least 5 years above 50. A three-year-old file with no reapplication is not an old file. It is an expired one.
3. That an action plan exists where risk came out high
This is the most common finding of all. The company ran the questionnaire, filed the results and stopped there. A high-risk result with no documented action is evidence that the problem was identified and nothing followed, which is a worse position than not having measured.
4. That results were communicated back
The standard requires informing workers. It is the part most often forgotten, because it produces no document by itself — you have to make one: minutes, an acknowledgement, a notice on the board. Anything, as long as it is dated.
What the other side costs
The "fine versus cost of compliance" comparison is tempting and has to be made carefully, because nobody can promise you that complying avoids a sanction. What can be stated is what the programme costs, and there the arithmetic is different from what people imagine.
The real work of NOM-035 is not the questionnaire. It is the operation around it: inviting, holding anonymity, keying in, scoring against the tables, documenting the action plan, communicating results and filing all of it with dates. Done by hand at a 200-person plant with Guide III, that is weeks of somebody's time. Automated, it is hours a year.
The point where paper stops paying
Not a legal point, an operational one: one site and under 50 people runs perfectly well on paper. Above that, keying in 72 items per person by hand — with the reverse-scored items, which is where the errors land — costs more than the software, and anonymity becomes hard to demonstrate.
What to do this week
If an inspection has just been announced, this order pays best: first confirm which guide applies to the site and whether that is the one you applied; then look for the action plan on the domains that scored high, because that is what most often does not exist; then the evidence that results were communicated; and last, the retention dates.
If no inspection is in sight, the order is the same without the hurry, and it is worth turning into a cycle rather than a project. The full compliance checklist is here, step by step.
The file, assembling itself
Both reference guides ship loaded, sending and reminders are automatic, and every administration is recorded with a timestamp. Free up to 25 employees.
Start free →To see how the evidence is produced and what the report exports, read about NOM-035 and ISO 45003 compliance in Bloomder. If you need the file audit-ready in 30 days, that is the 035 Shield Program.
Figures current at the 2026 daily UMA of $117.31 MXN, published by INEGI. The UMA is updated every February: if you are reading this after February 2027, check the current value before using these amounts. The 250 to 5,000 UMA range comes from article 992 of the Ley Federal del Trabajo.