PAS 79-1:2020 — Fire risk assessment for premises other than housing

What it is for

PAS 79-1 sets out a structured, repeatable way of carrying out a fire risk assessment in premises other than housing. Its purpose is consistency: two competent assessors working to the same methodology on the same building should reach broadly the same conclusions, and a duty holder receiving a report should be able to tell what was examined and what was not.

It is a published specification rather than a legal requirement, and its value is procedural. It gives an assessment a defensible shape — information gathered, hazards identified, people at risk considered, existing precautions evaluated, and findings expressed as a prioritised action plan rather than an undifferentiated list of observations.

Scope and typical application

The document addresses non-domestic premises: workplaces, offices, schools, shops, places of assembly, industrial and warehouse buildings, and the non-domestic parts of mixed-use developments. Housing is dealt with separately — that was the point of splitting the original PAS 79 into two parts in 2020, and the housing part has since been withdrawn and replaced by a British Standard.

In practice it is the framework most competent assessors work to for commercial and institutional buildings, and the framework most commissioning organisations expect to see referenced in a report. Where a building has both non-domestic and residential elements, the boundary between this document and the housing standard needs deciding at the outset rather than assumed.

It is a methodology for assessing fire risk. It is not a design code, and it does not tell you what standard of means of escape, detection or compartmentation a building ought to achieve — that is the territory of documents such as BS 9999 and the Building Regulations guidance.

How it relates to legal duty

A PAS is not law. The legal duty to carry out and keep up to date a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment comes from the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which applies in England and Wales, and it sits on the Responsible Person. The Order does not specify a methodology.

What a published methodology gives you is evidence of a systematic approach. Following PAS 79-1 does not, by itself, discharge the duty — an assessment can follow the process faithfully and still be unsuitable if the person carrying it out lacked the competence for that building. Equally, an assessment that does not reference PAS 79-1 is not automatically deficient. The statutory test is suitability and sufficiency, not conformity to a specification.

What this means in practice

If you commission a fire risk assessment for a non-domestic building, asking whether it follows PAS 79-1 is a reasonable question, but a more useful one is what the assessor's competence is for that building type and what the action plan actually asks you to do. A report that names the methodology and then delivers ungraded observations has borrowed the credibility of the document without doing its work.

Status and currency

PAS 79-1:2020 was published on 31 December 2020 and is current. No successor British Standard for non-domestic fire risk assessment has been published, and none has been identified as being in development. Note that the companion housing document, PAS 79-2:2020, was withdrawn and has been replaced by BS 9792:2025 — the two parts no longer share a status, and material that refers to "PAS 79" without a part number should be read with care.