Fire risk assessment review dates: how often is often enough?

"How often does our fire risk assessment need reviewing?" is one of the most common questions a responsible person asks, and the honest answer is unsatisfying: there's no single fixed number written into the current Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. The Order requires the assessment to be kept under review and revised when it's no longer valid — which shifts the question from a calendar problem to a judgement one.

Why there's no fixed interval

A fire risk assessment is a snapshot of a building and how it's used at a point in time. If nothing about the building changes — same layout, same occupancy, same use — the assessment can, in principle, stay valid for longer. The moment something material changes, the clock resets regardless of how recently the last review happened.

What triggers an early review

In practice, most competent assessors and much official guidance point to a working interval of around twelve months for most occupied buildings as a sensible default, but that default gets overridden by events. A change of use, a refurbishment, a change in the number or type of occupants, a near-miss incident, or a significant change to the building's fire precautions should all prompt a fresh look well before any scheduled date.

• –A change to how the building is used, or who occupies it
• –Structural alterations, including anything affecting escape routes or compartmentation
• –A fire, near-miss, or false alarm that raises new questions about the building's precautions
• –Significant staff turnover where fire safety knowledge left with the people who had it
• –New information — a fire door survey, an equipment servicing report — that contradicts the current assessment

The risk of treating the review date as a formality

On a portfolio of buildings, review dates are easy to lose track of individually, and a missed review tends to be discovered the hard way — during an incident, an insurance query, or an enforcement visit — rather than proactively. This is exactly the kind of drift that a fire risk assessment left to go stale creates, quietly, without anyone deciding it should happen.

Building a review rhythm that actually holds

The buildings that manage this well tend to treat the review date less as a single annual event and more as one checkpoint inside an ongoing routine — door checks, servicing records and incident reports feeding back into whether the current assessment still looks accurate, rather than everything being reassessed from scratch once a year in isolation.

For a single building this is manageable on a calendar reminder. Across a portfolio of a dozen or more, it stops being a reminder problem and becomes a reporting problem — knowing, across every building at once, which review dates are coming up and which have already passed. That's the specific gap portfolio-wide reporting in a platform like FireOptix is aimed at: surfacing which buildings need attention before a review date is missed, not carrying out the review itself.

The review that was never triggered

An assessment carries a review date, and most organisations diarise it. What routinely goes unnoticed is everything that should have prompted a review before that date arrived: a tenant fit-out that moved a partition, a ground-floor unit changing from retail to food, a fire door replaced by a contractor, scaffolding erected across an escape route, or a storeroom quietly becoming a sleeping space for a caretaker.

Each of those changes the building the assessment describes. The assessment does not object; it simply carries on describing a building that no longer exists in that form, and it will keep looking current right up to its diarised date. Treating material change as a trigger in its own right — with someone responsible for spotting it — is the part that is usually missing.

Common mistakes

• –Treating the diarised date as the only thing that prompts a review
• –No route for site staff or contractors to flag a change that might matter
• –Building works completed without anyone asking whether the assessment still holds
• –Change of use in one unit of a building assessed as a whole
• –Holding the review date somewhere nobody looks between annual cycles
• –Assuming a review is unnecessary because nothing structural changed

If you're unsure whether a building's current assessment is still valid, that judgement call belongs to a competent fire risk assessor, not a blog post — the guidance here is directional, and the current RRFSO and official government guidance should always be the reference point.