Safety Merit Badge

Four jobs at home, hiding as four lettered items

Most of this badge is explained to a counselor. Four parts are not:

They sit in two different requirements and look like four unrelated letters. They are the badge. Every one of them ends in a review with your counselor, so none of them can be done the night before.

2(d) and 3(b) are the same walk round the same building

Both say inspect your home or a similar building ... with an adult, both use a checklist, and both end in a review with your counselor. One is looking for hazards and the other for security measures.

Nothing on the badge tells you to do them together. Do them together.

You do not have to buy the pamphlet

Requirements 2(d), 2(f) and 3(b) each name a checklist in the Safety merit badge pamphlet, or one approved by your counselor.

In practice you need neither. All three checklists are published free by Scouting America and linked from the requirements themselves, and they are filed under other badges' resource folders, which is exactly why people miss them:

• the Home Safety Checklist (for 2(d)) and the **family emergency kit checklist** (for 2(f)) sit under Emergency Preparedness
• the Home Security Checklist (for 3(b)) sits under Crime Prevention Agree with your counselor which one you are using before you start walking round with a clipboard.

2(e) is a drill, not a drawing

Develop a fire-escape plan ... Include in your drawings exit routes from each room and a meeting place outside. Conduct a fire-escape drill.

Everyone in the building has to actually do it. That needs a time when they are all there and willing, which for most families means asking a week ahead rather than on the night.

Requirements 5 and 6

Requirement 5 is about Safeguarding Youth: the guidelines, recognising and reporting possible abuse, and the Scouts First Helpline. Requirement 6 is about avoiding and preventing assault, including sexual assault at a party or on a date.

These are difficult subjects and they are discussion requirements. It is entirely reasonable to ask your counselor to have a parent or guardian present, and to say beforehand which parts you would rather keep brief. This site does not reproduce or paraphrase the official material on either subject. It names what is asked and leaves the answers where they belong.

The printed book is a different badge

The page reports its own last change as 31 December 2025, after the 2025 requirements book was printed, and this badge changed more than most. The book's version is built round a notebook of collected articles, a safety project and the National Terrorism Advisory System. None of those three are on the current page, and the page's requirements 6 and 8 are not in the book at all.

If you are working from a printed book here, you are working from a different badge.

What this page is

The Safety merit badge, drawn so the four at-home projects are visible as projects rather than as letters. It is not a copy of the requirements: each step is a short label with a link to the official requirements, which are what actually governs and which change from year to year.