How many NSW fire safety practitioners are endorsed for each measure?
Last verified:
All figures on this page were counted directly from the FPA Australia Fire Safety Assessment Practitioners Register on that date. Methodology is set out at the bottom.
The short answer
There are 1,044 accredited Fire Safety Assessment practitioners listed for New South Wales.
Accreditation is not general. It is granted measure by measure, across 36 separate endorsement categories, and a practitioner may assess only the measures they are endorsed for.
No single measure is held by more than 70.4% of them. The least common are held by around 27%.
| Accredited FSA practitioners, NSW | 1,044 |
|---|---|
| Endorsement categories | 36 |
| Most widely held endorsement | Exit signs — 735 practitioners, 70.4% |
| Least widely held | Fire hydrant systems level 2 — 286 practitioners, 27.4% |
| Median coverage across all 36 measures | 48.8% |
The practical consequence: if your building's Fire Safety Schedule lists eight or ten measures, the chance that any one practitioner is endorsed for all of them is low. FPA Australia's own good practice guidance makes the same point — a building owner may need to engage more than one accredited practitioner for a single building.
Endorsement coverage across all 36 measures
Number of NSW-accredited Fire Safety Assessment practitioners endorsed for each measure, out of 1,044.
| Measure | Practitioners | Share of the register |
|---|---|---|
| Exit signs | 735 | 70.4% |
| Emergency lighting | 734 | 70.3% |
| Portable fire extinguishers | 632 | 60.5% |
| Fire doors | 630 | 60.3% |
| Fire hose reel systems | 620 | 59.4% |
| Lightweight construction | 620 | 59.4% |
| Fire seals protecting openings in fire-resisting components | 619 | 59.3% |
| Part 15 fire safety offences | 609 | 58.3% |
| Smoke alarms and heat alarms | 607 | 58.1% |
| Solid core doors | 591 | 56.6% |
| Smoke doors | 586 | 56.1% |
| Automatic fire detection and alarm systems (level 1) | 554 | 53.1% |
| Warning and operational signs | 547 | 52.4% |
| Access panels, doors and hoppers to fire-resisting shafts | 546 | 52.3% |
| Smoke detectors and heat detectors | 537 | 51.4% |
| Automatic fail-safe devices | 530 | 50.8% |
| Fire hydrant systems (level 1) | 525 | 50.3% |
| Fire windows | 514 | 49.2% |
| Fire shutters | 504 | 48.3% |
| Fire dampers | 499 | 47.8% |
| Fire alarm monitoring | 493 | 47.2% |
| Emergency warning and intercommunication systems | 479 | 45.9% |
| Automatic fire suppression systems (level 1) | 445 | 42.6% |
| Fire control centres and rooms | 445 | 42.6% |
| Mechanical air handling systems, including pressurisation | 445 | 42.6% |
| Wall-wetting sprinkler and drencher systems | 445 | 42.6% |
| Emergency lifts | 425 | 40.7% |
| Emergency planning | 412 | 39.5% |
| Perimeter vehicle access for emergency vehicles | 409 | 39.2% |
| Smoke dampers | 407 | 39.0% |
| Smoke and heat vents | 405 | 38.8% |
| Standby power systems | 359 | 34.4% |
| Automatic fire detection and alarm systems (level 2) | 335 | 32.1% |
| Safety curtains in proscenium openings | 333 | 31.9% |
| Automatic fire suppression systems (level 2) | 287 | 27.5% |
| Fire hydrant systems (level 2) | 286 | 27.4% |
The pattern worth noticing
Coverage does not fall away evenly. It clusters.
The measures a practitioner is most likely to hold are the visible, low-complexity ones — exit signs, emergency lighting, extinguishers, fire doors. All sit above 60%.
The measures most likely to be missing are the engineered systems — level 2 hydrants, level 2 suppression, level 2 detection, standby power, smoke dampers, mechanical air handling. All sit at or below 43%.
These are precisely the measures found in larger and more complex buildings: apartment towers, hospitals, hotels, shopping centres, warehouses with sprinkler systems. The buildings with the most measures on their schedule are the buildings least likely to be fully covered by one practitioner.
Four measures return an identical count of 445, and two return 620. That is consistent with endorsements being acquired in bundles rather than individually, which is worth keeping in mind: a practitioner endorsed for one measure in a bundle is likely endorsed for its siblings, and equally likely to be missing the whole of a bundle they never took.
Why this matters when someone signs an Annual Fire Safety Statement
Three facts sit behind the numbers above.
First, the endorsement restriction is real, not advisory. Under the Fire Protection Accreditation Scheme, an accredited individual may assess only the specific fire safety measures they have been endorsed for. An endorsement in sprinklers and hydrants implies nothing about competence in smoke detection or Part 15 assessment.
Second, the person who signs the declaration is not the person who did the assessment. For an Annual Fire Safety Statement, the declaration must be signed by the owner or their authorised agent. The assessing practitioner is expressly not the one who makes it. In a strata scheme that signature is usually the strata manager's.
Third, accreditation expires annually. A practitioner who was correctly endorsed last year may not be this year, and the register reflects the position on the day you look at it and no other day.
Put together: the person signing is attesting on the strength of an assessment by someone whose endorsement scope they may never have checked, for a building whose measure list they may never have compared against it.
There is no step anywhere in the process that performs that comparison. The regulator's mechanism is to search the register. FPA Australia's good practice guidance for NSW statements offers no verification procedure beyond clarifying the scope of work in the contract. No NSW council states that it checks.
What FPA Australia's disciplinary register shows
FPA Australia publishes a Notice of Decision Register recording every disciplinary decision made under the accreditation scheme. As at 14 September 2026 it holds 114 published decisions.
| Nature of conduct | Decisions |
|---|---|
| Completion of regulated work without the correct accreditation | 47 |
| Failure to comply with examination conditions | 17 |
| Failure to comply with the conditions of audit | 16 |
| Failure to demonstrate appropriate due diligence | 14 |
| Failure to comply with conditions of the scheme | 11 |
| Gross misconduct | 5 |
| Regulated work without correct accreditation, with fraudulent use of accreditation particulars | 3 |
| Regulated fire systems design work performed as a fire safety assessor | 1 |
51 of the 114 decisions — 45% — involve a practitioner performing work outside the accreditation they held. It is the largest single category by a factor of nearly three.
Fifty of the outcomes involved suspension, three cancellation, and one a two-year prohibition on re-applying.
This is not an inference about what might go wrong. It is the accreditation body's own published record of what has already gone wrong, and the most common form of it is exactly the mismatch the table above measures.
What this page does not tell you
Stated plainly, because a compliance figure without its limits is worth less than no figure at all.
- It is a snapshot. These counts describe the register on 14 September 2026. Accreditation renews annually and changes continuously. They will drift, and this page is refreshed quarterly.
- It says nothing about any individual. These are aggregate counts. Whether a particular practitioner holds a particular endorsement can only be answered by searching the register for that practitioner, on the day you need the answer.
- A count is not a judgement of competence. A practitioner endorsed for six measures is not worse than one endorsed for twenty. They are endorsed for different work.
- A scope gap is not a finding of non-compliance. If a practitioner's endorsements do not cover every measure on a building's schedule, that is a fact for the owner to act on — most often by engaging a second practitioner for the remaining measures. It is not a conclusion about the validity of any statement, and nothing on this page should be read as one.
- The register does not answer historical questions. Where a practitioner drops a measure, that endorsement stops appearing. The register shows what is held now, not what was held when a past statement was signed.
- A practitioner who is not found is ambiguous. The register returns the same empty result for a misspelling, for someone never accredited, and for someone whose accreditation has ended. Absence is not evidence of anything on its own.
This page is general information drawn from a public register on a stated date. It is not legal advice, not a certification, and not an assessment of any building or any person.
Methodology
- The source is the FPA Australia Fire Safety Assessment Practitioners Register, the public register of practitioners accredited to perform work prescribed under the NSW Building and Development Certifiers Act 2018.
- The total was obtained by filtering the register to the New South Wales jurisdiction with no other filter applied, and reading the result count: 1,044. The same query with no jurisdiction filter returns 1,045, so the register is effectively a New South Wales register.
- Each per-measure figure was obtained by applying the New South Wales jurisdiction filter together with a single endorsement filter, and reading the result count. Each of the 36 categories was queried separately.
- Counts that repeated across measures were re-queried against a reset unfiltered baseline to confirm the result had actually changed and was not a stale reading.
- Percentages are the per-measure count divided by 1,044, to one decimal place.
- Disciplinary figures were taken from the FPA Australia Notice of Decision Register, reading the complete published set of 114 decisions and classifying each by the register's own "nature of conduct" field. No classification was inferred.
- No practitioner is named on this page. Individual records were not extracted, retained or republished.
Corrections. If any figure here is wrong, or the register has moved since it was counted, tell us and it will be checked and amended with the date of the change recorded.
Written by Nigell Lee, Director, Reg Mon Aus Pty Ltd. Data counted from the FPA Australia public registers on 14 September 2026. Next scheduled refresh: December 2026.