A property owner in Wales tried to argue in court that fire safety law did not apply to his cottage because he only let it out for around twenty weeks a year and lived in it himself the rest of the time. The district judge was not persuaded. The case was reported to have settled with the owner agreeing to carry out fire safety works and pay the fire and rescue authority's costs, put at over £5,500. The point of the ruling reaches well beyond Wales: how often you let a second home has nothing to do with whether fire safety law applies to it.
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The test is payment, not frequency
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 exempts domestic premises, meaning a property occupied as someone's private dwelling. That exemption covers your own home and, usually, a second home you keep purely for your own use. It stops applying the moment the property, or part of it, is let to paying guests who are not living there as their permanent home.
Fire and rescue services are explicit about this. Hereford and Worcester Fire and Rescue Service lists holiday cottages, lodges and Airbnb listings as covered by the Order whether or not they are marketed as self-catering accommodation. Cumbria Fire and Rescue Service frames the test in plain terms: does anyone pay to stay at the property for a reason other than living there as their home. North Wales Fire and Rescue Service asks the same question under the heading of paying guests. None of these tests mention how many weeks a year the letting happens.
Why the "only occasionally" argument fails
This is exactly the argument that failed in the Welsh case above. The owner's position was that because the property functioned as his private home for most of the year, and was only commercially let for a portion of it, it should be treated as domestic premises outside the Order's reach. The court's rejection of that argument is the clearest illustration available that occasional letting does not create a part-time exemption. Once a property is offered for paid holiday use, the Order applies to that use, regardless of how many weeks of the year it happens.
That has a direct practical consequence for second-home owners who let out a cottage for a few summer weeks, a couple of festival weekends, or whenever they are not using it themselves. The size of the letting season is not the relevant question. Whether guests pay to stay there is.
Lending it to friends and family is a different situation
If you let family or friends stay in your second home without payment, the domestic premises exemption is on firmer ground, because nobody is paying to be there and the property remains, in substance, a private dwelling being used informally. The moment money changes hands for the stay, even a modest amount, you move toward the paying guest test that fire services apply, and the safer assumption is that fire safety duties now sit with you as the person in control of the premises.
If you are not sure which side of that line a particular arrangement falls on, treat the property as relevant premises and carry out a fire risk assessment. It is a far smaller cost than discovering the answer in court.
Tax thresholds are a separate legal test
It is tempting to borrow a number from tax law and assume it tells you something about fire safety duties. It does not. The various day-count tests that exist elsewhere, including the 90-night rule that applies to short-term letting restrictions in some areas, business rates thresholds, and the furnished holiday lettings occupancy tests that applied before that tax regime changed in April 2025, all answer different questions for different regulators. None of them are the test fire and rescue authorities use when deciding whether the Order applies to your letting.
Treat fire safety and tax or planning thresholds as two separate boxes to tick, not one. Falling under a tax threshold does not mean you fall outside fire safety law, and exceeding it does not automatically mean you do either.
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What counts as "letting for payment" in practice
Most owners who find themselves in this grey area are not running a traditional holiday let business with a dedicated booking calendar. They are letting the cottage to a work contact who insists on paying something toward the stay, accepting a booking through a platform for one weekend to help cover maintenance costs, or agreeing to a token sum from a friend of a friend. None of those scenarios look like a commercial operation from the owner's point of view, but each of them involves a guest handing over money to stay somewhere other than their own home, which is the exact test fire services apply.
The amount paid does not appear to be the deciding factor in any of the guidance reviewed here; what matters is that payment exists at all, in exchange for the stay. If you are weighing up whether a particular arrangement counts, ask whether you would describe it to a fire inspector as a private loan of your home to someone you know, or as a paid booking. If the honest answer is closer to the second, treat it as relevant premises.
Insurance follows the same logic as fire safety law
A standard home or second-home insurance policy is written on the assumption that the property is privately occupied, not let out to paying guests. Many insurers treat any paid letting, however occasional, as a material change of use that needs to be declared, and some policies exclude cover entirely for incidents that happen during a let the insurer was not told about. A fire that starts during a paid booking, on a policy that still describes the property as a private second home, is a genuine route to a declined claim, on top of whatever the fire and rescue authority has to say about the fire risk assessment that should have existed.
Checking your insurer's position on occasional holiday letting is a five-minute phone call. It is considerably cheaper than finding out the answer after a fire.
What official guidance tells small operators to do
The government's own guidance, Making your small paying guest accommodation safe from fire, is aimed directly at the kind of owner this article is about: people running small-scale paying guest accommodation, including self-catering lets, who are not running a large hotel operation. It sets out a proportionate approach to fire risk assessment for exactly this scale of letting, and it is the right starting point if you are letting a second home occasionally and want to know what a reasonable standard looks like in practice.
What this means if you let your second home occasionally
If you take paying guests in a property you otherwise use as your own, even for a handful of weeks a year, the sensible approach is to treat it as you would any other holiday let: carry out and document a fire risk assessment, check smoke and carbon monoxide alarm provision, confirm escape routes work for guests unfamiliar with the layout, and keep records ready in case your fire and rescue authority asks. Our guide on whether you need a fire risk assessment for your holiday let walks through the specifics for lower-volume operators, and our short-term let registration fire safety documents guide covers what paperwork you will increasingly be asked to show.
Next steps
Do not wait for a booking platform query or a fire service visit to find out which side of the line your second home sits on. If guests pay to stay there, treat it as relevant premises now.
FRASafe's holiday let fire risk assessment walks you through what fire safety law asks of a holiday-let host, completed online in 30 to 45 minutes for £45, whether you let all year round or only for a handful of weeks.