What BS 5266 is

BS 5266-1 is the British Standard for emergency escape lighting in premises. It defines design, installation, commissioning, testing and certification requirements for the lighting that illuminates escape routes when the normal supply fails. It is the standard that fire risk assessors, building control officers and insurers expect you to be working to.

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 places the duty for fire safety — including emergency lighting — on the responsible person (usually the building owner, occupier or employer). BS 5266-1 is how you discharge that duty in practice.

Two tests, two intervals

The testing requirement breaks into two routines:

Monthly function test

A brief functional test of every emergency fitting in the premises:

Simulate a mains failure (via a key-operated test switch on the local circuit, or a central test panel)
Verify each emergency fitting illuminates correctly
Restore mains and check the fitting returns to charge
Record the test in the logbook

Time on site: 30 to 60 minutes for a typical office; longer for multi-floor or multi-zone premises. The point of the monthly test is to catch failed lamps and dead batteries early, not to discharge the battery system.

Annual full-duration test

The annual test discharges the battery for the full rated duration (one or three hours) to prove the system can sustain emergency operation for the design period:

Isolate the mains to the emergency lighting circuit
Time the duration each fitting stays illuminated
Identify any fittings that fail before the rated duration
Restore mains, verify recharge, record the result

A three-hour test is typically scheduled overnight or out of hours, because the building should ideally not be occupied during the discharge period. For 24/7 premises we test in zones so emergency lighting remains live across the rest of the building.

What “rated duration” means

The duration is set at design time and stamped on each fitting. The two common ratings are:

One hour — acceptable only where the premises can be fully evacuated and not re-occupied during the same outage (small offices, single-storey retail with quick exit routes)
Three hours — the default for most commercial premises, mandatory for premises that may be re-occupied during a long supply outage (hotels, places of public assembly, multi-storey offices)

If you are unsure of the duration on your premises, it is recorded on the BS 5266-1 commissioning certificate from the original install.

The logbook

BS 5266-1 requires a dedicated emergency-lighting logbook held on site, signed at each test. The logbook records:

Premises name and address
Date of system commissioning
Drawings showing the location of every fitting
Maintenance records, including monthly tests and annual full-duration tests
Faults found and remedial actions taken
Names of competent persons carrying out tests

We hold a paper logbook on site at every PPM client and a PDF mirror in our compliance system. If your fire risk assessor or insurer asks to see it, it should be in the building, available within five minutes.

What “fail” means

A fitting can fail an emergency-lighting test in several ways:

Does not illuminate on mains failure — usually a dead battery, occasionally a faulty inverter
Illuminates but does not sustain rated duration — battery degraded, typically after 4 to 6 years of service
Visible lamp fault — failed LED or fluorescent tube
Physical damage — broken lens, missing fitting, water ingress

A failed annual test does not automatically make the premises unsafe, but it must be addressed and recorded before the next fire risk assessment. We document the failure, replace or repair the affected fittings, and re-test.

When to replace, not repair

Most fluorescent emergency fittings reach end-of-life at 4 to 6 years. Once you are repeatedly replacing batteries or lamps in the same fitting, it is usually more cost-effective — and more compliant going forward — to replace the fitting with a new LED unit.

LED emergency fittings:

Last 50,000 hours plus, vs ~15,000 for fluorescent
Draw a fraction of the battery load, so the battery lasts longer
Are available as self-test units that flag faults locally, reducing logbook overhead
Cost more up-front, but typically pay back inside 5 years on maintenance savings alone

A practical strategy: replace fittings on the annual test cycle. If a fitting fails this year and is more than 4 years old, replace it rather than repair.

Common BS 5266 mistakes

The most common compliance gaps we see on first inspections:

No logbook — the responsible person cannot produce a test record
Test switch missing or inaccessible — the system was installed without a permanent mains-isolation test mechanism
Fittings in the wrong location — escape route changed (new partition walls, new desk layout) but the emergency lighting was not re-coordinated
Missing high-risk-task fittings — kitchens, plantrooms and DT workshops require dedicated emergency lighting that often gets omitted
Annual test never carried out — only monthly function tests on the record

If any of these apply, the next compliance step is a BS 5266-1 design audit before the next round of testing.

What we deliver

For ongoing BS 5266 compliance under a PPM contract we deliver:

Monthly function tests, logged at each visit
Annual full-duration tests with photographic evidence
Repair or replacement of failed fittings within agreed SLA
Logbook held on site and PDF mirror in your file
Year-on-year compliance summary in the annual report

BS 5266 emergency lighting testing explained