Smoke and carbon monoxide alarm rules for landlords in England

Gas safety has a certificate and electrics have a report, but alarms have nothing. The Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (England) Regulations 2015, amended from 1 October 2022, create real duties with real penalties but no standard document proving you met them. The government’s Q&A booklet for landlords and tenants sets out the rules. This page is about the part it leaves to you, which is the record.

The duties, briefly

• Smoke: at least one alarm on every storey where any room is used as living accommodation.
• Carbon monoxide: an alarm in any room used as living accommodation containing a fixed combustion appliance such as a boiler, wood burner or gas fire, with gas cookers excluded.
• At the start of a tenancy: the landlord must make sure every alarm is working on the day a new tenancy begins.
• Repairs: since October 2022, once a landlord is informed an alarm is faulty, it must be repaired or replaced as soon as reasonably practicable. A tenant’s report starts a clock.
• Penalty: the local housing authority enforces, with a penalty charge of up to £5,000 per breach.
• Standards: the guidance recommends BS 5839-6 compliant smoke alarms and BS 50291 compliant CO alarms, ideally sealed-battery, ceiling-mounted in circulation spaces (smoke) and at head height near the appliance (CO).

Which rooms need a carbon monoxide alarm?

The test is the appliance, not the room type. Any room used as living accommodation that contains a fixed combustion appliance needs its own alarm: the room with the boiler, a lounge with a gas fire or wood-burning stove, a kitchen with an oil-fired range. A gas cooker on its own does not trigger the duty. A room with two appliances needs one alarm; two rooms with one appliance each need two. The guidance puts the alarm at head height, a short distance from the appliance, rather than on the ceiling where a smoke alarm goes, because carbon monoxide mixes with room air instead of rising. If you are unsure whether something counts as a fixed combustion appliance, the booklet linked above answers the common cases, and a Gas Safe engineer can confirm the unusual ones during the annual check.

Who tests the alarms during a tenancy?

The regulations put the day-one check on the landlord: on the first day of a new tenancy the alarms must be shown to work, which is why the check-in inventory should record the test. From then on the guidance expects tenants to test the alarms regularly and to tell the landlord about any fault, and the landlord to repair or replace the alarm as soon as reasonably practicable once told. The tenant’s report is the moment the duty attaches, so the date you were told matters as much as the date you fixed it. Nothing in the regulations requires a periodic professional test, but recording a test at each inspection costs nothing and closes the gap between tenancies.

Do smoke and carbon monoxide alarms have an expiry date?

Not in the regulations, which say nothing about replacement intervals. The alarms themselves do: a sealed alarm carries a manufacturer’s replace-by date on its case, because the sensor degrades over time and the unit stops being reliable long before it stops beeping. The National Fire Chiefs Council recommends replacing smoke alarms every ten years, and manufacturers give carbon monoxide alarms a similar or shorter service life, usually printed on the unit. None of this is statutory; it is the guidance a council or an insurer would expect a reasonable landlord to have followed. The practical rule is to treat the replace-by date exactly like a certificate expiry: record it when the alarm is fitted, and replace the alarm before it passes.

No certificate means the record is the evidence

If a council asks, or a claim is made after an incident, the question is “show us”, and with no certificate regime what you can show is whatever you kept. It is worth holding the following for every property:

• What is installed where: a simple list, storey by storey for smoke and room by room for CO, with the alarm type and whether it is sealed-battery or mains.
• That they worked at the start of the tenancy: the check-in record or inventory noting alarms tested, with the date.
• Every fault report and what happened next: when the tenant told you, when it was fixed, and by whom. The 2022 amendment makes this the obligation most likely to be tested, because it has a start time (the report) and an end time (the fix).
• Replacement dates: the replace-by date of every sealed alarm, and a ten-year-old alarm is a finding waiting to happen.

Where this lives in Verixad

Alarms fit the machinery that already exists. An inspection records what is installed and tested, with per-item condition. A tenant’s fault report arrives through the repair link and becomes a job with its dates on the record. Because you can add your own document types alongside the statutory ones, an alarm record filed with its replace-by date as the expiry date gets the same live status and the same reminders as a gas certificate. The property’s timeline then holds the whole story of installation, testing, the report and the fix, which is the sequence an enforcement question walks through. None of it is a certificate, because the law provides none, but the dated record stands in for one.

England-specific, and general information rather than legal advice. The official guidance covers the details and edge cases.

Every other landlord obligation and its maximum penalty is on one page, and the certificate checklist covers the documents that do exist. The free compliance audit shows where a portfolio’s recorded evidence has gaps, alarms included.