Guides · 9 min read

How Much Does a Fire Risk Assessment Cost in 2026?

A practitioner’s guide to fire risk assessment pricing in the UK — what drives the cost, what’s usually missing from cheap quotes, and how to compare assessors fairly.

Last reviewed: April 2026

A fire risk assessment in the UK typically costs between £199 and £700 for small to medium commercial premises in 2026, with HMO assessments starting from £199 for properties up to five rented rooms. Price is driven by building complexity and sleeping risk, not by floor area alone. Anything advertised below £150 is almost always missing the methodology, the reasoning, or both.

How much does a fire risk assessment cost in the UK in 2026?

Headline ranges in 2026 sit between £150 and £1,500+, with most competent assessments for small and medium premises landing between £200 and £700. London and the South East typically run 20–40% higher than the national figures. The wide spread reflects the fact that fire risk assessment fees are not regulated — assessors set their own prices, and quality varies dramatically at the bottom end of the market.

The single most useful thing to know about fire risk assessment pricing is that the headline number tells you almost nothing on its own. Two assessors can quote £200 and £600 for the same building, and the £600 quote can still be the better value if the £200 one is a templated tick-box exercise that gets rejected on its first audit.

Under Article 9 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the responsible person for any non-domestic premises must ensure a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment is carried out. Since Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 took effect in October 2023, that assessment must be recorded in writing for all relevant premises — the previous “five or more employees” threshold is gone. The legislation does not regulate price, but it does set the standard the assessment has to meet, and the cost of meeting that standard properly is what this article is really about.

Our own commercial pricing on the commercial fire risk assessment page starts at £199 for retail-only premises under 200m² and rises through £349 (up to 500m²), £499 (501–1,000m²), and £649 (1,001–4,000m²). HMO pricing on the HMO fire risk assessment page starts at £199 for properties up to five rented rooms and rises to £249 for up to seven rooms, with larger properties quoted manually. These prices are inclusive — there is no VAT (we are not VAT-registered), no mileage charge, and no separate fee for the action plan.

What does a fire risk assessment cost for a small business?

A competent fire risk assessment for a small commercial premises in 2026 typically costs between £199 and £499. Retail units under 200m² sit at the lower end, single-floor offices and small workshops in the middle, and mixed-use units with sleeping risk above (such as a shop with a flat over) usually push higher because of the additional escape analysis required.

For a small business owner, the most useful framing is by floor area band rather than by premises type, because the same physical space can be used for very different activities and the work involved is broadly comparable. The four bands on our commercial pricing reflect this:

  • Retail only, under 200m² — £199. A simple shop unit with a single occupancy class, no sleeping risk, no basement, no responsibility for floors above. Single sweep of the premises, straightforward escape analysis, standard report structure.
  • Small premises, up to 500m² — £349. Single-floor offices, small workshops, hairdressers, small cafés. Adds modest complexity around occupancy, kitchen risks, or customer-facing spaces.
  • Medium premises, 501–1,000m² — £499. Multi-floor offices, larger retail, light industrial units with mixed use. The site visit alone is typically two to three hours, plus document review.
  • Large premises, 1,001–4,000m² — £649. Larger industrial or commercial sites with multiple compartments, more complex escape route analysis, and proportionally longer report writing.

What we have to be honest about is that the quoted band is sometimes wrong before we arrive — and we wear that, not the customer. A “simple retail shop” can turn out to have an undisclosed basement. A small unit can turn out to have a flat above that the same landlord owns and is responsible for, which puts sleeping risk on the assessment and changes the escape analysis fundamentally. A “couple of offices and a warehouse” light industrial unit can turn out to have a mezzanine, machinery, and escape routes that wind around equipment in ways the booking form never captured. When that happens, the price stays as quoted. We sometimes underprice as a result — that is the trade-off of publishing fixed prices rather than asking everyone to phone for a quote.

How much does an HMO fire risk assessment cost?

An HMO fire risk assessment in 2026 typically costs between £199 and £400 for properties up to seven rented rooms. Pricing is driven primarily by room count, because room count is a reliable proxy for the things that actually drive the work: number of storeys, number of kitchens, total escape route length, and whether the property has been extended.

Our HMO bands are simple. Up to five rented rooms — £199. This is usually a standard family-sized house that has been converted into rented rooms, with a single kitchen, one main staircase, and a manageable layout. Up to seven rented rooms — £249. Above five rooms, the property has almost always either been extended at the rear, had a loft conversion or third storey added, or contains multiple kitchens — sometimes all three. The work jumps in step with that. Larger HMOs (8+ rooms) are quoted manually because the variation between properties at that size is too wide for a fixed band.

HMO pricing has to track room count rather than floor area for one practical reason: the assessment work scales with the number of sleeping risk locations and escape route complications, not the square metres. A 6-bed HMO with three storeys and two kitchens is meaningfully more work than a single-floor 6-bed bungalow share, even at the same floor area. Both are assessed under BS 9792:2025, the British Standard that replaced the withdrawn PAS 79-2:2020 in August 2025 and is now the benchmark for housing fire risk assessment in the UK. You can see our full HMO pricing and what is included on the HMO fire risk assessment page.

What makes a fire risk assessment more expensive?

The price of a fire risk assessment is driven by hours of competent work, and hours of work are driven by complexity rather than floor area. The variables that matter most are sleeping risk, compartmentation that needs to be inspected rather than assumed, occupancy patterns, undocumented building alterations, and whether reliable documentation exists from previous assessments and contractors.

A competent assessment of a small commercial premises typically involves six to ten hours of work end to end. About an hour of pre-visit admin and scheduling. Up to two hours of travel. A site visit of two to four hours, broken into 30–60 minutes with the client gathering documentation and asking follow-up questions, then a structured walk-around starting from the outside of the building, working inwards, mapping compartmentation zones and escape routes on the first sweep, then a second sweep specifically for hazards and missing measures. And then two to four hours of report writing — not just typing, but cross-referencing notes against the relevant standards, labelling photographs, locating the nearest fire station, and turning the observations into a prioritised action plan that an enforcement officer or insurer could follow three years later.

For a £349 small commercial assessment, that is an effective rate of £35 to £58 an hour gross, before any overhead. For our larger £649 band, the maths is similar — the larger premises simply takes more hours. This is one of the most useful tests you can apply to any quote: divide the price by an honest estimate of the hours involved and ask whether the resulting hourly rate is enough to retain a qualified assessor with insurance, professional development, and software. If it is not, something is being missed.

Why are some fire risk assessments so cheap?

Fire risk assessments advertised at £45, £90, or £150 are almost always templated tick-box documents — yes/no/yes/no with no reasoning, no narrative, and no genuine analysis of the building. They are frequently rejected by Fire and Rescue Service audits, refused by insurers, and turned down by HMO licensing officers, at which point the customer pays a second time for a proper assessment.

The single clearest signal of a poor assessment is the structure of the report. A report that reads as a series of tick boxes — fire alarm yes, extinguishers yes, escape routes yes — is not worth the paper it is written on. A proper fire risk assessment tells the story of the premises through the nine-step PAS 79-1:2020 methodology, and a competent reader should be able to follow how the assessor was thinking. If you cannot tell from reading the report which compartmentation zones the assessor actually inspected, why a particular fire alarm category was specified, or how the action plan was prioritised, the assessment has not been done — it has been generated.

There is also a structural reason this matters for buyers comparing quotes online — the cost figures most commonly cited at the top of search results are themselves anchored on the cheaper end of the market, and that is worth pulling apart explicitly.

What the current AI Overview gets wrong about fire risk assessment cost

Google’s AI Overview for “fire risk assessment cost” currently anchors prices around £150 to £600, with most assessments framed at £200 to £400. That ceiling is too low for anything that is not a small simple retail unit. For a multi-building site, a customer-facing premises with non-trivial occupancy, or any HMO with more than five rooms, those numbers should be a red flag rather than a benchmark.

The right question to ask of a £200 quote for a 1,200m² premises is not “what a bargain” but “what level of output am I actually getting for that?” The AI Overview anchor exists because it is the average of what the market currently advertises, including the templated £90 reports and the cheap-end providers. It is not the average of what a competent assessment costs.

A more honest framing for a buyer in 2026: small simple retail under 200m² sits between £199 and £300. Most small to medium commercial premises sit between £349 and £649 from a competent independent assessor, or 20% higher again from a VAT-registered provider. HMOs sit between £199 and £400 depending on room count. Anything significantly below those figures is not a bargain — it is a different product with the same name.

What is included in the price of a fire risk assessment?

A competent fire risk assessment should always include the on-site inspection, documentation review, written report, prioritised action plan, and post-delivery support. Some providers charge separately for the action plan, the revisit, the report itself, or for explaining the findings — which is how a £180 headline price becomes a £350 final invoice.

Our headline prices are fully inclusive, and “fully inclusive” needs to mean something specific. For every fire risk assessment we carry out, the price you see includes:

  • The full on-site inspection, however long it takes
  • The written report and prioritised action plan
  • A draft of the report after the visit, with the finalised version issued after invoice settlement
  • 12 months of telephone support, included as standard, for any questions about closing out the actions
  • A 100% Approval guarantee — if a local authority rejects the assessment, we refund 100% and fix the report free
  • No upfront payment to book, no mileage charge, no VAT, and no separate action plan fee

The 12 months of support and the approval guarantee are documented on the commercial and HMO service pages — they are not marketing language. They exist because the fire risk assessment is only the beginning of the customer’s compliance work, and a report that arrives without any explanation of what to do next leaves the customer with a 40-page formal document and no idea what to action first. We provide a plain-English supporting document alongside the formal report, written in language a non-specialist can absorb, with practical examples of how to close each action.

Hidden fire risk assessment costs to watch for

Common hidden charges in the fire risk assessment market include VAT (typically adding 20% to the headline price), mileage and travel time, separate fees for the action plan, charges for revisits if an area was not accessible the first time, urgency premiums for fast turnaround, and over-prescription of remedials by assessors who are also in the business of selling fire alarms or extinguishers.

The single largest hidden cost is VAT. Many established competitors are VAT-registered, which means a £349 headline price becomes £418.80 once VAT is added. We are not VAT-registered, so our published prices are the prices our customers pay. This is worth checking explicitly with any assessor before you book — the question to ask is “is that price inclusive of VAT?”

Beyond VAT, the hidden charges to watch for are:

  • Revisit fees for areas that could not be accessed on the first visit, with the assessment held in draft until the revisit takes place
  • Urgency or fast-delivery surcharges — sometimes 50% or more on top of the standard rate for next-day or same-week turnaround
  • Mileage or travel time charged on top of the headline assessment fee, particularly from London or out-of-area providers
  • Cancellation clauses that bite if a booking is rescheduled within a short notice window
  • Action plan as a separate line item — yes, this exists, and yes, we have seen it
  • Over-prescription of remedials when the assessor is tied to a parent company that sells fire alarms, fire doors, or extinguishers. The assessment becomes a sales opportunity for kit the building does not actually need. This is the structural reason we do not sell any fire safety products, equipment, or installation work — the assessment is the only thing we do, which means there is no incentive on our side to inflate the action plan.

Initial assessment versus review pricing is also worth understanding. A review is not a cheap update to the previous assessment — the largest part of a competent review is checking whether new regulations or standards have changed the picture since the original was carried out, which on housing alone has happened twice in the last three years (Building Safety Act 2022 Section 156 in 2023, BS 9792:2025 in August 2025). A reassessment after significant change — extensions, change of use, new occupancy patterns, installation of solar PV or lithium-ion battery storage — is priced as a full new assessment, because that is what it is.

How to compare fire risk assessment quotes like-for-like

To compare fire risk assessment quotes fairly, ask each assessor for a redacted sample report, check what methodology they follow, ask how long they expect to be on site, confirm whether the price is fully inclusive, and check whether they sell any of the remedial works they might prescribe. The cheapest quote is rarely the best value, but the most expensive is not automatically better either.

The six questions below are the ones we would suggest any responsible person ask before instructing a fire risk assessment from an assessor they have not worked with before:

  1. Can I see a redacted sample of a report you have completed for similar premises? A good report tells the story of a building. If the sample is a series of tick boxes with no narrative, that is the answer — walk away.
  2. How long do you expect to be on site, and what could increase that? A competent answer for a small to medium commercial premises is two to four hours depending on complexity. “One hour, two hours tops” is a red flag.
  3. What methodology do you follow? For commercial premises, the answer should reference PAS 79-1:2020. For HMOs and other housing, it should reference BS 9792:2025. If you hear “PAS 79-2,” that document has been withdrawn since 2021 and replaced — the assessor is working from a retired standard.
  4. What are the dead-end travel distance benchmarks (also known as one-way travel distances) for low, medium, and high-risk premises? A competent assessor should be able to give you the figures off the top of their head. If they cannot, they may not know the standards well enough.
  5. Is the price fully inclusive? Ask specifically about VAT, mileage, action plan, revisit fees, and urgency surcharges. Get the answer in writing.
  6. Do you sell any of the remedial works you might prescribe? If the assessor is also a fire alarm installer, an extinguisher supplier, or a fire door contractor, the action plan you receive is not independent. There may be good reasons to use them anyway, but you should know about the conflict of interest before you read the recommendations.

Frequently asked questions about fire risk assessment cost

How much does a fire risk assessment cost for an HMO with 6 bedrooms?

A 6-bedroom HMO assessment typically costs around £249 in 2026, sitting in the “up to 7 rooms” pricing band. This reflects the additional complexity of HMOs above 5 rooms, which usually involve extensions, an extra storey, or multiple kitchens. The figure is fully inclusive — no VAT, no mileage, no separate action plan charge.

Do I have to pay VAT on a fire risk assessment?

It depends on the assessor. VAT-registered providers must add 20% to the headline price, so a £349 quote becomes £418.80. Smaller independent assessors below the VAT registration threshold can offer prices that are inclusive by default. Always ask “is that price inclusive of VAT?” before booking — it is the single largest hidden cost in the market.

How often do I have to pay for a fire risk assessment?

A fire risk assessment must be reviewed regularly and reassessed after any significant change to the premises, occupancy, or activities. In practice, most commercial and HMO assessments are reviewed annually and fully reassessed every three to five years, or sooner if the building has changed materially. Reviews are not free updates — the largest part of a competent review is checking whether regulations or standards have changed since the previous assessment.

How much does a fire risk assessment cost per square metre?

Per-square-metre rates of £1.50 to £15/m² are sometimes quoted in the UK market, but they are misleading for most buildings under 4,000m². Fire risk assessment work scales with building complexity, sleeping risk, and number of compartments — not floor area. A 200m² salon with a flat above can require more work than a 600m² single-occupancy office. Fixed band pricing by total floor area or room count is a more honest framing for small and medium premises.

Can I do my own fire risk assessment to save money?

Legally, yes — the responsible person can carry out the assessment themselves for simple, low-risk premises if they are competent to do so. In practice, the cost of getting it wrong (Fire and Rescue Service audit failure, insurance refusal, HMO licensing rejection) almost always exceeds the cost of having a competent assessor do it properly the first time. For sleeping-risk premises, HMOs, or anything above small low-occupancy retail, professional assessment is the practical default.

Last reviewed: April 2026

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