How Often Should a Business Run a Fire Evacuation Drill

A hospice was ordered to pay £165,000 in costs, on top of a fine, after admitting fire safety breaches that included a main fire exit found locked and staff with no proper training in how to evacuate the people in their care. A fire drill is one of the cheapest items on any fire risk assessment action plan, and it is one of the first things an inspector checks is actually happening rather than just written down on a policy nobody follows.

What the law actually requires

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 does not state a fixed number of drills per year. Article 15 requires the responsible person to establish procedures to be followed in the event of serious and imminent danger, including safety drills, and Article 21 requires staff to receive adequate fire safety training. Neither article hands you a specific frequency. The Order is risk-based: how often you drill should come out of your fire risk assessment, driven by the size of your premises, the number of people in it, and how familiar they are with the building.

That is why there is no single correct answer that applies to every business. A small office with five long-serving staff who know the building needs a different drill schedule to a large retail unit with high staff turnover and constant footfall from the public.

The practical minimum government guidance gives you

Government guidance fills the gap the Order deliberately leaves open. The gov.uk page on workplace fire safety responsibilities recommends carrying out at least one fire drill a year and recording the results as part of your fire safety and evacuation plan, alongside training staff when they start and whenever risks in the workplace change. Treat this as the practical floor, not a target: it is the minimum a reasonable business should be doing, not evidence of best practice on its own.

Recording the drill matters as much as running it. An unannounced drill that nobody wrote down looks, to an inspector, exactly the same as a drill that never happened.

When once a year is not enough

Higher-risk premises are commonly drilled more often than the annual minimum, and twice a year is a figure that comes up repeatedly in professional fire safety guidance for premises with shift patterns, high visitor turnover, or anyone sleeping on site. If your workforce changes constantly through shift work or high turnover, an annual drill will have trained a workforce that has mostly left by the time of the next one. The practical test is simple: if a meaningful share of the people who would need to evacuate were not present at the last drill, you need another one sooner.

This is a judgement call for your fire risk assessment to make explicit, with a stated frequency and a reason attached to it, rather than something left to whoever remembers to organise it.

What some sectors do differently

Schools commonly run fire drills at least once a term, unannounced, under local authority and school fire safety guidance, which works out to roughly three times a year given the higher turnover of a school population and the number of young people who need to learn the evacuation routine from scratch each year. Some sector guidance for care homes recommends twice-yearly drills, reflecting the sleeping risk and the practical difficulty of evacuating residents with mobility or cognitive impairments. Neither of these figures is a reason to copy them into an unrelated business; they illustrate how the general risk-based approach adapts to higher-consequence environments, which is the same exercise your fire risk assessment should do for your own premises.

Planning a drill that actually tests something

A fire drill that simply tells everyone in advance that it will happen at eleven o'clock on Thursday tests very little beyond whether people can walk to a fire exit when they already know one is coming. A more useful drill varies the timing, blocks an obvious route to see whether staff know an alternative, and checks whether the assembly point count actually matches who was in the building, including visitors and contractors who might not know the building's layout at all.

It is also worth testing what happens when the person who normally leads the evacuation is not there. If your fire marshal is on holiday the day a real fire starts, someone else needs to know what to do, and a drill is the only safe way to find out whether that is actually true before it is tested for real.

Keeping a record that holds up

A drill record does not need to be elaborate, but it needs to exist and to say something specific: the date, who took part, how long the evacuation took, the assembly point headcount against the expected number, and any problems found, such as a fire door that stuck or an exit route that was obstructed by stock or furniture. Fixing whatever the drill reveals, and recording that it was fixed, is what turns the exercise from a box-ticking formality into something that actually reduces risk.

Without that record, a business has no way to demonstrate to an inspector, an insurer, or in the worst case an inquiry, that fire safety training was more than a line in a policy document nobody had read since it was written.

What goes wrong when drills are treated as a formality

Enforcement findings follow a consistent pattern: a documented fire policy exists on paper, but staff on the ground have had no meaningful training and have never actually practised the evacuation. A government findings letter into an NHS Trust fire incident set out failings that included staff not being given suitable information on their nominated fire duties, inadequate training and support for people with emergency roles, and a failure to carry out practice fire drills on wards, cited against the relevant articles of the Order. The hospice case mentioned above followed the same pattern: training that existed in name only, and an exit that was supposed to be available in an emergency but was not.

None of this requires a large or complex business. It requires someone with the responsible person role actually running the drill, not just filing the policy that says one should happen.

New starters and temporary staff

An annual drill schedule assumes a fairly stable workforce, and that assumption breaks down fast in businesses that rely on seasonal staff, agency workers, or a steady trickle of new starters throughout the year. Someone who joined the week after your last drill could go a full year without ever practising an evacuation, relying entirely on a verbal explanation given on their first day.

Where turnover is high, build a short fire safety induction into every new starter's first week that covers the nearest exit, the assembly point, and who to listen for in an emergency, and treat the next scheduled drill as reinforcement rather than their only exposure to the procedure. This costs very little time and closes a gap that an annual-only schedule leaves wide open for a meaningful part of the workforce.

Building this into your fire risk assessment

Your fire risk assessment should state your drill frequency explicitly, name who is responsible for organising it, and set out how results get recorded. If you have fire wardens or marshals, the drill is also the only reliable way to find out whether they actually know their role under pressure rather than just on an organisational chart.

Next steps

If you cannot say with confidence when your last fire drill happened and what the record of it says, that is the gap to close this month, not next year.

FRASafe's small business fire risk assessment walks you through every area the RRO 2005 requires, including drill frequency and training records, completed online in 30 to 45 minutes for £45.