Fire Safety for Large Group Holiday Lets That Sleep 10 or More

Book out a converted barn or a rambling farmhouse to twelve guests for a hen weekend, and the fire risk assessment you copied from a two-bedroom cottage template will not protect you. It will not satisfy a fire and rescue officer who inspects after a complaint or an incident, and it is unlikely to satisfy your insurer's small print, which increasingly ties cover to a fire risk assessment that actually matches the scale of the property being let.

Since 1 October 2023, every holiday let owner has needed a full written fire risk assessment under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (RRO 2005), whatever the size of the property. But a written assessment produced with the wrong guidance behind it is not much better than no assessment at all once your property crosses into "larger premises" territory.

When does a holiday let count as "larger" or "complex"

Guidance used across the self-catering sector treats a property as larger or more complex, rather than a straightforward small premises, if it is open plan regardless of bedroom count, has more than four bedrooms, or sleeps ten or more guests. Properties with more than two storeys, or unusual layouts such as converted barns, mill buildings or interconnected cottages, are pushed into the same category.

If any of that describes your property, the small-premises fire risk assessment templates circulating online are the wrong starting point. The relevant reference is the government's "Fire safety risk assessment: sleeping accommodation" guide, which covers exactly this scale and type of building, and for genuinely complex layouts it is worth commissioning a competent fire risk assessor rather than working through it yourself.

Why size changes the alarm system you need

A typical small holiday cottage can usually get by with a domestic Grade D, LD2 system under BS 5839-6: mains-powered, interlinked smoke and heat alarms in the right rooms and escape route, without a control panel or a maintenance contract. That is a reasonable outcome for a two or three-bedroom property with a single simple escape route.

Once you are sleeping ten or more guests, often unrelated groups sharing a large property for the first time, the case for coverage grows. Your fire risk assessment is far more likely to call for full LD1 coverage, meaning detection in every habitable room and every circulation space, not just bedrooms, hallways and the top of stairs. For larger or more complex buildings, it may point to a professionally designed and maintained system built to BS 5839-1, the standard normally associated with commercial and larger residential premises, rather than the simpler domestic Grade D setup. Do not assume the cheaper domestic kit will pass muster just because it worked for your other, smaller properties.

Escape routes for bigger groups

Ten to twenty guests, often after a few drinks, moving through unfamiliar corridors in the dark is a materially different evacuation problem to a family of four who arrived that afternoon. Your fire risk assessment needs to look properly at:

• Whether there is more than one usable escape route from each part of the building, and what happens if one is blocked by fire or smoke
• Travel distances from the furthest bedroom to a final exit, and whether they are longer than guidance allows for the type of escape route involved
• Whether stairs, corridors and doors are wide enough to clear the maximum number of guests the property is marketed to sleep, not just the number typically booking
• Emergency lighting to BS 5266 on any escape route that relies on artificial light, particularly in basements, internal corridors or converted outbuildings with no natural light
• Fire doors on any room used for cooking, storage or plant, and on any door separating linked buildings such as an annexe or converted barn from the main house

See our guide to holiday let fire escape requirements for the detail on travel distances and window sizes that applies to any self-catering property, large or small.

Compartmentation between converted and linked buildings

Barn conversions, coach houses and cottages knocked through into one another are common at the larger end of the self-catering market, and each conversion adds a junction where fire and smoke can spread between areas that were once separate buildings. A risk assessment for a property like this needs to look specifically at the fire resistance of walls and floors between the original structure and any extension, and at whether doors between sections are fitted and maintained as proper fire doors rather than ordinary internal doors.

Where sleeping accommodation is split across an annexe and a main house, work out whether guests in the annexe can reach a final exit without passing back through the main building, and what happens to that route if the main house is the part on fire.

Fire extinguishers and manual fire-fighting equipment

Larger self-catering properties often have bigger kitchens, sometimes two, plus utility rooms, boiler rooms and games rooms with their own ignition risks. BS 5306 covers the type, number and siting of portable extinguishers, and a property sleeping ten or more with multiple kitchens or plant rooms will typically need more extinguishers, in more locations, than the single unit that might suffice in a small cottage. Guests are not trained fire marshals, so equipment should be sited for obvious access rather than tucked away, with clear signage showing what each extinguisher is for.

Guests who need extra help evacuating

The bigger the group, the higher the odds that someone booking has reduced mobility, is elderly, or is travelling with young children who cannot evacuate unaided. A large group holiday let cannot rely on guests to sort this out among themselves at 3am in a fire. Your booking process should ask about additional needs before arrival, and your fire safety information, covered in our piece on fire safety signage for Airbnbs and holiday lets, should be clear enough that a stressed, half-asleep group of strangers can act on it without a briefing from you.

Changeover day checks matter more at scale

A single missed fire door check on a two-bedroom cottage is a problem. The same miss across a twelve-bedroom property, split across several changeover cleaners working to a tight turnaround, is a much bigger one, simply because there are more doors, more alarms and more escape routes to get wrong. Build fire safety checks into your changeover routine as a fixed step, not an afterthought once the beds are made, and keep a record of who checked what and when.

Insurance and booking platform obligations

Large group bookings, hen and stag parties especially, are exactly the kind of let that insurers scrutinise hardest after a claim. If your policy schedule references compliance with fire safety legislation and your fire risk assessment was never updated to reflect the sleeping accommodation guidance appropriate to a property of your size, an insurer has grounds to challenge a payout. Booking platforms are also increasingly asking hosts of larger properties to confirm a written fire risk assessment is in place before listing groups above a certain size.

Keep the assessment itself, your alarm maintenance records and your extinguisher service certificates together in one file that you can produce quickly if an insurer or a booking platform asks. A large group let generates more paperwork than a small cottage, and scattered records are as much of a liability as missing ones.

Next steps

If your property sleeps ten or more, is open plan, has more than four bedrooms, or has an unusual layout, do not rely on a generic small-cottage checklist. FRASafe's holiday let fire risk assessment walks you through every area required by HMSO guidance, completed online in 30 to 45 minutes for £45, and flags where a property of your scale needs a higher standard of alarm coverage or escape route provision than a small self-catering cottage would. For straightforward smaller properties, our self-catering fire safety checklist and full list of holiday let fire safety guides cover the basics before you scale up to a larger let.