Fire Doors: What Landlords and Employers Are Legally Required to Check

Short answer: fire doors are not optional extras. They are a specific legal fire safety measure, and both landlords and employers have clear duties to make sure the fire doors in their buildings are the right doors, fitted correctly, and kept in proper working order. Faulty fire doors are one of the most common failures found on fire risk assessments up and down the country.

Where the legal duty comes from

For workplaces and the common parts of blocks of flats and HMOs, the duty sits with the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (the RRO), which requires the “responsible person” to keep fire doors in efficient working order and good repair as part of the wider fire safety measures for the building. Since the Grenfell Tower fire, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 added specific, legally binding fire door duties for high rise residential buildings: in blocks over 11 metres, the responsible person must check flat entrance doors at least annually and communal fire doors at least quarterly, and must use best endeavours to check flat entrance doors where they cannot get direct access. The Building Safety Act 2022 sits alongside this, tightening accountability for fire safety in higher risk buildings generally.

What actually counts as a fire door

A genuine fire door is a tested, certified assembly, not just a heavy looking door. It carries a fire rating such as FD30 (30 minutes fire resistance) or FD60 (60 minutes), fitted with intumescent strips that expand under heat to seal the gap around the frame, and cold smoke seals to stop smoke getting through before the fire itself reaches the door. A compliant fire door also needs the correct door closer so it shuts fully from any open position, proper hinges rated for the door’s weight and fire rating, and gaps around the door kept within the manufacturer’s tolerance, usually no more than about 4mm on the sides and top.

What landlords specifically need to check

In HMOs, every door leading off an escape route, and the front door to each let room in higher risk HMOs, generally needs to be a certified fire door with a working self closer. Communal doors in blocks of flats need regular checking under the 2022 regulations if the building is over 11 metres, and even where a landlord falls outside that specific rule, the RRO still applies to the common parts of any block containing more than one household. A flat entrance door that has been fire rated should never be swapped out for a standard door during a refurbishment, even if it looks similar, because it will no longer perform in a fire.

What employers need to check

In workplaces, fire doors along escape routes, doors to stairwells, and doors protecting storerooms or plant rooms containing anything combustible all typically need to be fire doors. The responsible person under the RRO needs to include fire doors in the fire risk assessment, check they are not wedged open, propped, or disabled, and make sure staff understand that a fire door held open defeats the entire point of it being there.

What goes wrong most often

The same handful of faults turn up again and again on inspections: doors wedged open with a fire extinguisher or doorstop, self closers that have been removed or disconnected because they were “annoying”, gaps around the door that have grown too wide after the building has settled, missing or damaged intumescent strips, and doors that were never fire rated in the first place being treated as if they were. Any one of these can be enough to let a fire risk assessment fail on that point alone.

If you want a proper look at where your fire doors and wider fire precautions stand, that is exactly what a full fire risk assessment covers point by point, and it is worth reading alongside a look at what HMO fire safety actually requires room by room if you let to multiple households.

Getting fire doors wrong is rarely deliberate, it is usually a case of nobody checking them since they were fitted. A proper fire risk assessment picks up exactly this kind of thing before it becomes a problem with a tenant, an employee, or a fire service inspector, and I can carry one out for your property or business, have a look at my fire risk assessment service for what is involved.