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Fire Doors: UK Legal Requirements and How Often You Need to Check Them
A fire door only has one job. It has to hold back fire and smoke for a set period of time so that people can get out safely. A missing seal, excessive gaps or wedging the door open can be enough to stop it performing as intended.
Fire doors are one of the most overlooked parts of fire safety compliance, mainly because they look like ordinary doors and people forget they're a piece of life-saving equipment rather than a furniture item. If you own, manage or occupy a commercial premises, the law places clear duties on you to keep fire doors in working order and there are now set inspection intervals depending on your building type.
This guide covers what a fire door does, where they're required, how they're rated, what the law says and how often you should be checking them.
What Does a Fire Door Actually Do?
A fire door is a tested and certificated assembly designed to resist fire and, where required, smoke for a set period of time. Most fire doors include the door leaf and frame, intumescent and smoke seals, hinges, and a latch or lock. They may also have a self-closing device, fire-resistant glazing and signage.
These parts need to work together for the door to perform properly. Intumescent seals expand when exposed to heat and help seal the gap between the door and frame. Smoke seals help restrict the spread of cold smoke. Missing, damaged or incompatible components, such as the wrong hinges or seals, can reduce the fire resistance of the door.
Fire doors are rated according to how long they can resist fire. An FD30 door provides a minimum of 30 minutes fire resistance, FD60 provides 60 minutes, with FD90 and FD120 used where greater fire resistance is required.
The “S” suffix, such as FD30S or FD60S, indicates that the door also provides smoke control.
Rating | Minimum fire resistance |
FD30 / FD30S | 30 minutes |
FD60 / FD60S | 60 minutes |
FD90 | 90 minutes |
FD120 | 120 minutes |
Where Are Fire Doors Required?
Fire doors aren't scattered around a building at random. They typically go wherever a door sits on a compartment line or on a protected escape route.
Every door into a protected stairwell, since the stair has to stay smoke-free as the main escape route.
Cross-corridor doors, which sub-divide long corridors so a fire on one side can't block the whole escape route.
Plant rooms, boiler rooms, comms rooms and storage areas, regardless of where they sit on the escape route, because they're treated as places of special fire risk.
Commercial kitchens, enclosed separately from the general escape route requirements.
Any door through a compartment wall or floor, so the compartmentation strategy isn't compromised at that point.
Lift lobbies, so the lift shaft can't act as a smoke chimney.
Flat entrance doors in blocks of flats and HMOs, since each flat is treated as its own fire compartment.
*This list covers the common locations. Always confirm against the building's specific fire strategy or risk assessment. Unusual layouts, sleeping risk or licensing conditions can extend these requirements.
How many fire doors a building needs and what rating they need to be, comes down to travel distance (how far someone has to walk to reach safety) and the building's fire strategy or fire risk assessment.
The Law on Fire Doors
For non-domestic premises in England and Wales, the starting point is the same legislation that governs the rest of your fire safety arrangements: the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (the FSO).
Article 17 of the FSO makes it a legal requirement that fire resisting doors and escape doors are correctly installed and adequately maintained so that they're fit for purpose. This applies whether you run an office, a shop, a warehouse or any other workplace covered by the Order. Enforcement authorities have the power to prosecute, or in serious cases close a building down, where fire doors are found to be defective or the record-keeping is inadequate.
Our guide to fire safety in the workplace covers the wider legal picture, including who counts as the responsible person and what changed under the Building Safety Act 2022.
Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022: Regulation 10
Following the Grenfell Tower fire, government introduced additional duties specifically around fire doors in residential blocks of flats, set out in Regulation 10 of the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022. This applies to any building containing two or more domestic premises with shared common parts. It requires the responsible person to:
Give residents information about keeping fire doors shut and not tampering with self-closing devices, repeated at least every 12 months.
Where the building's top storey is more than 11 metres above ground (typically five storeys or more), check all flat entrance doors at least every 12 months and all fire doors in communal areas at least every three months.
These particular checks are described by government guidance as simple, visual checks that don't need a specialist.
Regulation 10 is specific to residential blocks. If you run a standard commercial premises, it doesn't apply directly, but the general duty under Article 17 of the FSO to keep fire doors properly maintained absolutely does. The exact wording of Article 17 is worth knowing: the responsible person must have a "suitable system of maintenance" in place and keep facilities and equipment "in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair."
What Approved Document B Requires of a Fire Door
Approved Document B of the Building Regulations sets out the technical detail behind these duties and it goes further than most people expect:
Self-closing devices are the default. Every fire doorset should have one, aside from a short list of exceptions such as doors to cupboards, service ducts kept locked shut and doors within individual flats or houses.
Signage comes in three flavours: "Fire door keep shut" for doors kept closed, "Fire door keep locked shut" for doors normally locked and "Automatic fire door keep clear" for doors held open by an automatic release mechanism.
Hinges have their own standard. The load-bearing parts of a fire door's hinges must be made from a material with a minimum melting point of 800°C, so the door doesn't drop out of its frame as the metal heats up.
Door openings are capped within a compartment wall. Unless the doorset itself provides full fire and insulation performance, no more than 25% of a compartment wall's length should consist of door openings.
A fire door's rating is tied to the wall it sits in, via Table C1 of Approved Document B. A door in a compartment wall generally needs the same minimum fire resistance as the wall around it.
How Often Should Fire Doors Be Inspected?
This is the question we get asked most and there's no single legal number that applies to every building.
For standard commercial premises (offices, shops, warehouses, factories):
The BWF Fire Door Alliance Best Practice Guide recommends periodic checks at least once every six months as a minimum.
Newly occupied buildings often need more frequent checks in their first year, since doors and hardware are still settling in.
High-traffic doors, corridors that see constant use in busy offices, schools or care settings, are more prone to damage and should be checked more often, whether that's monthly or weekly depending on usage.
For blocks of flats over 11 metres, Regulation 10 sets the legal minimum: flat entrance doors every 12 months, communal fire doors every three months.
A risk-based approach makes sense here rather than treating six months as a fixed rule for every door in every building. A rarely used plant room door and a fire door on a busy stairwell used by 200 staff every day don't carry the same wear and tear, and shouldn't necessarily sit on the same inspection cycle.
What a Fire Door Inspection Actually Checks
A proper fire door inspection isn't a glance in passing. It works through each component of the doorset:
The gap between door and frame. As a rule of thumb, this shouldn't exceed 4mm at the head and sides, with a slightly larger allowance at the threshold. Too wide, and the intumescent seal can't do its job.
Intumescent and smoke seals. Present, continuous, undamaged and not painted over.
The door leaf and frame. Free of splits, warping, holes or damage that could affect fire performance.
Hinges. At least three fire-rated hinges, correctly fixed, with no missing screws or visible wear.
Self-closing devices. The door should close fully into its frame from any angle, including a small opening angle, without sticking on the latch or the floor.
Glazing, letterboxes and ventilation grilles. Any aperture in the door leaf should be factory fitted and certificated. Cutting apertures or glazing on site invalidates certification.
Signage. "Fire Door Keep Shut" or "Fire Door Keep Locked Shut" clearly displayed where needed.
The certification label. Usually found on the top or hinge edge of the door, showing the fire rating and certificate number. If it's damaged, painted over or missing, the door's certification is effectively invalidated.
If a fire door fails any of these checks, it needs to be repaired or replaced by a competent contractor using compatible, correctly rated components.
Common Fire Door Failures We See
The same issues turn up again and again:
Fire doors wedged open with a chair, fire extinguisher or door stop.
Self-closing devices that have been disconnected or don't fully close the door.
Damaged or missing intumescent and smoke seals, often after redecoration.
Certification labels painted over during a repaint.
Gaps between the door and frame that are visibly too wide.
Vision panels or letterboxes added after installation without the correct fire-rated glazing or components.
No record of when the doors were last checked.
None of these are complicated to put right once they're spotted. The real problem is usually that nobody's been made responsible for fire doors specifically, so checks slip through the gaps between other duties.
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