Fire Door Checks Explained | Flame Shield London

In short

In England, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 (in force 23 January 2023) require the Responsible Person for a multi-occupied residential building with a storey over 11 metres to check fire doors in the common parts at least every three months, and to make best endeavours to check flat entrance doors annually. Both checks must include the self-closing devices. Every multi-occupied residential building with common parts, whatever its height, must also give residents information about why fire doors matter. Outside that scope — offices, shops, warehouses, HMOs below the threshold — there is no statutory interval, but the Fire Safety Order still requires fire doors to be kept in efficient working order, and the frequency comes from your fire risk assessment.

What a fire door is actually doing

A fire door holds back fire and smoke long enough for people to escape and for the fire service to work. It is rated by how long it resists, tested to BS 476-22 or BS EN 1634-1: FD30 for thirty minutes, FD60 for sixty. The rating belongs to the whole door set — leaf, frame, hinges, seals, glazing and closer — not to the slab of timber alone.

That last point is the one that undoes most buildings. People think of a fire door as a heavy door. It is an assembly, and it performs as an assembly. A certified FD30 leaf hung on the wrong hinges, in a frame with no intumescent seal, with a closer that has been disconnected, is not an FD30 door. It is a heavy door.

Compartmentation is the wider idea a fire door serves. The building is divided into boxes, and each box is meant to hold a fire for a defined period. Every hole in a box — a door, a cable penetration, a duct — is a place the box can leak. Doors are simply the holes people use, which is why they are also the holes people break.

The 2022 Regulations: who has to check, and how often

The duties apply in England to multi-occupied residential buildings. Where the building has a storey over 11 metres, the Responsible Person must check fire doors in the common parts at least quarterly, and use best endeavours to check flat entrance doors that open onto common parts at least annually. Both include checking the self-closing devices. In all multi-occupied residential buildings with common parts, residents must be given information about the importance of fire doors.

Multi-occupied residential, storey over 11m. Quarterly checks of common-part fire doors. Annual best-endeavours checks of flat entrance doors. Both include the self-closers.
Multi-occupied residential, under 11m. No fixed interval in the Regulations, but the residents-information duty still applies, and the Fire Safety Order maintenance duty still applies.
Offices, shops, warehouses, care settings. Outside these specific Regulations. The Fire Safety Order requires the doors to work; your fire risk assessment sets how often you look.
Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. These particular Regulations are England only. Check the equivalent regime where you are.

"Best endeavours" is doing real work, not sending one letter. For flat entrance doors you cannot force entry, so the law asks you to try properly: written requests, repeat attempts at different times, and a record of every attempt. The record of trying is the compliance. Not trying, and having nothing to show, is not.

What a check has to cover

Look at the door closing fully from any angle, on its own, into the latch. Look at the gaps around the leaf. Look at the intumescent and smoke seals along their whole length. Look at the hinges, the glazing and the signage. Look for anything screwed, drilled or cut into the leaf that should not be there.

A routine check is a practical thing, not a laboratory test. Open the door to different angles and let it go: it should close and latch every time, without being pushed. Run a finger round the gap; roughly 3mm at head and sides is the usual guide, and a gap you can post a coin through is a gap smoke will use. Check the seals are continuous and not painted solid, gouged or missing. Check the hinges are firm, complete and unpainted. Check any vision panel is intact with its beading in place.

Then look for what people have added. Cat flaps, letterboxes, drilled-through cables, mortice locks fitted after the fact and stick-on numbers over the certification label all change a door set from certified to unknown.

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Check, inspection or survey?

A check is the routine look required by the Regulations, done frequently by a competent person who knows what to look at. An inspection is deeper, examining the door set against its certification. A survey is a building-wide exercise producing a full schedule of every door, its rating, its condition and its remedial cost. They answer different questions and cost very different amounts.

Buying the wrong one is common. A landlord who needs a quarterly check does not need a certified survey four times a year. A building owner facing a remediation programme and a funding decision needs the survey, because a schedule of forty doors with a cost against each is the only thing a board can act on.

The failures we find most often

Closers disconnected or too weak to latch, doors wedged open, gaps opened up by dropped hinges or new flooring, intumescent seals painted over or missing in sections, and holes drilled through leaves for cables or locks.

The wedge is the classic, and the reason is almost always practical rather than careless: the door is heavy, the route is busy, somebody is carrying something. Wedging is a symptom, and removing the wedge without fixing the reason simply means a new wedge next week. The proper answer is a hold-open device wired into the fire alarm, so the door stands open all day and releases the moment the alarm sounds. Those devices are part of the alarm system and must be proved during alarm testing — and in our experience they are the single most likely part of a fire alarm installation to have been quietly untested for years.

Flooring is the quiet one. New carpet or new vinyl raises the floor, the door catches, and somebody planes the bottom of the leaf to clear it. The threshold gap is now wrong and the leaf may be breached below the intumescent line. Nobody records it, because from the corridor it looks like an improvement.

Records, and what an inspector asks for

A dated record of each check, what was found, what was done about it, and who did it. For flat entrance doors, the evidence of your attempts to gain access. Kept somewhere you can produce them, alongside the fire risk assessment and the alarm servicing records.

The record does not need to be elaborate. A simple schedule with a row per door, a column per quarter and a note against anything that failed is enough, provided somebody actually completes it and remedials get closed out. An inspector reading a log with four consecutive quarters of "all satisfactory" on a building with a visibly wedged door learns something about the whole management system, not just the door.

Fire door checks, your questions answered

How often do fire doors have to be checked?

In England, in multi-occupied residential buildings with a storey over 11 metres, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 require quarterly checks of fire doors in the common parts, and annual checks of flat entrance doors on a best-endeavours basis. Outside that scope there is no fixed statutory interval, but the Fire Safety Order still requires doors to be maintained in efficient working order, and your fire risk assessment sets the frequency.

Do the 11-metre rules apply to my office block?

No. Those specific duties apply to multi-occupied residential buildings. An office still has to keep its fire doors working under the Fire Safety Order, and the interval comes from the fire risk assessment rather than from a regulation.

Who is allowed to check a fire door?

The routine check under the 2022 Regulations is deliberately practical and can be done by a competent person in-house once they know what to look at. A detailed inspection of a door set, its certification and its installation is a specialist job. The Regulations ask for the check to be done, not for it to be outsourced.

Can a fire door be propped open?

Not with a wedge. A fire door that does not close does nothing. If a door needs to stay open for access, the compliant answer is a hold-open device linked to the fire alarm, so the door releases and closes when the alarm sounds. Those devices are part of the fire alarm system and must be tested with it.

Does a gap around the door matter?

Yes, a great deal. The intumescent seal has to be able to expand into a gap it can bridge. Gaps of roughly 3mm at the top and sides are the common guide, with the threshold gap depending on the door set. A door that has dropped on its hinges, or been trimmed to clear new flooring, can fail on the gap alone.

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Fire door checks: what the law asks for, and what actually fails