Every summer the same thing happens. Temperatures climb, buildings get stuffy, and fire doors across offices, care homes, schools and residential blocks quietly acquire a wedge, a fire extinguisher or a chair holding them open. It feels harmless: everyone wants a through-breeze, and the door is still there, ready to be closed if anything happens.
It is also one of the most common fire door breaches found on inspections, and one of the most dangerous. This article covers why a propped fire door is such a serious problem, what the law says, the legitimate ways to hold a fire door open, and how to handle propping when you find it in your building.
A fire door only works when it is closed. Its job is to hold back fire and smoke long enough for people to escape and for the fire service to get to work, keeping each compartment of the building sealed off from the next. An FD30 door held open by a wedge provides zero minutes of protection, exactly the same as no fire door at all.
Smoke is the bigger killer in most building fires, and smoke moves fast through an open doorway. A single propped door on a corridor can let smoke spread along an escape route in minutes, cutting off the very path residents or staff would use to get out. In buildings with a stay put evacuation strategy, such as many blocks of flats, the entire strategy rests on doors staying shut.
The reason propping spikes in summer is simple: fire doors are often the only thing between a warm room and a cooler corridor, and a closed door blocks airflow. But the fire risk does not take the summer off. Kitchens, plant rooms and electrical equipment are just as likely to start a fire in July as in January.
Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the Responsible Person must ensure that fire precautions, including fire doors, are maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair. A fire door that has been wedged open is not in efficient working order: its self-closing device has effectively been disabled.
In residential buildings with a storey over 11 metres, Regulation 10 of the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 requires checks of communal fire doors at least every three months. A door found propped open during one of those checks is a defect to record and act on, not something to quietly kick the wedge out of and forget.
Enforcement is real. Fire and rescue authorities can issue enforcement notices requiring the problem to be fixed, and persistent or serious breaches can lead to prosecution, with unlimited fines available in the most serious cases. We cover the enforcement ladder in more detail in our article on fire door non-compliance penalties. None of this is legal advice, but the pattern in prosecutions is clear: wedged fire doors come up again and again as evidence that fire safety was not being managed.
The good news is that wanting airflow through a building is not a compliance problem in itself. There are lawful ways to hold a fire door open, and they all share one feature: the door closes automatically the moment the fire alarm sounds.
The main options are:
Whatever device is used, it must be compatible with the door assembly and installed and maintained properly. A hold-open device that is not linked to the alarm, or that has a flat battery, is just an expensive wedge. Our guide to self-closing devices and hold-open systems goes deeper on how these devices work and how to check them.
What is never acceptable: wedges, hooks, cords, furniture, fire extinguishers or anything else that stops the door closing and does not release on alarm.
Finding a wedged fire door is a people problem as much as a hardware problem, so the response needs both.
First, remove the obstruction and check the door still closes fully and latches. Wedges are often a symptom: sometimes a door gets propped because the closer is too stiff, the door slams, or it has dropped and binds on the frame. If the door is hard to use, people will defeat it again, so log the underlying fault and get it fixed.
Second, record it. A propped door found during a routine check is a finding, and your response to it is part of your compliance evidence. Note where, when, what was removed and any follow-up action.
Third, communicate. A short notice to staff or residents explaining why fire doors must stay shut, ideally with the offer of a legitimate solution where there is a genuine need for airflow, works far better than silently removing wedges that reappear the next day. Repeat offending in the same location is a signal that a hold-open device is worth the investment.
Propping is a condition that comes and goes, which is exactly why regular checks earn their keep. A door that was fine in April can spend all of July wedged open. Quarterly communal door checks under Regulation 10, and routine walk-arounds in any workplace, are your chance to catch it, and a written record of each check is your evidence that you did.
It is also worth briefing whoever walks the building most: caretakers, concierges, cleaners and reception staff will spot a wedged door long before the next formal inspection does.
DoorTRACE gives every fire door in your portfolio a digital record, so a propped door found on a check is logged in seconds through the engineer app, photographed, and tracked as a defect until it is resolved. Recurring problems at the same door become visible in the data, making the case for a compliant hold-open device easy to evidence. See the platform or get in touch to see how it works.
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