Fire protection documentation — what the requirement means

Fire protection documentation (brandskyddsdokumentation) describes how a building's fire protection is designed and why. The requirement comes from the building regulations — since 1 July 2025 from Boverket's regulations and general recommendations on safety in the event of fire in buildings, BFS 2024:7, which replaced the fire safety chapter of BBR. The transition period during which developers could choose between the old and the new rules ended on 30 June 2026.

It is a completely different document, with a completely different legal basis, from systematic fire safety work.

What the regulation says

BFS 2024:7 Section 20 states that fire protection documentation must be produced and cover at least

1. the preconditions for the fire protection,
2. the design of the fire protection, and
3. which parts of the fire protection have been verified through analytical design.

The requirement applies if the works require a permit or a notification and it is not unnecessary. Both conditions matter. The first ties the requirement to a building measure — it arises when something is built or altered, not continuously during management. The second leaves room to abstain for buildings covered only to a very limited extent by the fire safety requirements of the building rules.

The difference from SBA

The two are confused constantly, and they answer different questions.

	Fire protection documentation	Systematic fire safety work
Legal basis	Building regulations, BFS 2024:7	Civil Protection Act (2003:778)
Arises	On construction or alteration requiring permit or notification	Continuously, for the building's whole life
Answers	How the fire protection is designed and why	That it keeps working
Reviewed by	The building committee during the permit process	The fire and rescue service at inspection

The relationship between them is one-directional and practical: the documentation is the source material the SBA works on. Without it nobody knows where the fire compartment boundaries run, which doors are fire-rated, or why a particular escape route is sized as it is — and then self-monitoring becomes a walk-through without an answer key.

Do we need fire protection documentation for a building from 1965?

No. The requirement is triggered by a building measure requiring a permit or notification, and there is no duty to produce documentation retrospectively for a building erected when the requirement did not exist. Many older buildings lack it entirely, and that is not in itself a breach of the building rules.

Responsibility under the Civil Protection Act applies regardless of the building's age, however. You must maintain reasonable fire protection in the 1965 building too — you just must not do it with a document you are not required to hold.

In practice, portfolios with older buildings often produce a fire protection description or an inventory of their own accord. That is not the same thing as fire protection documentation under the building rules and should not be called that, but it serves the same function as source material for the SBA and for future alterations.

When it is missing where it should exist

Most common on acquisition: the building is from 2008, documentation was produced then, and nobody knows where it is. Three places to look before giving up:

1. The municipal building permit archive — the documentation is generally part of the papers for the final certificate.
2. The fire consultant engaged on the project.
3. The contractor's as-built documentation from the project.

If it cannot be found, the alternative is an inventory of the existing fire protection. It costs, but the cost appears anyway at the next alteration — a change to a building whose compartmentation nobody knows is designed more expensively, because the designer has to assume the worst.

See compliance when buying property for the documents worth requesting before completion rather than after.

Keep the three documents apart

A portfolio typically holds three different fire documents, and confusing them is why one of them is always missing:

• The fire protection documentation — the building rules' description of the design, from construction.
• The SBA documentation — organisation, routines, self-monitoring, from management.
• Inspection reports from the fire and rescue service — the authority's observations, from supervision.

Emphyx handles the second of the three. Inspection rounds and fire safety provide checklists, deviations with photos and history per building. We produce no fire protection documentation, perform no fire engineering design and replace no fire consultant.