Fire door regulations
Do I Need Fire Doors? How to Know
If your building is anything other than a single private home, the answer is almost always yes, at least somewhere in it. Fire doors are required on escape routes in virtually all non-domestic buildings, in the shared parts of multi-occupied residential buildings, and increasingly on individual flat entrance doors too. Exactly where depends on the building's type, height and fire strategy, not on guesswork.
By Daniel, Director · 7 August 2026 · 5 min read
The short answer
Fire doors are a legal requirement, not an optional upgrade, in almost every building that is not a single private house. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires the person responsible for a non-domestic building, or the common parts of a residential one, to keep escape routes safe, and a fire door is usually part of how that duty is met. The question in practice is rarely "do I need any fire doors", it is "which doors in my building need to be fire doors, and to what rating".
What this looks like by building type
The detail changes by building type, but the underlying duty does not:
Commercial and workplaces
Fire doors are required on escape routes, stairwells and any wall separating different fire compartments, in effectively all workplaces, shops and public buildings.
Flats and apartment blocks
Communal fire doors are required as standard. Since the Fire Safety Act 2021, individual flat entrance doors are also expected to meet the fire door standard in most blocks.
HMOs
Fire doors to habitable rooms and escape routes are a standard licensing condition, checked as part of HMO licensing.
Schools, healthcare, care settings
Fire doors are required throughout, generally to a higher specification and inspection frequency given the occupants and the difficulty of evacuation.
Why building height changes the answer
Height and occupant risk drive stricter duties, not just a general requirement to have fire doors somewhere in the building. Under the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, residential buildings over 11 metres carry a duty to check communal fire doors quarterly and flat entrance doors annually. The Building Safety Act 2022 adds further duties for higher-risk buildings over 18 metres or seven storeys, including named accountability and a digital fire safety record, sometimes called the golden thread.
A single-storey commercial unit and an 20-storey residential tower both need fire doors, but the paperwork, inspection frequency and accountability around them are not the same.
The single private house exception
A single private dwelling, occupied by one household, generally falls outside this framework, since the Fire Safety Order and the 2022 Regulations are aimed at non-domestic premises and the shared parts of multi-occupied buildings. The moment a building is converted into flats, let as an HMO, or used for anything other than a single household, that exception stops applying.
Getting a straight answer for your building
General guidance can only take you so far, since the exact requirement depends on your building's specific layout, use and fire strategy. A survey gives you a door-by-door answer: which openings need to be fire doors, what rating, and whether what is currently fitted meets it.
Free guide, no email required
Installation and Remediation of Fire Doors
What BS 8214:2026 requires, and how to tell whether an installation has been done correctly. The same guide applies whichever part of the country your building is in.