The safety concept in current norms and best-practice guidelines for temporary works often relies on safety concepts drawn from established norms (as for example the Eurocodes) or introduced empirically, while often temporary works are designed on the basis of permissible stress. In some cases, owners of building infrastructure may set acceptable safety levels as temporary works design requirements through the project’s design criteria. However, it is seen in practice that several significant failures and losses occurred due to inadequate safety at a construction stage, while an increased requirement for competent temporary works designs is evident across the industry. At the same time, there is no consensus in the safety level (e.g. resistance partial safety factors) necessary for such a design, therefore designers often resort to using safety factors associated to permanent structures with a long service life. In order to ensure an optimum level of safety and economic construction, this paper proposes a customized reliability threshold and an adjustment of the partial safety factors used in temporary works design, based on a reassessment of the current standards’ safety narratives as well as project specific risk acceptance criteria.