PAS 79 fire risk assessment software: what to look for
If you carry out fire risk assessments for a living, PAS 79 is probably the shape your reports already take. It is the recommended methodology most UK assessors work to, and “does it follow PAS 79” is one of the first questions people ask about assessment software.
It is also a question that is easy to answer badly, because PAS 79 is not one document any more.
PAS 79 is guidance, not law
Worth saying plainly, because a lot of marketing copy blurs it. The legal duty comes from the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which requires a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment. It does not name PAS 79 or any other methodology.
What PAS 79 gives you is a defensible framework. Following it is a well-recognised way of demonstrating that an assessment was suitable and sufficient, which matters when someone reviews your work after an incident.
Two things follow from that. There is no such thing as a PAS 79 certified assessment, so treat any software claiming certification with suspicion. And no tool can make an assessment compliant on its own. Competence sits with the assessor, and the software’s job is to stay out of the way.
PAS 79-1 and PAS 79-2 are not the same story
Worth getting straight, because plenty of guidance written about “PAS 79” predates the split and still reads as though it is one document.
PAS 79:2012 was split in 2020 into two parts:
- PAS 79-1:2020, covering premises other than housing. Offices, retail, industrial, hospitality, healthcare and so on. This remains the current recommended methodology for non-domestic premises.
- PAS 79-2:2020, covering housing. This one has been replaced by BS 9792:2025, the first full British Standard for fire risk assessment in housing, which became the benchmark on 31 August 2025.
So if you assess a mixed portfolio, you are now working to two different documents depending on the building. A vendor still saying “PAS 79” flatly across housing and commercial has not updated their thinking since 2020, and quite possibly not since 2012. It is a reasonable proxy for how closely they follow the sector.
We covered what changed in the housing standard in the biggest changes to residential fire risk assessments. To their credit, several of the assessor-focused tools do handle both parts properly, which we go through in our comparison of UK fire risk assessment software.
The nine steps, and what they mean for software
PAS 79-1 sets the methodology out as nine steps. Paraphrased:
- Gather information about the building, its use, its processes and its occupants
- Identify the fire hazards and the means of removing or controlling them
- Assess the likelihood of a fire starting
- Determine the fire protection measures already in place
- Gather information on fire safety management arrangements
- Assess the likely consequences for people if a fire occurs
- Form an overall evaluation of the fire risk
- Produce and document a prioritised action plan
- Set the review period and record the significant findings
Read that list as a software specification and it tells you what to look for.
Steps 2, 4 and 5 are the assessment’s spine. Hazards, protection, management. If a tool’s question structure does not visibly separate those three, it is not built on PAS 79, whatever the website says. That structure should also survive into the report, so a reader can find their way around it.
Step 7 needs the right vocabulary. PAS 79 rates risk as trivial, tolerable, moderate, substantial or intolerable. Software that invents its own red/amber/green scale is making your report harder to defend, not easier.
Step 8 is where the time goes. Writing remedial actions is the slowest part of the job and the part most software leaves you to do by hand in a text box. Prioritisation, timescales and ownership all belong to the assessor, but the drafting does not have to.
Step 9 is the one to check hardest. Review periods and significant findings are the steps vendors most often skip, because they are unglamorous.
What to check before you buy
Ask for a trial and produce one real report end to end. Then check:
- Does the question structure separate hazards, protection and management?
- Can you record limitations, the things you could not inspect and why? An assessment without them is incomplete, and it is a common gap.
- Does the risk vocabulary match PAS 79, and can you overrule whatever the software suggests?
- Does the action plan carry priority, timescale and owner, and can you edit all three?
- Does the report number findings consistently, so an action traces back to the question that raised it?
- Does it know the difference between a housing assessment and a commercial one?
- Can you get your data out?
That last one is not a PAS 79 question, but it is the one people regret not asking.
Where Assura Safety fits
Assura Safety is built around that structure rather than retrofitted to it. The base assessment is roughly 200 questions across fire hazards and control, protection and management, with hierarchical numbering carried through to the PDF, so finding 1.3.2 in the report is the question you answered on site.
Risk uses the PAS 79 wording. The app suggests an overall rating from the non-compliances you record, and the assessor decides whether that is right. For every non-compliance it drafts a remedial action grounded in your own legislation library and cites the regulation or standard behind it, with priority, timescale and assignee all editable. For housing you classify the work as BS 9792 Type 1 to 4, and high-rise residential buildings pull in the Building Safety Act questions automatically.
Two things it does not do yet, since this page is about asking vendors hard questions. There is no dedicated limitations field, so caveats currently go in the assessment narrative rather than a structured section. And the app does not yet track review dates, which is step 9. Both are on the roadmap, and neither is something you should have to discover after buying.
If you assess buildings for a living and want to see whether the structure matches how you already work, have a look at the features or get in touch.
