A fire in your property can cause devastating damage, leaving your home uninhabitable in a matter of minutes and resulting in costly, time-consuming repairs and lost rental income, which is why it's important to carry out thorough fire risk assessments as a landlord.

More importantly, a fire can put your tenants’ lives in danger. The risks are particularly high in properties that house multiple, unrelated tenants, such as student lets. For this reason, the fire safety rules are much tighter for HMOs than single lets.

In this guide, you'll find everything you need to know about fire safety as a landlord, including:

• Fire safety regulations for landlords
• Tenant fire safety responsibilities
• What to do if there's a fire in your property

Need help ensuring your property is fire-safe and legally compliant? Join the NRLA to access advice and support whenever you need it via our landlord hotline.

What are the main causes of fires in rental properties?

There are many things that might cause a fire in a rental property, including:

• Candles
• Faulty or unattended appliances
• Overuse of extension leads
• Cigarettes
• Deep fat fryers
• Portable heaters

According to Total Landlord, the most reported reason for a fire claim in the five-year period up to November 2023 was electrical hazards, which accounted for 28% of all fire claims.

Although fires in dwellings have been steadily decreasing over the years, fire and rescue incident statistics for England for the year ending March 2024 show that fire and rescue services still attended 61,970 primary fires (those considered to be the most serious or with a threat to life or property).

How to carry out a fire risk assessment

Periodical fire risk assessments are a legal requirement for many rental properties and best practice in all. They identify possible causes of fires, highlighting potential hazards and the precautions the landlord should take to reduce the likelihood of a fire.

It is a good idea to review the risk assessment every two years and update it every four years.

For older buildings or those over three storeys, the risk assessment should be reviewed annually and updated every three years.

Although there's no legal obligation to carry out a fire risk assessment if your property is a single private dwelling, it's best practice to do one anyway. Download our landlord fire risk assessment template to complete a thorough assessment of your property.

New rules came into force on 1 October 2023, making a fire risk assessment a legal requirement if you are responsible for a building that isn’t a single private dwelling. Check the government website to learn more about your fire safety responsibilities.

There is no mandatory method of fire risk assessment for HMOs, but we strongly recommend hiring a certified fire safety inspector to carry it out. This will help to ensure that your property is safe and give you peace of mind that you're following all of your fire safety obligations as a landlord.

Safe2 is a great choice for your fire risk assessment - they'll fully document every aspect of the assessment, record any significant findings, and make recommendations around how you can make your HMO as safe as possible.

What are your fire safety obligations as a landlord?

There are a number of fire safety regulations for landlords to keep track of. By law, you must comply with them to minimise the risk of a fire starting and spreading and ensure the safety of your tenants.

Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms

Landlords are required by law to have at least one working smoke alarm installed on every floor of their rental properties and a carbon monoxide alarm in any room containing a solid fuel-burning appliance.

Landlords must also make sure alarms are in working order at the start of each new tenancy and should encourage tenants to continue to check alarms on a monthly basis. It’s also a good idea to inspect smoke and carbon monoxide alarms when carrying out routine property inspections.

As a landlord, it's your legal responsibility to make sure smoke and carbon monoxide alarms are repaired or replaced if you find or are informed by your tenant that they are faulty.

Access to escape routes

Landlords are legally responsible for making sure tenants have access to a safe and reliable escape route at all times. Escape routes can be external, such as stairways fixed to the sides of buildings, or internal. To make sure they can be used if there is a fire, escape routes should have emergency lighting, however this is only a legal requirement under the HMO management regulations where there are four or more occupiers. Additionally, floors and walls should be made of fire-resistant materials.

They should also be accessible from every floor and every room in the property to avoid tenants becoming trapped, and tenants should be made aware of what to do in an emergency to make sure they can exit the property as quickly as possible.

There are more stringent rules for HMOs, which can be larger and more difficult to get out of. More complex rental properties should be assessed by a person who has comprehensive training or experience in fire risk assessment.

Fire-safe furniture and furnishings

Landlords must make sure that they comply with the fire safety requirements for furnishings. This information can usually be found by checking the manufacturer’s label for a fire safety symbol.

Items such as bed bases, headboards, mattresses, pillows, cushions, bed covers, sofas, and other furniture like nursery and indoor-use garden furniture are all caught by these regulations, as are the covers for these types of furniture. However, the regulations don’t apply to pre-1950 furniture or to bedclothes, pillowcases, duvets, loose mattress covers, curtains, and carpets.

Landlords are not responsible for tenant-owned furniture and appliances – everything the tenant brings inside the property is their own responsibility.

Electrical safety inspection

Landlords are responsible for making sure that electrical wiring, sockets and fuse boxes are safe throughout the tenancy. All landlords are required to have the electrical installations in their properties inspected and tested by a person who is qualified and competent, at least every five years.

Landlords have to provide a copy of the electrical safety report to their tenants, and to their local authority if requested.
 

Gas safety check

Landlords are required by law to make sure any gas equipment they supply is safely installed and maintained by a Gas Safe registered engineer and that they have a registered engineer do an annual gas safety check on each appliance and flue.

Landlords must also provide their tenants with a copy of the gas safety check record before they move in or within 28 days of the check. This is a legal requirement and each individual certificate has to be renewed every year. Gas safety isn’t just about complying with the law; it’s ultimately about tenant safety. Gas is volatile and highly flammable, and if it leaks, it can cause an explosion or fire. Gas safety checks will also check for the presence of carbon monoxide, which is poisonous and can be deadly.
 

What else can landlords do to reduce the risk of fires occurring?

Although these aren't legal requirements, there are some additional things you can do to reduce the risk of a fire breaking out at your property.

Banning smoking indoors

There are already restrictions in place around where tenants can and can’t smoke in HMOs, for example in shared areas. But although it is not against the law for tenants to smoke in rental properties, landlords can include a clause in the tenancy agreement stating that smoking is not permitted.

A significant proportion of accidental house fires are caused by cigarettes. In the last five years, seven per cent of Total Landlord’s claims were for fires caused by cigarette smoking. Banning smoking indoors also reduces the likelihood of burns to floors, carpets and surfaces.

Portable appliance testing

Landlords should check that any electrical appliances provided are in safe working order and have a British or European safety mark. Portable appliance testing (PAT) isn’t compulsory for all properties, but is always a condition for HMO properties with a mandatory licence. In general, it is recommended to carry out PAT if electrical appliances of any kind are provided in the rental property.

You can register for our PAT training course to learn how to carry out PAT testing on your equipment/appliances without needing to hire a specialist to do it for you.

However, it is a good idea to use a licensed PAT specialist to help with larger properties such as HMOs, where it is likely that more electrical appliances will be provided, increasing the risk of something going wrong.

It’s also important that landlords warn tenants about the hazards of using extension leads to overload sockets and that sufficient sockets are provided in each room to prevent this from happening.

Reference checking

While we've mostly focused on how to prevent accidental fires so far, some fires are caused deliberately. To minimise the risk of arson and give you peace of mind, you should always carry out thorough tenant reference checks. This will help ensure that the people you're allowing to live in your property are trustworthy and likely to take good care of your rental home.

If you need some help understanding your fire safety regulations as a landlord, the NRLA can assist. Sign up today for access to our landlord support hotline.

Additional fire safety regulations for HMOs

Regulations are particularly stringent around Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs), so if you’re a HMO landlord, it’s important to contact your local council to understand the specific regulations that apply.
New rules came into force in January 2023 in response to the recommendations made by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.

The Fire Safety (England) Regulations apply to responsible persons in high-rise residential buildings, and impose duties on you if you are the responsible person for any building which contains two or more sets of domestic premises and/or contains common parts through which residents would need to evacuate in the case of an emergency.

The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 introduce new duties under the Fire Safety Order for building owners or managers (responsible persons).

For high-rise residential buildings (a multi-occupied residential building at least 18 metres in height or seven or more storeys), responsible persons must:

• Share electronically with their local fire and rescue service information about the building’s external wall system and provide the fire and rescue service with electronic copies of floor plans and building plans for the building
• Keep hard copies of the building’s floor plans, in addition to a single page orientation plan of the building, and the name and UK contact details of the responsible person in a secure information box which is accessible by firefighters
• Install wayfinding signage in all high-rise buildings that is visible in low-light conditions
• Establish a minimum of monthly checks on lifts, which are for the use of firefighters in high-rise residential buildings, and on essential pieces of firefighting equipment
• Inform the fire and rescue service if a lift used by firefighters or one of the pieces of firefighting equipment is out of order for longer than 24 hours

For multi-occupied residential buildings over 11 metres in height, responsible persons must:

• Undertake quarterly checks on all communal fire doors and annual checks on flat entrance doors

In all multi-occupied residential buildings, responsible persons must:

• Provide residents with relevant fire safety instructions and information about the importance of fire doors
• The Fire Safety Act clarified the scope of the Fire Safety Order to make clear that it applies to the structure, external walls (including cladding and balconies), and individual flat entrance doors between domestic premises and the common parts.

For more information, particularly about high-rise blocks of flats, here is comprehensive government guidance on the 2022 Regulations.

Tenants' fire safety responsibilities

Although landlords must make sure they meet their legal fire safety responsibilities and duty of care to their tenants, the responsibility for preventing fires in rented properties falls to tenants too.

Tenants need to make sure they are doing all they can to mitigate fire risks throughout the property. Good landlord and tenant communication can help facilitate this. For example, landlords should:

• Fully outline fire safety measures, such as the importance of carrying out regular (ideally monthly) smoke alarm tests and ask tenants to contact them without delay if they are worried about fire safety in the property.
• Provide advice to prevent electrical fires – switch off and unplug appliances when not in use, don’t overload extension leads and plug sockets.
• Remind tenants to take care when in the kitchen – remove pans from the heat if leaving the kitchen, keep tea towels and cloths away from the cooker and hob, and clean the oven, hob and grill frequently as a build-up of grease can ignite a fire.
• Advise tenants to minimise the use of flammable substances and never to leave any near a heat source.
• Make sure tenants know how to be prepared – agree on a safe place to keep the window and door keys so that everyone can find them in case of an emergency, make sure everyone knows the escape route and has a second exit in the event a fire is blocking the first one.
• Remind tenants to keep escape routes and exits free of obstructions and not to prop open fire doors.
• Make sure tenants don’t store combustible objects near boilers or fuse boxes.

Of course, in practice, it can be hard to enforce some of these measures, and tenants won’t always follow the rules. However, as long as you've given them this advice, you've done your part to help keep them safe.
 

What to do if there's a fire in your property

In the event of a fire, it’s vital to act quickly to save lives:

• Use a fire extinguisher or fire blankets to combat the fire if it is safe to do so
• Call the emergency services on 999 and ask for the fire brigade
• Make sure that the property is safe before allowing anyone to re-enter
• Take time-stamped photos if it is safe to do so
• Contact your insurers to notify them of the situation and begin the claims process. They will advise you on the next steps to take
   

The importance of insurance

It is vital to make sure you have landlord insurance in place to mitigate against fire risk. Cover won’t stop damage from being caused, but it will provide peace of mind that you will not be out of pocket for the cost of any repairs or rebuilds – and potentially the cost of lost rental income or temporarily rehousing tenants in the event of a deliberate arson attack or an accidental fire.

Steve Barnes, Head of Broking at Total Landlord, offers his advice:

'Prevention is always best when it comes to fire. Making sure you have working fire alarms that are regularly tested and showing tenants how to test them, is vital in the event of a fire.

Unfortunately, we are seeing an increase in arson claims, so always thoroughly reference check tenants.

Of course, despite doing all you can to protect your property from fire, accidents do happen, and the costs of repairing fire damage can be very high. This is why landlords should make sure they have comprehensive landlord insurance cover in place.'

Need advice? The NRLA can help

If you're feeling overwhelmed by your landlord fire risk assessment obligations, the NRLA can help break it down for you and give you the support you need to ensure your property is legally compliant and safe to live in.

Become a member of the NRLA today for access to personalised support and advice, as well as exclusive landlord discounts on a wide range of essential services and products.