How to check your fire safety practitioner

In New South Wales, an Annual Fire Safety Statement declares that each essential fire safety measure has been assessed by an accredited practitioner (fire safety) — s88(1)(a) of the Environmental Planning and Assessment (Development Certification and Fire Safety) Regulation 2021. That practitioner's accreditation is granted measure by measure, not in general.

You can identify them, because s92(1)(b)(xi) requires the statement to carry the name, address and telephone number of the accredited practitioner who assessed the measures.

That means the useful question is not "is this person accredited?" It is "is this person accredited for the specific measures my building has?"

Almost nobody asks the second question. Here is how to answer it in about ten minutes.

Before you start: get your Fire Safety Schedule

You cannot check scope without knowing what you are checking against.

The Fire Safety Schedule is the document that lists the essential fire safety measures your building is required to have, and the standard each must meet. It is dealt with at s78 and s79 of the Environmental Planning and Assessment (Development Certification and Fire Safety) Regulation 2021, and it is issued with the building's development approval or construction certificate. A new mandatory template took effect on 28 July 2025, so a recently issued schedule may look different from an older one.

You are entitled to expect it to be attached: s92(2) requires a fire safety statement to be accompanied by the building's fire safety schedule.

Where to find it:

• Attached to your last Annual Fire Safety Statement
• In the building's compliance file, held by the owner, the strata manager or the facility manager
• From the consent authority, usually the local council, which holds the approval documents

If you cannot find it, stop and get it before going further. A check against a half-remembered list of measures is not a check.

One thing worth knowing: a building approved before around 1988 that has never been altered may have no fire safety schedule and no annual statement obligation at all. If that describes your building, confirm it with the council rather than assuming either way.

Step 1 — Look the practitioner up on the accreditation register

FPA Australia publishes the Fire Safety Assessment Practitioners Register, the public register of individuals accredited to perform work prescribed under the NSW Building and Development Certifiers Act 2018.

You can search it by:

• Accreditation number — the most reliable, and it appears on the statement they signed
• Surname or first name
• Company name
• Jurisdiction, and by individual endorsement

Search by accreditation number if you have it. Names are entered inconsistently and a common surname returns a long list.

The result shows the practitioner's name, employer, suburb, accreditation number, the jurisdictions the register lists against them, and a status.

Step 2 — Open the record and read the endorsements

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the only one that answers the real question.

Expanding a practitioner's record reveals the specific measures they are endorsed to assess. There are 36 endorsement categories in the scheme, covering everything from exit signs and fire doors to smoke dampers, mechanical air handling and level 2 hydrant systems.

Put that list beside your Fire Safety Schedule and compare them, line by line.

Expect gaps. They are normal. Across the 1,044 practitioners accredited in NSW, no single measure is held by more than 70%, and the median measure is held by fewer than half. The engineered systems found in larger buildings — level 2 suppression, level 2 hydrants, standby power, smoke dampers, mechanical air handling — are held by between a quarter and 43% of the register.

FPA Australia's own good practice guidance makes the same point: a building owner may legitimately need to engage more than one accredited practitioner for a single building.

A gap is a fact about scope, not a verdict on anyone's work. It means somebody else needs to assess that measure. It does not mean your practitioner has done anything wrong.

Step 3 — Check the disciplinary register too

This is the step that is missing from every set of instructions we have seen, including Google's.

FPA Australia publishes a second, separate register: the Notice of Decision Register, recording every disciplinary decision made under the accreditation scheme. As at 14 September 2026 it holds 114 published decisions, each showing the practitioner's name, accreditation number, any suspension end date, the nature of the conduct, a summary and the outcome.

It matters because the accreditation register and the disciplinary register do not tell you the same thing, and checking only the first can leave you with a false sense of having checked.

The largest single category of published decisions — 47 of the 114, and 51 once related categories are included — is completion of regulated work without the correct accreditation. That is 45% of every disciplinary decision the scheme has published, and it is precisely the scope mismatch that step 2 is designed to catch.

Step 4 — Note the date you checked

Accreditation is valid for one year and must be renewed annually, so the register tells you the position on the day you read it and no other day.

Write down what you searched, what the register returned, and the date. If you are the person signing the declaration, that note is the only evidence you performed the check at all.

How to read the result

The register gives you one of four outcomes, and they do not all mean what they appear to mean.

The practitioner is listed, status Current, endorsements cover every measure

The straightforward case. Record the date and the accreditation number, and note the expiry — you will need to check again before next year's statement.

The practitioner is listed, status Current, but some measures are not covered

The common case, and the reason to do this at all. The measures outside their endorsement need to be assessed by someone who holds them. Raise it with whoever engaged the practitioner, well before the statement is due, because arranging a second assessor takes time.

The practitioner is listed as Not Current

The register marks practitioners who have not renewed or transitioned by their deadline. A record shown as Not Current is not a current accreditation. Opening the record shows the date the accreditation ceased to be current.

The practitioner is not found at all

This is the result that misleads people, because the register returns exactly the same empty response — "no data found" — in four completely different situations:

1. The name or number was mistyped, or the name is recorded differently on the register
2. The person has never held this accreditation
3. The accreditation has lapsed and the record has gone
4. The accreditation was suspended, cancelled or terminated

Absence proves nothing on its own. Before concluding anything, search again by accreditation number rather than name, and check the Notice of Decision Register, which is where outcome 4 is recorded and where the accreditation register is silent.

What this check cannot tell you

• It cannot tell you what someone was endorsed for in the past. Where a practitioner drops a measure, that endorsement stops appearing on the register. If you need to know whether a practitioner held a particular measure when they signed a statement in a previous year, the register cannot answer it — FPA Australia asks that you contact them directly for that.
• It cannot tell you whether the work was done well. Accreditation is a scope boundary, not a quality rating.
• It cannot tell you whether your statement is valid. That is a legal conclusion, and it is not one a register lookup can support. If a check raises a concern, take advice.

Why the person signing should care

The statement is issued by or on behalf of the owner — s88(1) — and FPA Australia's good practice guidance states that the assessing practitioner must not make the owner's declaration. In a strata scheme that signature is usually the strata manager's; in a commercial building, the owner's or the facility manager's.

So the person carrying the consequences of the declaration is, in almost every case, not the person who did the work and not the person whose accreditation the whole thing depends on.

The duty to give the statement to council sits with the owner — s89(1), maximum 800 penalty units for a corporation and 400 for an individual, which at the current A$110 penalty unit is A$88,000 and A$44,000 — and s89(3) makes failure to give it on time a separate offence for each week the failure continues. Those are maximums on prosecution, not routine outcomes. Councils also issue on-the-spot penalties; Inner West Council, as one published example, lists A$1,000 to A$4,000 per week for a late or incomplete statement. Check your own council's schedule.

Two timing rules worth knowing while you are at it: the assessment and inspection must have been carried out within the 3 months before the statement is issued — s88(2) — and the statement is due within 12 months of the previous one being given to council — s89(2).

Ten minutes and two registers is a low price for the only evidence that the check was ever made.

Sources

• FPA Australia, Fire Safety Assessment Practitioners Register — the public accreditation register. Counts on this page were read from it on 14 September 2026.
• FPA Australia, Notice of Decision Register — the public disciplinary register. 114 decisions as at 14 September 2026.
• Environmental Planning and Assessment (Development Certification and Fire Safety) Regulation 2021 — s78, s79, s88, s89, s92. Read on legislation.nsw.gov.au, 14 September 2026.
• FPA Australia, Good Practice Guide GPG-04, Fire Safety Statements — New South Wales, version 3, August 2024 — on multiple practitioners per building, and on who makes the declaration.
• NSW Building and Development Certifiers Act 2018 — the Act under which the prescribed work sits, as identified on the register itself.
• Building Commission NSW — the mandatory Fire Safety Schedule template, effective 28 July 2025.

This page is general information about a public register, read on a stated date. It is not legal advice, not a certification, and not an assessment of any building or any person. No practitioner is named on this page.

Written by Nigell Lee, Director, Reg Mon Aus Pty Ltd. Last verified 14 September 2026.