Do holiday lets and Airbnbs need a fire risk assessment?

It’s not limited to hotels or big guest houses, either. The same guidance extends to cottages, flats and chalets, and on to holiday caravans, glamping pods, lodges, shepherds’ huts, tents, treehouses and yurts. If a guest pays to sleep in it, it’s in scope. The duty falls on the “responsible person” — usually the owner, or the letting agent or whoever else controls the property — and it can’t be passed to the guest.

For owners along this stretch of coast, that’s a live issue — short-term letting is everywhere, from Hayling Island and the harbour towns of south-east Hampshire, across the New Forest and its coast at Lymington and New Milton, to the Dorset shore through Bournemouth, Christchurch, Poole and Weymouth. It’s exactly the kind of premises fire and rescue services have been focusing attention on.

Before that date, you only had to record an assessment in full if you employed five or more people — so a one-cottage holiday let could get by without much on paper. Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 ended that. Since 1 October 2023, the responsible person must record the assessment in full, regardless of size. A holiday let that previously “had a think about fire safety” but nothing written down no longer meets the law.

There’s a second reason the bar is higher than for an ordinary home: your guests don’t know the building. They don’t know where the exits are, where the alarm is, or which door is locked. The Home Office guidance is clear that short-term lets carry stricter requirements precisely because the people sleeping there are unfamiliar with the place — in the dark, in an emergency, that unfamiliarity is the risk.

HMO rules apply to people living somewhere as their main home — sharing a house, with their own tenancy. Holiday guests don’t live there; they’re paying visitors. So you don’t need HMO-style licensing fire conditions — you need a Fire Safety Order assessment for sleeping accommodation. Which Home Office guide applies depends on size: a single premises on the ground floor (or ground and first floor) sleeping up to ten people, with no more than four bedrooms on the first floor, is “small paying guest accommodation” and uses the small-premises guide. Anything larger, taller, or more complex follows the fuller “sleeping accommodation” guidance instead.

Getting this distinction right matters, because an assessment built on the wrong framework — HMO when it should be Fire Safety Order, or vice versa — isn’t suitable and sufficient, however thorough it looks.

• Detection and alarm — most self-catering lets need interlinked smoke and heat alarms, mains-powered with battery backup, so a fire anywhere wakes everyone.
• Carbon monoxide — a CO alarm wherever there’s gas, oil or a solid-fuel appliance such as a wood burner.
• Escape routes and door locks — clear routes out, and thumb-turn locks so a guest never has to hunt for a key to escape.
• Emergency lighting — enough to find the way out in a power cut: plug-in escape lights in a small cottage, full emergency lighting in larger properties.
• A fire action notice guests can actually follow — simple, visible instructions, because your guests have never been in the building before.
• Kitchen safety — the right extinguisher and a fire blanket where most holiday-home fires start.
• Electrics and appliances — an electrical installation check (EICR) every five years, and appliances checked between lets.
• Heating and chimneys — annual servicing of gas and heating, and the chimney swept yearly where there’s a wood burner or open fire.
• Clear policies and prevention — a no-candles and smoking policy guests are told about, and simple arson precautions like keeping bins away from the building.

The thread running through all of it is the same: a guest doesn’t know your property, so both the measures and the instructions have to work for a stranger, fast, in the worst moment.

But the post-2023 rules are more involved than the old ones, older and larger properties need real judgement about escape and compartmentation, and there’s a practical reality on top of the law: your holiday-let insurer and your booking platform will expect to see a proper recorded assessment, and may not pay out on a claim without one. So the honest position is — a small, simple, modern let, you might do yourself; an older building, a larger one, anything over more than one floor, or any property where you’re not certain, is where a professional earns the fee. Either way, the legal responsibility stays with you, so the assessment has to be one that holds up.