Get a fire door inspection wrong and it is not the door that costs you, it is the enforcement notice, the hiked insurance premium, or the finding in an incident investigation that an intumescent seal had perished and nobody had checked it in years. Fire doors are one of the most commonly cited failures when fire and rescue services carry out audits under the RRO 2005, and unlike a smoke alarm, a faulty fire door usually looks perfectly fine right up until the day it is tested by an actual fire.
What the Law Actually Requires
Article 17 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (RRO 2005) is the operative duty for almost every office, shop, warehouse or other workplace in England and Wales. It requires the responsible person to ensure that fire safety equipment and facilities, which includes fire doors, are subject to a suitable system of maintenance and kept in efficient working order and good repair. Notice what it does not say: there is no fixed inspection interval written into the Order for ordinary commercial premises. How often you check is left to the judgement recorded in your fire risk assessment, based on the actual risk in your building.
That is a common point of confusion, because the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 did introduce a specific legal inspection frequency, annual checks on flat entrance doors and quarterly checks on communal doors, but that duty applies only to high rise residential buildings of 18 metres or seven storeys or more. It has no bearing on a standalone office, retail unit or warehouse. If you run a commercial premises, that specific rule simply does not apply to you, whatever a supplier's sales pitch might imply.
How Often Should You Actually Check
With no statutory number to hide behind, you need a defensible frequency of your own, and industry guidance fills that gap. BS 9999 and inspection bodies such as the Fire Door Inspection Scheme and the British Woodworking Federation's Fire Door Alliance commonly recommend a formal inspection of every fire door on an escape route at least every six months, with more frequent checks for doors that see heavy daily use, such as a door onto a busy stairwell or a kitchen fire door propped open by staff between deliveries. HMOs work to a different, more prescriptive regime; see our guide to HMO fire door inspection frequency if you also let residential property, but that stricter cycle does not transfer across to an office or shop.
Six months is a benchmark, not a ceiling. If your fire risk assessment identifies doors under particular strain, constant use, exposure to weather, or automatic closers that take a daily battering, then your maintenance system should check those more often. Write the frequency you choose into the fire risk assessment itself, with the reasoning, so it holds up if a fire inspecting officer asks why you picked that interval.
Who Actually Arranges the Inspection
The RRO 2005 puts the duty on the responsible person, but it does not require that person to carry out the inspection personally. Article 18 requires the responsible person to appoint one or more competent people to help with preventive and protective measures, and a fire door inspection is exactly the kind of task most offices and shops hand to a competent contractor rather than doing in-house. What matters is that someone with the right training actually does it on a defined schedule, not that it happens to be the business owner holding the tape measure.
Smaller operations sometimes train a member of staff, often the same person handling fire marshal duties, to carry out routine visual checks (gaps, obvious damage, the closer working) between more thorough periodic inspections by a specialist. That two-tier approach, frequent basic checks plus a less frequent professional inspection, is common practice and satisfies the "suitable system of maintenance" test provided both levels are documented.
Multi-Occupied and Leased Buildings
Fire door responsibility gets murkier the moment a building is shared. Under RRO 2005 Article 5, the responsible person is whoever has control of the premises, and in a multi-let office block that is often split: the landlord typically controls common parts such as stairwells and their fire doors, while each tenant controls the doors within their own demise. Your lease should say explicitly who inspects what, but if it is silent or ambiguous, do not assume the landlord has it covered. Ask, in writing, and keep the answer with your fire risk assessment.
This split responsibility is a frequent gap. A tenant assumes the landlord's managing agent is inspecting the fire doors in the shared corridor, the managing agent assumes the individual tenants are covering their own suites, and nobody actually checks either. If you occupy leased premises, confirm who is responsible for the doors outside your own front door as well as the ones inside it.
What an Inspection Actually Checks
A proper fire door check covers five things. Look at the gaps around the door: no more than about 4mm at the top and sides, and up to 8mm under the door where there is no cold smoke seal. Check the intumescent strip and any cold smoke seals are continuous and undamaged. Check the hinges: there should be at least three, all firmly fixed with no missing or loose screws. Confirm the self-closer shuts the door fully onto the latch every time, from any angle, without slamming or sticking. Finally, look for damage to the door leaf itself, including holes, cracks or missing intumescent lippings around the edges.
Certification matters as much as condition. A fire door is only as good as its rating, commonly labelled FD30 or FD60, meaning it has been tested to resist fire for 30 or 60 minutes under BS EN 1634-1, or the older BS 476-22 for legacy doors. An "s" suffix, FD30s or FD60s, means the door has also been tested for cold smoke control under BS EN 1634-3. That rating applies to the whole doorset, frame, seals, hinges and hardware together, not the leaf on its own, so replacing a certified door with a similar looking leaf, or swapping in different hinges, can invalidate the rating even though nothing looks different.
Keeping Records That Hold Up
An inspection that is not written down does not help you if something goes wrong. Since Building Safety Act 2022 section 156 came into force on 1 October 2023, every responsible person must record their fire risk assessment in writing, regardless of how many people they employ. The old exemption for premises with fewer than five staff is gone. That written record should reference your fire door inspection regime directly: what gets checked, how often, by whom, and where the results are logged.
BS 8214 sets out the code of practice for specifying, installing and inspecting fire doors, and is worth having to hand if you ever need to demonstrate that your maintenance system follows recognised industry practice rather than something invented on the spot. If you use contractors or an in-house facilities team, get them to sign off each inspection against a checklist rather than a verbal "all fine," since that signed record is what protects you at enforcement or insurance renewal.
A dated photo of each door alongside its checklist, stored with your fire risk assessment rather than scattered across individual inspectors' phones or inboxes, turns a routine maintenance task into evidence you can produce immediately if a fire and rescue officer asks for it during an audit. A door that turns out to be in poor condition is a maintenance problem you can fix; a missing record of any inspection ever happening is a compliance problem that is much harder to talk your way out of.
England, Wales and Scotland
The RRO 2005 covers England and Wales, so the position above applies equally in both nations. Scotland runs a separate regime under the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 and the Fire Safety (Scotland) Regulations 2006, which places a broadly equivalent maintenance duty on a "duty holder" rather than a "responsible person." The practical inspection standards, checking gaps, seals, hinges and closers, do not change across the border, but if you operate premises in Scotland, check your fire risk assessment references the correct legislation rather than the RRO 2005.
Next steps
Check when your fire doors were last formally inspected and against what checklist. If you cannot answer that question immediately, that is the gap to close first. FRASafe's small business fire risk assessment walks you through every area the RRO 2005 requires, completed online in 30 to 45 minutes for £45. It covers fire door maintenance directly and gives you a written record that stands up if your inspection regime is ever questioned.