What a fire safety consultant actually does

Every building above a single house in NSW carries a list of fire safety measures it must have and maintain: fire doors, exit signs, emergency lighting, smoke detection, hydrants, hose reels, sprinklers, fire-rated construction, mechanical smoke control, warning systems, and so on. That list is set when the building is approved and it follows the building for life. A fire safety consultant is the person who works out what should be on that list, checks whether the building matches it, and tells you what to do when it does not.

In practice the work falls into four streams:

• Strategy for new work. Before a DA, CDC or Construction Certificate is lodged, the consultant reviews the design against Volume One of the National Construction Code (the Building Code of Australia), identifies every fire safety provision that applies, flags where the design departs from the Deemed-to-Satisfy provisions, and prepares the fire safety strategy report and draft fire safety schedule that the certifier and, where required, Fire and Rescue NSW will rely on.
• Audits of existing buildings. A physical inspection and document review that compares the building’s approved fire safety schedule with what is installed and how it has been maintained, and produces a prioritised compliance report.
• Schedules, certificates and statements. Reviewing and correcting fire safety schedules that are wrong, incomplete or missing; coordinating the fire safety certificate needed before an Occupation Certificate; and guiding owners through the annual and supplementary fire safety statement process without the missed deadlines that attract weekly penalties.
• Upgrade and order responses. When a council or Fire and Rescue NSW issues a fire safety order, or a change of use triggers an upgrade, the consultant prepares the compliance pathway, the upgrade strategy and, where the standard provisions cannot be met, briefs a fire engineer for a performance solution.

What a consultant is not is a contractor. They do not install or service sprinklers or test extinguishers. Their job is to know what the law requires and to translate that into a document a certifier, council, insurer, buyer or court will accept. Built Smart Solutions delivers this through its Fire Safety Strategy and Reports service, alongside BCA consulting and certification, so the fire safety advice and the certificate that depends on it come from the same team.

Consultant, fire engineer, accredited practitioner, certifier, contractor: who does what

Fire safety in NSW involves five different roles, and confusing them is the root of most wasted fees. The table sets them side by side.

The line that matters most is between the consultant and the fire engineer. A consultant will tell you whether the building complies with the standard rules and what to do if it does not. A fire engineer is brought in when the answer to “what to do” is a performance solution, which is a bespoke engineered justification rather than a fix. Engaging a fire engineer for a building that only needs a compliant schedule and a repaired door closer is expensive; engaging a consultant to sign off a performance solution is not possible. A good consultant scopes the brief so the right expertise is engaged, and no more. Our Advantage tier covers expert witness work when a fire safety matter ends up in dispute.

Nine situations where you need a fire safety consultant

1. You are designing a Class 2 to 9 building. Apartments, boarding houses, offices, retail, warehouses, factories, schools, childcare, aged care, hospitals, hotels. The fire safety strategy has to be settled before the DA or CDC is lodged, because it drives the layout: exit numbers, travel distances, fire compartment sizes, stair pressurisation and sprinkler coverage all change the plan.
2. You are altering an existing commercial or residential building. Alterations trigger a compliance check of the affected parts, and under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Regulation 2021 a council can require the whole building to be brought up to current standard where the work is significant. Knowing where that threshold sits is the difference between a contained fit-out and an upgrade of the whole building.
3. You are changing the use of a building. Warehouse to gym, shop to restaurant, office to medical centre, house to childcare. A change of use changes the building’s NCC classification and, with it, the fire safety measures required. Most change-of-use projects that stall do so on fire safety. BCA consulting for change of use.
4. Your Occupation Certificate is being withheld. A certifier cannot issue an OC without a fire safety certificate covering every measure on the schedule, endorsed by an accredited practitioner. If a measure is missing, untested or uncertified, the OC stops. A consultant closes the gap. Why OCs get delayed.
5. Your annual fire safety statement cannot be signed. The accredited practitioner has found a measure that fails, or a measure on the schedule that does not exist, or a schedule that names the wrong standard. The fix is not another contractor; it is a compliance review of the schedule and the building. Annual fire safety statements explained.
6. You have received a fire safety order or notice. Councils and Fire and Rescue NSW issue orders requiring specified measures to be installed or upgraded, usually with a deadline. Responding needs a compliance pathway, not just a quote from a fire contractor, and often needs a negotiated alternative to what the order literally says.
7. You are buying, financing or insuring a commercial or strata building. A fire safety audit is standard due diligence. Lenders and insurers increasingly ask for one, and a building with a defective schedule or a history of unsigned statements is a liability the purchase price should reflect.
8. You manage a strata scheme or a portfolio. The February 2026 reforms put owners corporations on the hook for AS 1851-2012 maintenance and seven years of records. A portfolio-level compliance review tells a committee or manager which buildings are exposed before a council inspector does.
9. You are in a dispute. Defect claims, certification disagreements and insurance disputes over fire safety need independent, court-compliant expert reports. Expert witness services.

The five fire safety documents every NSW building owner should understand

Search for “fire safety compliance statement” and you will find the phrase used for several different documents. NSW’s fire safety system runs on five, and the relationship between them is where compliance either holds or falls apart.

The chain works like this. The schedule defines the obligation. The certificate proves the obligation was met at handover. The annual and supplementary statements prove it is still being met, every year, on the same schedule. A fire safety compliance statement from a consultant is what you commission when you suspect, or need to demonstrate, that one of the links in that chain is broken or that a new building will satisfy it.

What a fire safety audit in NSW involves

A fire safety audit is the consultant’s systematic comparison of what the building is required to have, what it actually has, and how well it has been looked after. It is the single most requested piece of fire safety work in Sydney because it answers the question every owner, buyer, committee and council eventually asks: is this building compliant?

Stage 1: document review

The audit starts on paper. The consultant obtains the current fire safety schedule (or discovers there is not one), the original approval and any subsequent CDCs, CCs or orders, the fire safety certificate, recent annual and supplementary statements, service and maintenance records, and any fire engineering reports or performance solutions. Inconsistencies between those documents are logged before anyone walks the site.

Stage 2: site inspection

A physical inspection of the whole building, attended in person. The consultant checks:

• Passive measures: fire-rated walls, floors and shafts; fire doors and their closers, seals and signage; penetrations through fire-rated construction (the single most common failure in Sydney apartment buildings); fire-rated service risers and cupboards.
• Egress: number and width of exits, travel distances, exit signage, emergency lighting, paths of travel kept clear, door hardware that opens without a key.
• Active measures: detection and alarm systems, occupant warning, sprinklers, hydrants, hose reels, extinguishers, fire blankets, smoke hazard management and mechanical smoke control, stair pressurisation, emergency lifts and lift recall.
• Building fire safety features: fire indicator panel location and block plan, brigade booster and access, fire control room where required, portable extinguisher coverage.
• Maintenance evidence: logbooks and service records against AS 1851-2012 frequencies, tags on equipment, defect close-out.

Stage 3: assessment and report

Each measure is assessed against the standard in the schedule (or, where there is no schedule, the standard that applied at approval and the current NCC). The report classifies findings by risk and by consequence: life safety defects that require immediate action, defects that will stop the next annual statement, schedule errors that need correction, and items that are compliant. It then sets out a prioritised pathway: what to fix, in what order, what it is likely to cost, and where a performance solution or a council application is needed rather than a repair.

What fire safety consulting costs in Sydney, and what actually moves the number

Fire safety consulting is scoped work, not a list price. Two buildings of the same size and class can differ by a factor of three on fee, almost entirely because of how much of the paper trail survives and what can be reached on the day. What follows is what actually sets the fee, and what a proposal has to state before you can compare one to another.

What a comparable proposal has to tell you

Two quotes are only comparable when both answer the same questions. Ask for these in writing before you compare a number to a number.

• What the site inspection covers, how long on site, and what is sampled rather than inspected in full.
• How many units or tenancies are included in the sample, and what happens if more access is needed.
• Whether the schedule review is included, and whether liaison with the council or the original certifier to get it reissued is included or extra.
• That fire engineering is excluded, which it almost always is. It should say so rather than leave you to find out.
• What the report contains: a risk-ranked defect register, photographs, locations and a sequenced pathway, not a list of standards.
• Whether the accredited practitioner assessments for a fire safety certificate or an annual statement are inside the scope or a separate engagement. They are a separate role.
• Turnaround in business days, from what trigger.
• A fixed fee against that scope, rather than an hourly rate with no cap.

Built Smart Solutions quotes every engagement as a fixed fee against a written scope, with the exclusions and the turnaround stated on the same page. Get a fee proposal.

Two cost points are worth putting in context. The audit fee for an apartment building is usually less than a single year’s fire contractor invoice, and a fraction of the penalty exposure for a missed or defective annual statement. And the strategy fee for a new development is almost always smaller than the cost of the first design change that the strategy would have prevented.

Fire safety strategy for new developments: DA, CDC and CC

For a new Class 2 to 9 building, fire safety is a design input, not a certification afterthought. The NCC’s fire provisions set the number and location of exits, maximum travel distances, fire compartment sizes, fire resistance levels of structure, separation from boundaries and other buildings, and the active systems required by class and rise in storeys. Every one of those shapes the floor plate.

Deemed-to-Satisfy or performance solution?

The NCC allows two routes to compliance. The Deemed-to-Satisfy (DtS) provisions are the prescriptive rules: follow them and the building complies. A performance solution is an engineered demonstration that a different approach meets the same performance requirement. The DtS route is faster, cheaper and needs no fire engineer. The performance route is used when the design cannot meet DtS (an atrium, an extended travel distance, a heritage constraint) or when a DtS requirement is disproportionate. A performance solution for a fire safety requirement in a Class 2 to 9 building must be put to Fire and Rescue NSW three times: the building owner must ensure the Fire Commissioner’s comments are sought on the performance-based design brief, the certifier must forward the plans within 7 business days of receiving the Construction Certificate application, and the certifier must request a final fire safety report at Occupation Certificate stage. Performance solutions that do not touch fire safety, such as access, energy or sound, are not referred. This regime has applied since December 2020; what changed on 1 August 2023 was separate, being certifier consultation with Fire and Rescue NSW on fire safety designs that depart from Deemed-to-Satisfy, and the standard Fire Safety Schedule template, revised again on 28 July 2025.

The consultant’s job at design stage is to keep the project on the DtS route wherever possible, and to identify the departures early enough that the fire engineer’s brief is tight and the FRNSW referral is a formality rather than a redesign. That is why the fire safety strategy is prepared before the DA, not after the CC is refused. The same logic underpins our approach to approval pathways generally.

Existing buildings: schedules, upgrades and fire safety orders

Most of a fire safety consultant’s Sydney workload is existing stock: 1960s walk-ups with no schedule at all, 1990s towers with schedules that reference superseded standards, industrial estates that have changed tenants and uses six times since approval, and post-2000 apartment buildings whose fire-rated penetrations were never sealed.

Buildings with no schedule

Buildings approved before fire safety schedules existed still carry essential fire safety measures, which must be maintained to the standard to which they were originally designed and implemented. The owner can request a schedule of those original measures from the council, and the council must provide it as soon as practicable. That request is usually a better move than waiting for an inspection or a complaint to force the issue. The consultant’s role is to establish what measures the building should reasonably have for its class and age, and to negotiate a schedule with council that is achievable rather than one that assumes a new building.

Alterations and the upgrade trigger

Alterations to an existing building must comply with the current NCC for the altered part. The Regulation gives the consent authority, on determination of a development application, power to require the existing building to be brought into total or partial conformity with the BCA. There are two triggers and only one of them involves volume: either the proposed work and building work completed or authorised in the previous three years together represent more than half the total volume of the building, or the measures in the building are inadequate to protect people in a fire, allow safe egress, or restrict the spread of fire to nearby buildings. The second trigger has no volume threshold at all, and it is the one that catches fit-outs. The consent authority must consider whether to require conformity; whether it does is discretionary. A certifier has no such power. Knowing whether a proposed fit-out will trip that requirement, and structuring the work so that it does not where the outcome would be disproportionate, is core consultant work.

Fire safety orders

A council or Fire and Rescue NSW can order an owner to install or upgrade fire safety measures where the building is unsafe or non-compliant. The order specifies measures and a timeframe. The mistake owners make is treating the order as a shopping list and sending it to a fire contractor. The right response is a compliance assessment that confirms what the order requires, identifies where the order is wrong or where an alternative would achieve the same safety outcome for less, and puts a staged program to council. Orders can be varied; the cost of not asking is paying for measures that were never needed.

The 2026 NSW fire safety reforms: what changed on 13 February

The NSW fire safety reforms were staged from February 2023. The final and most consequential stage commenced on 13 February 2026 under the Environmental Planning and Assessment (Development Certification and Fire Safety) Regulation 2021. For every building that has a fire safety schedule, or a schedule of essential measures, the position now is:

• AS 1851-2012 is mandatory, measure by measure. Inspection, testing and servicing must follow an approved performance solution where one addresses that activity, and otherwise AS 1851-2012 where the standard addresses it. The test runs activity by activity, so one building can sit partly on each. The standard does not cover everything on a schedule: emergency and exit lighting sits under AS/NZS 2293. Frequencies run monthly, quarterly, six-monthly, yearly, five-yearly, ten-yearly and, for a few items, twenty-five and thirty-yearly. The Regulation adopts the standard as in force from time to time, so a future revision applies without any further amendment. Previously the standard was best practice; now it is the law.
• Seven years of records, on site. Maintenance records in the form AS 1851-2012 prescribes must be kept at the building for at least seven years and produced on request to council or the Fire Commissioner. Logbooks, digital or paper, are now inspected.
• Penalties, and they are not one figure. Failure to maintain a measure, or to service it to the standard, carries a maximum of 600 penalty units for a corporation and 300 for an individual. Failing to keep the records is a separate offence with a maximum of 300 penalty units for a corporation and 150 for an individual. At $110 a penalty unit that is $66,000 and $33,000 respectively. Penalty notices for a late annual fire safety statement are separate again, and the amounts are set council by council rather than uniformly across NSW.
• What did not change in February 2026. Assessment by an accredited practitioner (fire safety) for each measure, and the rule that the person who installed a measure cannot assess it, were already law and are often misreported as new. The change still ahead is the requirement for an accredited person to certify newly installed measures, commencing on 13 February 2027, or 18 months after a new accreditation scheme is approved, whichever comes first.
• No upgrade obligation. The reforms do not require existing systems to be upgraded. They require them to be maintained, documented and honestly assessed. For most well-managed buildings the change is procedural; for buildings that have been “tag and go” for a decade, it is significant.

Our annual fire safety statements guide covers the statement process itself in detail. The consultant’s role under the new rules is to make sure the schedule is right, the servicing contract actually specifies AS 1851-2012, the practitioner is accredited for every measure, and the records will survive an inspection.

Common fire safety compliance mistakes in Sydney buildings

Treating the fire contractor as the compliance advisor

Contractors service what they are contracted to service. They are not engaged to tell you the schedule is wrong, the exit is blocked by a new partition, or the change of tenancy has changed the classification. That is consulting work, and it needs to be commissioned.

Signing an annual statement against a defective schedule

The statement is only as good as the schedule. A schedule that omits a required measure, lists a measure that was never installed or nominates the wrong standard exposes the owner every year it is signed.

Unsealed penetrations

Every cable, pipe and duct through a fire-rated wall or floor has to be fire-stopped to the wall’s rating. Post-construction trades (data, air conditioning, plumbing) routinely breach them and nobody reseals. It is the most common defect in Sydney apartment audits and one of the cheapest to fix if found early.

Ignoring the change-of-use trigger

A new tenant with a different use changes the NCC class, the occupant load and the fire safety requirements. Councils find out when the annual statement is lodged, or when a neighbour complains.

Bringing in the fire engineer too late, or when not needed

A performance solution commissioned after the CC is refused adds months and FRNSW review. A performance solution commissioned for a building that only needed a schedule correction adds five figures. Scope first.

No one owning the records

Since February 2026, the owner is liable for seven years of AS 1851 records. In strata schemes that means the owners corporation, in practice the committee and the manager. If the logbook lives in a contractor’s van, the building does not have records.

Assuming the OC is the end of the obligation

The fire safety certificate at OC is the start of the annual cycle, not the end of compliance. The first annual statement is due twelve months later and the standard of proof is the same.

How to engage a fire safety consultant: step by step

1. Define the trigger

   New development, alteration, change of use, withheld OC, unsigned statement, order, purchase, portfolio review or dispute. The trigger sets the scope, the deliverable and who else needs to be involved.

2. Gather the paper trail

   Fire safety schedule, approval documents, fire safety certificate, last three annual and supplementary statements, service records, any orders or council correspondence, any fire engineering reports. Gaps in this list are findings in themselves.

3. Confirm the consultant’s credentials

   Registration under the Building and Development Certifiers Act where the work touches certification, professional indemnity insurance, and experience with your building class. Ask who will attend site.

4. Get scope, fee and turnaround in writing

   A fixed fee against a defined scope, the report format, the site inspection duration, what is excluded (fire engineering, contractor works, council fees) and when you will have the report.

5. Attend the site inspection

   Or have the building manager attend. Access to risers, plant rooms, roof spaces and a sample of tenancies or units needs to be arranged in advance; a locked riser is an unassessed riser.

6. Act on the report in priority order

   Life safety defects first, then anything that will stop the next statement, then schedule corrections, then longer-term upgrades. The report should give you the sequence; follow it rather than the cheapest quote.

7. Close the loop with the statutory documents

   A corrected schedule reissued by council or the certifier, a fire safety certificate for new measures, and a maintenance contract that names AS 1851-2012 and an accredited practitioner. The audit is finished when the paper matches the building.

Choosing a fire safety consultant in Sydney: the checklist

• Registered and insured. Registration number searchable on the NSW Fair Trading register where certification is involved; current professional indemnity insurance.
• Attends site in person. No desktop-only audits of buildings the consultant has never walked.
• Reads the schedule before the building. A consultant who starts on site without the schedule is auditing against a guess.
• Independent of the contractor. The consultant should not be selling you the sprinkler upgrade they recommend.
• Knows when to brief a fire engineer, and when not to. Ask how many recent projects needed a performance solution and why.
• Reports with a defect register and a pathway. Photographs, locations, risk ranking, sequence and indicative cost, not a list of standards.
• Fixed fee and turnaround in writing. Scope, exclusions and delivery date on one page.
• Experience with your building class. Aged care is not a warehouse; a boarding house is not an office.
• Can carry through to certification. A consultant who is also a registered certifier can issue the schedule, assess the CC and issue the OC, so the advice and the approval do not contradict each other.
• A quality system behind the work. ISO 9001 certification means the audit on your building follows the same method as the last one, and the one before that.

Built Smart Solutions meets every line on that list, across Sydney and regional NSW. Meet the team or see the areas we serve.

Final verdict

Fire safety compliance in NSW is a documents problem before it is an equipment problem. The schedule, the certificate and the annual statements have to describe the same building, the servicing has to meet AS 1851-2012, and the records have to exist. A fire safety consultant is the person who makes those things true, and who tells you, early and in writing, what it will take.

Engage one at design stage for any Class 2 to 9 project, before any change of use or significant alteration, on receipt of any order, before any purchase, and the moment an OC or an annual statement stalls. In each case the consultant’s fee is small against the cost of the problem it prevents. If you would like a fixed fee for a fire safety audit, strategy report or schedule review anywhere in Sydney or NSW, tell us about the building.

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