Future EU legislations enforce a fast hazard and risk assessment of thousands of existing chemicals. If conducted by means of present data requirements, this assessment will use a huge number of test animals and will be neither cost nor time effective. The purpose of the current research was to develop methods to increase the acceptability of in vitro data for classification and labelling regarding acute toxicity. For this purpose, a large existing database containing in vitro and in vivo data was analysed. For more than 300 compounds in the database, relations between in vitro cytotoxicity and rat or mouse intravenous and oral in vivo LD50 values were re-evaluated and the possibilities for definition of mechanism based chemical subclasses were investigated. A high in vitro-in vivo correlation was found for chemicals classified as irritants. This can be explained by a shared unspecific cytotoxicity of these compounds which will act as the predominant mode of action for both endpoints, irritation and acute toxicity. For this subclass, which covered almost 40% of all compounds in the database, the LD50 values after intravenous dosing could be predicted with high accuracy. A somewhat lower accuracy was found for the prediction of oral LD50 values based on in vitro cytotoxicity data. Based on this successful correlation, a classification and labelling scheme was developed, that includes a hazard based definition of the applicability domain (irritants) and a prediction of the labelling of compounds for their acute iv and oral toxicity. The scheme was tested by an external validation.