The statutory compliance calendar for commercial buildings.

Most facilities teams can name the statutory checks their buildings carry. Fewer can produce, on demand, a single view of which ones are current, which have lapsed, and where the evidence for each one lives. That second thing is what a compliance calendar is for, and it is a different document from a maintenance schedule — narrower, less negotiable, and considerably more consequential when it is wrong.

What follows is the shape of a typical commercial building's calendar. Which of these apply to you depends on your assets, your occupancy and your role as duty holder, and several frequencies are set by a risk assessment or a competent person rather than by a fixed rule. Treat this as a prompt for a conversation with a competent person, not as your regime.

Why this is a separate list from your PPM schedule

Statutory items and discretionary maintenance behave differently under pressure, and mixing them into one list means treating them the same when the week goes wrong. A compliance calendar is the subset where the date is not yours to move, the competence of the person attending is specified, and the output is a certificate someone may later ask to see. Pulling those out and looking at them on their own is usually the moment a team discovers two or three that nobody owns.

If you subscribe to SFG20, its criticality classification does this separation for you across the task library — which is most of the argument for holding a subscription, and is covered in SFG20 and maintenance standards, explained.

Weekly and monthly

• –Fire alarm — user testing of a manual call point, typically weekly, rotating through call points, with the result logged
• –Emergency lighting — brief function test at the interval set out in BS 5266, commonly monthly
• –Water hygiene — flushing of little-used outlets, commonly weekly where the risk assessment requires it
• –Water temperatures — sentinel outlet checks, commonly monthly
• –Fire doors — routine checks where the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 apply to your building, at the frequency those regulations set
• –Means of escape — visual checks that routes and final exits are clear and unobstructed

The weekly items are the ones most likely to be done and least likely to be evidenced, because they are quick and carried out by whoever is on site. A logbook in a cupboard is the traditional answer and it works right up until the logbook is the only copy, at which point a flood, a refurbishment or a change of contractor loses a year of evidence in one go.

Water hygiene is the heaviest of the short-cycle duties and the one with the most record keeping attached to it, so it has a guide of its own — legionella control and ACOP L8 record keeping covers the monitoring regime and what an inspection actually asks to see.

Quarterly and six-monthly

• –Fire alarm servicing by a competent person, commonly twice a year under BS 5839
• –Lifting equipment used to lift people — thorough examination under LOLER, commonly at six-monthly intervals
• –Lifting accessories — thorough examination, commonly six-monthly
• –Emergency lighting — where a six-monthly partial duration test is specified by the scheme
• –Water systems — calorifier and tank checks at the interval set by the risk assessment
• –Air conditioning and refrigeration — F-gas leak checking, at an interval determined by the system's charge size

Annual

• –Lifting equipment not used to lift people — thorough examination under LOLER, commonly twelve-monthly or in accordance with an examination scheme
• –Emergency lighting — full duration test, in line with BS 5266
• –Gas appliances and installations — inspection and maintenance by a suitably registered engineer
• –Pressure systems — examination in accordance with the written scheme under PSSR 2000
• –Asbestos — review of the management plan and reinspection of the condition of known materials
• –Fire risk assessment — review, and revision where anything material has changed
• –Local exhaust ventilation — thorough examination and test under COSHH, commonly at fourteen-month intervals

Longer cycles

• –Fixed electrical installation — periodic inspection and testing to BS 7671, at the interval recommended on the previous report; commonly five years for commercial premises, shorter for some environments
• –Portable appliance testing — no fixed statutory interval; frequency determined by risk under the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989
• –Lightning protection — periodic inspection and testing in line with BS EN 62305
• –Legionella risk assessment — reviewed regularly and whenever it may no longer be valid, with a two-year cycle commonly applied as a default

The long-cycle items are the dangerous ones, and the reason is boring: nobody who set the date is still doing the job when it comes due. A five-year electrical test set in 2021 falls due under a different manager, quite possibly a different managing agent, and it will only be picked up if the date is held somewhere institutional rather than in a diary.

Three failure modes worth recognising

Compliance calendars fail in patterns rather than randomly, and the patterns are recognisable enough to design against.

• –The orphaned duty — a routine nobody owns, usually because the person who did own it left and the handover covered the day job rather than the calendar
• –The undocumented completion — the check happened, the contractor has the certificate, and you do not; entirely common where the contractor holds the portal
• –The register gap — the check ran perfectly on every asset on the list, and three assets were never on the list

The third is the one that survives audits by accident and fails incidents. It is not a compliance problem at all, it is an asset register problem, and it is why a compliance calendar built without a verified register gives false assurance rather than assurance.

What a defensible position looks like

The test is not whether you are fully compliant — very few estates are, at any given moment, on every item. It is whether you know where you are not, why, and what is being done about it. A duty holder who can produce a current position, an explanation for each gap and a dated plan to close it is in an entirely different position from one who believed everything was fine and was wrong.

That position has to be available continuously rather than assembled on request. Estate-wide compliance reporting drawn from the operational records means the answer to "where are we exposed" is the same answer your team already works from, and it is current by construction rather than current as at the last time someone built the pack.