From 13 February 2026, every apartment building in NSW will be required to inspect, test and service its essential fire safety systems in accordance with AS 1851-2012, unless a documented performance solution is already in place. This isn’t a new safety concept for the sector — most well-run strata schemes already commission annual fire safety statements — but the shift formalises the inspection regime and puts explicit compliance obligations on owners corporations and building owners, with fines on the table for non-compliance.
What the deadline actually requires
The NSW Government guidance is careful to separate two distinct obligations that often get conflated in strata committee discussions:
- Ongoing inspection, testing and servicing of fire safety measures under AS 1851 — this is the new mandatory regime from 13 February 2026.
- The annual fire safety statement — a separate, pre-existing obligation that verifies those measures are working and gets lodged with the local council and Fire and Rescue NSW.
Critically, the guidance is explicit that buildings do not need to upgrade existing fire systems to comply — the requirement is to properly maintain what’s already installed, unless a council order says otherwise. That’s a meaningful distinction for committees worried about unbudgeted capital works. The obligation is about rigour of maintenance, not forced capex.
Where things can get complicated is in the follow-up work. If an inspection under AS 1851 identifies a fault — a sprinkler head, smoke detector, fire door closer, or similar — the rectification work may require a specialist license holder (electrical, plumbing, or fire-specific). Committees should budget for this contingency rather than assuming the inspection fee is the only cost in play.
Where this intersects with security and BMS systems
Fire safety compliance sits in a different regulatory lane to the electronic security and access control systems Mallen typically manages, but the two are rarely fully separate in practice. Fire indicator panels frequently interface with access control systems for fail-safe door release, lift recall, and smoke door operation. If your building’s fire safety schedule includes integrated systems — for example, magnetic door holders released on alarm, or access-controlled fire stairs that must fail open — the AS 1851 testing regime will touch those integration points, and it’s worth having your security integrator present or on standby during testing to confirm the access control side behaves as designed after any fire panel firmware or configuration changes.
This is also a good prompt for committees to check that building documentation is current more broadly. A stale fire safety schedule is often symptomatic of stale documentation everywhere else too — network topology diagrams, device registers, and CCTV coverage plans included. If your last full site review predates recent works or tenancy changes, the Mallen site audit is a useful complement to a fire safety review, since it captures the security and network side of the same “what’s actually installed and is it documented” question.
Mallen’s take
This is a compliance deadline worth flagging to strata committees now rather than in January 2026. The lead time matters because accredited fire safety practitioners are a finite resource, and buildings that leave engagement to the last few weeks before the deadline risk being caught in a scheduling crunch across the industry. Strata committees should ask their strata manager directly: “who is our accredited fire safety practitioner, and are they testing to AS 1851 already?” If the answer is vague, that’s the moment to get a written schedule in place.
For buildings where fire and security systems are integrated — which is increasingly common in newer developments and in any building with electronic access control on fire-isolated stairs — it’s worth looping in your security integrator early so that any changes made during AS 1851 testing don’t inadvertently break access control fail-safe behaviour or leave doors in an unintended state. A ten-minute conversation before the test date is cheaper than a defect discovered during an actual fire event.
Original source: https://www.nsw.gov.au/housing-and-construction/strata/serving-on-a-committee/safety