Same-day fire risk assessment from £99

Honesty is more useful to you than optimism when you are working to a deadline. What we can usually do today is a single building of ordinary complexity inside the M25 — a block of flats, an HMO, a shop, a restaurant, an office floor — provided somebody can give the assessor access and there is enough of the working day left to survey it properly. What we cannot responsibly do today is a large multi-block estate, a higher-risk building needing document review before the visit, or anything requiring resident access to sampled flats that has not already been arranged with notice. In those cases we will normally attend part of the scope today and complete the rest within days, so the urgent element of your deadline is met without pretending the whole job was done in an afternoon.

You call or send the property details; we price it on the spot from the property type, floors, units and postcode. If a slot exists, we confirm the assessor and the arrival window in writing before anybody sets off, so you are never waiting in for an unknown time. The survey itself takes around an hour to ninety minutes for a small block or single premises, and longer for larger sites. The assessor works the building systematically — escape routes, compartmentation, fire doors, detection, emergency lighting, signage, ignition sources, storage, management arrangements and the arrangements for anyone who could not self-evacuate — photographing findings as they go. Anything dangerous is raised with you before the assessor leaves the site. The written report follows within 24 hours, and if your deadline is the following morning we say so at booking rather than after the visit.

There is a legitimate worry behind every urgent booking: that a rushed assessment is a worse assessment. It is worth being precise about where the speed comes from. It comes from holding capacity open and from having employed assessors rather than a subcontractor network that has to be canvassed for availability. It does not come from a shorter site visit, a lighter methodology, or a template report with the address changed. The survey follows the same PAS 79 process, the report carries the same named, IFSM-registered, NFRAR-listed author, and the action plan is banded by priority in exactly the same way. If we cannot do the job properly today, we tell you that instead of doing it badly today.

The reasons repeat. An HMO licence application has stalled because the licensing officer asked for a current written assessment. An insurance renewal is days away and the broker has asked for evidence. A sale or remortgage has been queried by a buyer's solicitor. The fire and rescue authority has visited and asked what date the last assessment was carried out. A managing agent has just taken on a block and inherited no documentation. A tenant has complained and the council has written. In every one of these the cost of the delay is much larger than the cost of the assessment, which is why we hold the capacity in the first place.

The same as when it is not. Prices start at £99 and are set by the building — floors, units, size and complexity — not by how quickly you need it. We do not add an emergency premium for a visit inside normal working hours, because charging more to a person under pressure is a poor way to build the repeat and portfolio work that actually sustains a practice. Out-of-hours attendance — evenings, weekends, or a site that can only be surveyed when it is closed — is quoted separately and agreed in writing before we commit anyone. The calculator on this page uses the same bands our assessors quote from, so you can see the number before you speak to anybody.

Three things make today possible. First, call rather than email — a same-day slot cannot be allocated from an inbox that is checked in an hour. Second, have the access answer ready: who holds the keys to the communal areas, plant rooms, risers and any locked cupboards, and whether they can be there. Third, gather whatever paperwork already exists — the previous assessment, alarm and emergency lighting service records, fire door surveys — so the assessor can review it against what they find rather than working blind. None of these are prerequisites, but each one is the difference between a survey that happens at two o'clock and a survey that happens tomorrow.

When the diary genuinely will not stretch, the fallback is the next working day, and that is confirmed in writing at the same call rather than left as a maybe. In our experience the deadline behind an urgent enquiry is rarely today itself — it is a document that has to be with somebody by the end of the week. Given the report follows within 24 hours of the survey, a next-morning visit still puts the written assessment in your hands well inside almost every deadline people call us about. We will tell you which of the two you are looking at before you commit to anything.