Offices rarely feel like high-risk buildings. There are no sleeping occupants, people know the way out, and the fire alarm gets tested every week. But the legal duty to manage fire doors in a commercial building is just as real as it is in a block of flats, and the law that creates it is a different one from the residential rules most people have heard about.
This article explains which law governs fire doors in offices, shops, warehouses and other commercial premises, who carries the duty, how often the doors should be checked, and the defects that turn up most often in a working office.
Most of the fire door rules that make the news, quarterly checks, annual flat entrance checks, resident information, come from the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, and specifically Regulation 10. Those duties apply to multi-occupied residential buildings. They do not apply to a commercial office.
The law that governs an office is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, usually shortened to the Fire Safety Order. It covers virtually all non-domestic premises in England and Wales: offices, shops, factories, warehouses, restaurants, and the common parts of buildings. Under the Order, the person responsible for the premises must carry out a fire risk assessment and put in place general fire precautions to keep people safe. Fire doors are one of those precautions.
So the framing is different. In residential buildings the inspection frequency is written into law. In a commercial building, the frequency comes out of your fire risk assessment. That distinction is the key one, and we come back to it below.
The Fire Safety Order puts the duty on the "Responsible Person". In a workplace that is normally the employer, because they are the person with control over the premises. Where a building is let or managed, the person in control of the relevant part also carries duties, so a landlord or managing agent is usually responsible for the common parts, the stairwells, corridors and shared plant rooms, while each tenant is responsible for their own demised space.
That split is where commercial buildings get complicated. A single office block can have one Responsible Person for the common parts and a separate one for each floor or suite. The Order requires these duty holders to cooperate and coordinate with each other so that nothing falls through the gap, the corridor fire door between two tenancies being a classic example of something that is easy for everyone to assume is someone else's problem.
If you are not sure whether you are a Responsible Person, our guide to who the Responsible Person is walks through the test.
The Fire Safety Order requires that fire safety equipment and facilities, fire doors included, are maintained in efficient working order and in good repair. In plain terms that means a fire door has to do two things: be in sound condition, and actually work as a fire door when it is needed.
Condition covers the leaf, the frame, the seals, the glazing and the hardware, all the things that have to be intact for the door to hold back fire and smoke for its rated period. Function covers the part offices most often get wrong: the door has to close fully into its frame and latch on its own, every time, without being held or propped open.
There is no separate statutory standard for the doors themselves in the way Regulation 10 sets frequencies. Instead the expectation is that your fire risk assessment identifies the doors, your maintenance keeps them working, and you can show that you have been doing both. BS 8214, the code of practice for timber fire door assemblies, and BS 9999, on fire safety in the design and management of buildings, are the documents most assessors will expect to see informing your approach.
Because there is no fixed legal frequency for commercial premises, the honest answer is: as often as your fire risk assessment says, and that depends on the building.
A quiet, low-traffic office might be reasonably served by a competent check every six months, which is the interval commonly cited as good practice for fire doors in commercial buildings. A busy door, a main entrance, a door onto a stairwell, a door that takes trolley or furniture traffic, will wear faster and may need checking quarterly or more often. The point is that the frequency is a judgement recorded in your fire risk assessment and then actually carried out, not a number you can copy from the residential rules.
For more on setting a sensible interval, see our guide to inspection frequency.
Offices have their own pattern of fire door problems, and most of them come from daily use rather than poor installation.
Our common defects guide covers what each of these means and how they are recorded.
Fire doors in commercial premises are enforced by the local fire and rescue authority. Where they find failings they can issue an alterations notice, an enforcement notice or, in serious cases, a prohibition notice that restricts use of part of the building. Prosecution is possible, and the penalties under the Fire Safety Order can include unlimited fines and, in the most serious cases, imprisonment. This is general information rather than legal advice; if you have had contact from an enforcing authority, take proper professional advice on your specific situation.
DoorTRACE gives a commercial building the same standard of fire door record-keeping that the residential sector now expects, whether or not your building is legally required to hold it. Every door is registered and tagged, so you have a complete fire door register from day one. Inspection schedules are set per door, so a busy stairwell door can be checked more often than a quiet meeting-room door, and the system tracks every check and defect to closure. When an assessor or enforcing officer asks how you maintain your fire doors, the answer is a few clicks rather than a search through a filing cabinet.
If you manage offices or commercial premises, see how DoorTRACE works, our QR plaques and reporting, or read more about fire doors in the workplace. To talk it through, get in touch.
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