How often must a fire alarm be serviced?

How often must a fire alarm be serviced?

Most building owners hear "six-monthly" and picture one engineer doing the same thing twice. It is not quite that. The servicing regime is designed so that over a twelve-month cycle every detector, every call point, every sounder and the panel itself has been proven to work. A larger building might see the engineer more often, with the work split across four quarterly visits instead of two, because there is simply more to get through.

Your fire risk assessment can also push the interval down. A building with a history of false alarms, heavy dust, or a system serving sleeping occupants may justify more frequent attention. Six months is a ceiling to work back from, not a target to drift towards.

The one month either side is worth knowing about. BS 5839-1:2025, which replaced the 2017 edition on 30 April 2025, states the six-monthly cycle with a permitted tolerance of a month in each direction. A service at five months or at seven is inside the standard. That is not a licence to let things slide, and two visits still have to happen in a year, but it does mean a visit that lands at six and a half months because of holidays or access problems has not put you in breach of anything. We mention it because the opposite is regularly claimed, sometimes by a contractor who would rather you did not question a missed date.

What the law actually says

This distinction matters more than it sounds. Because the law asks for an outcome rather than a frequency, "we service it sometimes" is not a defence, and neither is a stack of invoices with no engineer reports attached. What you are being asked to demonstrate is that the system works and that you can prove it.

The weekly test is your job, not the engineer's

The rotation is the part people miss. Testing the same call point by the front door every Monday for three years proves that one call point works. Working through them in sequence proves the whole system does, and it surfaces a dead zone before an inspector or a fire does.

How long should it sound? Long enough that everyone in the building hears it and recognises it, then stop. In most premises that is well under a minute. Let people know the test time in advance and keep it consistent, so an unexpected alarm is always treated as real.

• Weekly: test one manual call point, rotating through them. Log it.
• Monthly: where fitted, check emergency lighting and any standby power arrangements.
• Six-monthly: inspection and service by a competent person, with one month of tolerance either side.
• Annually: across the year's visits, every device tested at least once.

What happens during a six-monthly service

A service visit that produces no paperwork has not really happened, as far as an enforcement officer is concerned. The report is the evidence. It should name the engineer, list what was tested, state what failed, and say what needs doing next. If your current provider leaves nothing behind but a sticker on the panel, that is a gap in your compliance file.

Batteries deserve a mention of their own. Standby batteries are the single most common reason a system fails when the mains drops, and they are consumable. Expect them to be flagged for replacement on a predictable cycle rather than treated as a surprise.

What happens if you miss a service

Enforcement under the Fire Safety Order sits with the local fire and rescue authority. In practice, most cases start with an audit rather than a fire: an officer visits, asks for the fire risk assessment and the maintenance records, and works outwards from what is missing. A tidy log book answers half the questions before they are asked.

If you have already drifted past the interval, the fix is straightforward. Get the system inspected, deal with whatever the report finds, and restart the cycle from that date. Nobody is helped by waiting until the anniversary comes round again.

Who is allowed to service a fire alarm?

The word "competent" carries real weight here, because the duty to choose a competent person sits with you. If the company you appoint turns out not to be, that is your problem to explain, not theirs. Third-party certification and manufacturer registration are the two practical ways to check before you appoint rather than after.

We are BAFE SP203-1 registered, and approved by Fike and C-TEC. If your panel is a Fike or C-TEC unit, that registration is the difference between an engineer who knows the platform and one who is reading the manual on your time.

Servicing is planned work on a system that is behaving. A panel standing in fault, or an alarm that keeps sounding for nothing, is a different job, and fire alarm repair and fault finding covers what is involved and why the event log matters more than the fault showing today.