Fire Door Inspection Checklist:
What to Check and How Often

How Often to Inspect

For multi-occupied residential buildings over 11 metres tall, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 set the floor: quarterly checks of fire doors in common parts and annual checks of flat entrance doors. For HMOs, commercial premises and everything else, a sensible default is a quarterly routine check, moving to monthly for doors in heavy daily use — a busy corridor door takes thousands of operations a year and drifts out of tolerance faster than a rarely used one.

Landlords should also read our guide to landlord fire door regulations, which covers who is legally responsible for these checks and what enforcement looks like.

The Checklist

1. Certification

Check the top edge of the door leaf for a certification label (BWF-Certifire) or coloured plug (BM TRADA Q-Mark). No label, no paperwork — treat the door as unverified and have it assessed. This is the first thing a fire risk assessor looks for.

2. Gaps

Close the door and check the gap between leaf and frame with a gap gauge or a £1 coin (roughly 3mm thick). Target figures:

• — Top and sides: around 3mm, with 2–4mm the commonly accepted range — and consistent all the way round
• — Threshold: up to 8mm to a hard floor finish, or around 3mm where a cold smoke seal is required at the door bottom
• — The manufacturer's installation instructions override these general figures where they differ

3. Intumescent Strips and Smoke Seals

Run a finger along the seals in the door or frame edge. They should be continuous, firmly seated in their grooves, not painted over, and free of breaks, compression damage or sections pulled away. Brush or fin smoke seals should make light contact with the closing face without preventing the door from latching.

4. Self-Closer

Open the door to about 5 degrees — a few inches — and let go. It should close fully and engage the latch under its own power, from any angle, without slamming. A door that stalls on the smoke seals or stops short of the latch fails, even if the closer looks fine. Check the closer body for oil leaks and the arm for loose fixings, and confirm any hold-open device releases when the alarm sounds. Wedges and hooks holding the door open are an automatic fail.

5. Hinges

A fire door needs a minimum of three fire-rated hinges, CE or UKCA marked (BS EN 1935). Check that all screws are present and tight, that there is no visible wear, metal fragments or oil leaking from the knuckles, and that the door hasn't dropped — a dropped door shows up as uneven gaps.

6. Glazing

Any vision panel must be fire-rated glazing, intact and secure, with its glazing beads and intumescent glazing seals undamaged. Cracked glass or loose beads are a fail. A plain glass panel cut into a fire door on site voids the door entirely — it needs replacement, not re-glazing.

7. Leaf and Frame Condition

Look for splits, delamination, holes (including old hardware and letterbox cut-outs that were never fire-stopped), deep impact damage and warping. Check the frame is solidly fixed to the wall with no movement, and that the architrave conceals a properly fire-stopped junction — not a void or builder's foam.

8. Signage

In commercial premises and the common parts of residential buildings, fire doors should carry the blue mandatory "Fire door — keep shut" sign (or "keep locked" for cupboards and risers), normally at eye level on both faces. Signage is not generally required inside private dwellings or on HMO bedroom doors' room side, but your fire risk assessment governs.

9. Latches, Locks and Furniture

The door must latch positively and hold shut in its frame. Check handles return properly, locks are fire-rated where fitted, and no hardware has been added since installation — every unplanned hole through a fire door is a breach of its compartmentation.

Repair or Replace?

Usually repairable — worn or painted-over seals (re-groove and replace), a failed or weak closer (replace with a correctly sized BS EN 1154 unit), loose or worn hinges (replace like-for-like fire-rated), minor gap problems (adjustment or re-hanging), missing signage.

Usually replacement — a split, holed or delaminating leaf; a door trimmed beyond the manufacturer's limits; site-cut glazing; no certification evidence; a frame too damaged to hold fixings. At that point a new certified doorset, correctly installed, is cheaper than chasing repairs that can never restore the rating.

The judgement call between the two is exactly what a survey visit is for. We carry out fire door surveys, repairs and full replacements across South Bucks, including Amersham and the surrounding villages.

Record What You Find

A check that isn't written down might as well not have happened. For each door, record the date, the door's location, each checklist item as pass/fail, photos of any defects, and the action taken with its completion date. A simple spreadsheet or logbook is enough — what matters is that you can produce it if the fire service, the council or your insurer asks. Recurring failures on the same door are a signal that the underlying installation is wrong, not that tenants are unlucky.