How often should fire doors be inspected?

There is no single legal interval — except in tall residential blocks

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 does not name a number. It requires fire safety measures, including fire doors, to be "subject to a suitable system of maintenance" and kept in efficient working order. Frequency is therefore something you justify through your fire risk assessment rather than something you look up. The one place a number is written into law is Regulation 10 of the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, which applies to relevant residential buildings above 11 metres.

The intervals we recommend

• Monthly — a quick visual walk-round by site staff: nothing wedged open, no obvious damage, closers still closing. Five minutes, logged.
• Quarterly — a structured check of communal doors in busy buildings: schools, student accommodation, care settings, blocks of flats, busy offices. Mandatory above 11 metres.
• Annually — a full competent-person inspection of every door, recorded individually with photographs and measurements.
• Event-driven — after refurbishment, cabling work, new flooring, a change of tenant, or any incident involving a door.

Why building work triggers a re-check

More fire doors are compromised by trades than by wear. New carpet raises the floor and the door stops latching. A data cable is drilled through the frame and never fire-stopped. A door is trimmed to clear a threshold strip. None of this is malicious and all of it voids the rating. Any contractor working near a fire-resisting element should trigger a re-inspection of the doors they touched.

Regulation 10 in practice

If your building is a residential block above 11 metres, the responsible person must make best endeavours to check flat entrance doors annually and must check communal fire doors quarterly. "Best endeavours" for flat entrance doors matters because you cannot force access — but you must be able to show repeated, documented attempts: letters, texts, appointment slots, notes of no-access visits. A single unanswered knock is not best endeavours.

Buildings under 11 metres and HMOs

Regulation 10 does not bite below 11 metres, but the Fire Safety Order still does, and licensing conditions for HMOs almost always require fire doors in working order. In practice, a licensed HMO in Nottingham or Mansfield should be running annual competent-person inspections and checking doors at every tenancy change-over. Change-over is the ideal moment: the property is empty, defects are visible, and remedial work does not disturb residents.

What "competent" means for the inspector

Competence is knowledge, training and experience relevant to fire doors specifically. Third-party certification schemes such as BM TRADA Q-Mark inspection, FDIS and IFC give an auditable route to demonstrating it. Your fire risk assessor will ask who inspected the doors and on what basis, so keep the inspector's credentials with the register.

Building the record

Fire door compliance lives or dies on paperwork. Number every door, hold a register with location, rating and inspection history, attach photographs and note remedial work with completion dates. When an inspecting officer arrives, the difference between a conversation and an enforcement notice is usually whether you can produce that register within a minute.

Cost of getting the rhythm right

An annual inspection of a modest HMO's doors costs less than a single replacement door set, and far less than the disruption of an enforcement notice. Most defects found on a first inspection are adjustments and seal replacements measured in tens of pounds. Left for three years, the same doors need replacing.