BS 9792:2025: the new standard for housing fire risk assessments

What BS 9792:2025 is, and why it appeared

BS 9792:2025 is a full British Standard giving recommendations for fire risk assessment of housing. Until it was published, assessors working on residential buildings largely relied on PAS 79-2:2020 — a publicly available specification rather than a British Standard — or on in-house methodologies built around it.

The legal duty has not changed. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 still requires a suitable and sufficient assessment, and it still does not prescribe a method. What BS 9792 provides is a recognised, current framework for housing specifically, at a point when the residential sector is under more scrutiny than any other part of UK fire safety.

The practical driver is that the housing risk picture has moved. A standard written before lithium-ion batteries were charging in communal corridors and electric vehicles were parking under blocks was always going to need catching up on.

How the assessment is structured

BS 9792 organises the work into three substantive blocks, after the general information about the premises:

• Elimination and control of fire hazards (Clause 13, with Annex B) — the ignition sources and the combustible materials that let a fire grow.
• Fire protection measures (Clause 15) — everything the building itself does once a fire starts.
• Management of fire safety (Clause 16) — the arrangements that keep all of it working between assessments.

Clause 13: the hazards, including the new ones

Clause 13.2 works through the sources of ignition: malicious ignition, electrical faults, high-density electricity storage and photovoltaic panels, smoking, cooking, portable heaters, contractors’ activities and hot work, heating installations, and lightning.

Clause 13.3 then covers the combustible materials and the behaviours that put them where they should not be — housekeeping, waste management, battery-powered mobility scooters, e-scooters and e-bikes, electric motor vehicles, UPS and energy storage systems, and furniture and furnishings.

Those middle items are the substantive change. In a PAS 79-2 assessment, a corridor full of charging e-bikes gets recorded as a general housekeeping or ignition-source observation because there is nowhere else to put it. BS 9792 gives it a named section, which means it gets asked about on every assessment rather than only when the assessor happens to notice.

Clause 15: the building’s fire protection measures

Clause 15 runs from detection and warning (15.2) and means of escape (15.3, with Annex C) through signs and notices, emergency escape lighting and manual firefighting equipment, to the passive and structural measures: separating elements limiting fire spread (15.7), automatic suppression (15.8), loadbearing elements of structure (15.9), fire spread over external walls (15.10), smoke control (15.11) and facilities for firefighters (15.12).

The external wall clause matters more in housing than the single line it occupies suggests. Since Grenfell it is the question every leaseholder, lender and insurer asks first, and an assessment that records it explicitly is a far more useful document than one that mentions it in passing.

Clause 16: management, including resident engagement

Clause 16.3 covers fire procedures and evacuation arrangements, staff response and liaison with the fire and rescue service, routine inspections and monitoring, training and drills, resident engagement and information to third parties, testing and maintenance, and false alarms, documents and records.

Resident engagement being a named heading reflects the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, which put specific duties on responsible persons to give residents information about fire safety in their building. Recording it in the assessment is how you demonstrate it happened.

BS 9792 or PAS 79-2 — which should you use?

Both are legitimate. PAS 79-2:2020 remains widely used and is still what many clients and framework agreements specify by name, so you cannot simply retire it. BS 9792:2025 is newer, is a full British Standard, and handles modern ignition sources better.

In practice most assessors will run both for a while — existing clients and recurring reviews on the methodology their file already uses, new housing work on BS 9792. What you should avoid is the position of having only one Word template and quietly bending it to whichever standard the client asked for.

This is one of the few genuine arguments for software over a document. In fire risk assessment software the standard is a property of the assessment rather than a property of the file you started from: you pick it when you create the job, the checklist follows, and the report records which standard it was written to.

Assessing to BS 9792 without rebuilding your template

The cost of a new standard is rarely the reading — it is rebuilding the pro forma, then keeping every assessor’s copy of it in step. AssessHub ships BS 9792:2025 as a built-in checklist alongside PAS 79-1, PAS 79-2 and an enhanced PAS 79 variant, with each section tagged to the clause it comes from, so the finished report shows which part of the standard each finding answers.

You still own the methodology: clone the built-in template and edit it if your practice works differently. And the report itself comes out in the same branded format as every other job, so a mixed portfolio of housing and commercial premises does not turn into two different house styles.

Frequently asked questions