How to Write a Fire Door Schedule — A Practical Guide for Architects and Consultants

A door schedule is the working document that connects every opening on a set of drawings to the specific product, rating and hardware needed to buy, install and certify it correctly. For fire doors specifically, the schedule carries additional weight: it's often the primary evidence, alongside the fire strategy report, that a building's compartmentation intent has actually been translated into a buildable, procurable specification — and gaps or inconsistencies in the schedule are a common source of on-site compliance problems.

What a Fire Door Schedule Needs to Capture

At minimum, a fire door schedule should reference each door by a unique identifier matching the drawings, and record: the required fire resistance rating (and smoke rating, where applicable) taken from the fire strategy; the door leaf material and finish; frame material and profile; glazing (if any) with its own matched fire classification; hardware specification (hinges, closer, lock/latch, any access control integration); acoustic rating where relevant; and the specific third-party certification scheme the doorset will be supplied under. Each of these needs to trace back to a single coherent, tested configuration — a schedule that specifies a rating and a set of hardware independently, without confirming they're certified together, has effectively specified two things that may not actually be compatible.

Tracing Requirements Back to the Fire Strategy

The rating entered against each door in the schedule should be directly traceable to the project's fire strategy report — not estimated or copied from a similar project. A door schedule produced without this direct linkage is one of the most common sources of late-stage compliance findings, particularly on larger projects where the schedule may be developed by a different consultant to the one who wrote the fire strategy, and where the connection between the two documents isn't always explicitly cross-referenced.

Coordinating Hardware and Access Control

Where fire doors also carry access control (electronic locks, card readers, maglocks), the schedule needs to specifically confirm that the access control hardware being specified is compatible with, and doesn't compromise, the door's fire certification — a maglock or strike that wasn't part of the tested configuration is exactly the kind of hardware substitution that can quietly void a door's rating, discussed in more detail in our article on fire door hardware. This coordination point is worth flagging explicitly in the schedule rather than assuming the security consultant and fire door supplier will resolve it independently.

Common Gaps to Check For

• —Doors with a fire rating specified but no corresponding smoke rating, on doors that sit on a protected escape route where smoke control matters as much as fire resistance.
• —Glazed doors where the vision panel glazing's own classification isn't separately confirmed against the leaf's overall rating.
• —Access-controlled fire doors where the electronic hardware's compatibility with the door's fire certification hasn't been explicitly checked.
• —Doors scheduled by rating alone, without reference to which specific certification scheme (and therefore which specific tested configuration) the doorset will be supplied under.
• —Acoustic requirements noted separately in a room data sheet but not cross-referenced into the door schedule itself, risking a door that meets its fire rating but not the acoustic performance the room actually needs.

BÖLDT's technical team can work directly from a project's fire strategy and door schedule to confirm a coherent, certified specification across an entire project, rather than reconciling rating and hardware choices after the fact.