What is a G6 certificate?

If you're a responsible person under the Fire Safety Order 2005 — the person who carries personal legal liability for fire safety at a building you manage — a "G6" is the certificate your fire alarm contractor should hand you (or upload to your portal) after every routine service visit to your fire detection and alarm system. It's the paper trail that proves the system has actually been looked at, not just installed and forgotten.

Where "G6" comes from

The name comes from Annex G of BS 5839-1:2025, the British Standard that governs the design, installation, commissioning and maintenance of fire detection and fire alarm systems in non-domestic buildings. Annex G sets out a family of model certificates, each covering a different stage of a system's life — installation, commissioning, handover, and so on. G.6 is the model Inspection and Servicing certificate — the one issued after ongoing maintenance visits, not the ones-and-done certificates issued when a system is first put in.

The standard is explicit that a contractor's actual certificate doesn't have to look exactly like the model in Annex G — but whatever format they use has to contain, at minimum, the same information and statements of conformity.

When you should be getting one

BS 5839-1:2025 Clause 43 sets the servicing schedule: a competent person should carry out a full inspection and test at intervals of approximately six months, with some flexibility — a visit anywhere between five and seven months since the last one still counts as compliant. If your system uses a vented (wet-cell) battery, there's also a lighter quarterly check just for the battery.

Each time the six-monthly visit happens and completes successfully, the standard says an inspection and servicing certificate should be issued. If you've had visits with no certificate to show for them, that's worth raising with your contractor.

What the engineer is actually meant to check

Clause 43 doesn't just say "check it's working" — it lists specific, concrete things a competent person should verify on every visit, including:

• The logbook — checking previous faults were actually dealt with, not just noted
• A walk of the building to confirm nothing's changed that would affect the system — call points still unobstructed, no new partitions built too close to a detector, no storage piled up against the ceiling near a detector's field of view
• The false alarm rate over the previous 12 months, with further investigation if it's climbing
• The standby battery — charge voltage, load test, and (critically) checking the power supply still holds up close to its nominal voltage with the battery disconnected and the alarm activated
• A functional test of at least one detector or call point on every circuit, logged against which device was used
• All the controls and indicators on the control and indicating equipment (the panel), fault indicators (tested by simulating a fault, not just looking at a light), and any automatic signalling to an alarm receiving centre

Any defects found during this process get written up in the certificate and the logbook — that's the whole point of the paperwork: it's not just proof a visit happened, it's a record of exactly what was found and what (if anything) still needs fixing.

Why this matters legally, not just administratively

Under Article 17 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the responsible person has a duty to ensure that fire safety systems are maintained in efficient working order — and, in practice, to be able to demonstrate that. A filed G6 certificate, with the checks above genuinely carried out and any defects tracked to resolution, is a large part of that evidence. An enforcing authority (or your insurer, after a claim) asking "how do you know your fire alarm actually works?" is asking exactly the question this certificate is meant to answer.

What to actually check on your copy

• Does the date match the schedule? Roughly every 5–7 months since the last one — a gap much wider than that is a compliance issue, not just a scheduling inconvenience.
• Is anything marked as a defect or non-conformity? If so, is there a plan and a date to fix it — not just a note that it exists.
• Does it name a specific competent person and organisation, not just a company name with no accountable individual.
• Is the false alarm count mentioned, and has anyone flagged if it's trending up.