SFG20 is the recognised industry standard for building maintenance in the UK, setting out how often plant and building services should be maintained and what each visit should involve. This guide explains what it is, why it matters for compliance, and how a planned maintenance contract built on it actually works.
SFG20 is a library of standard maintenance task schedules for building services, published by the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA). Each schedule describes a specific asset type — a boiler, an air handling unit, a fire damper, an emergency lighting system — and sets out the maintenance tasks it needs, how often they should be carried out, and the skill level required to do them.
Its purpose is to answer a deceptively simple question: what does 'properly maintained' actually mean for this asset? Rather than every contractor inventing their own regime, SFG20 gives building owners, facilities managers and maintenance providers a common, defensible benchmark that reflects legislation, British Standards and manufacturer good practice.
Schedules are graded by criticality. Statutory tasks are those required by law, such as gas safety checks or fixed wiring inspection. Others are mandatory under industry requirements, important for keeping equipment running as intended, or discretionary. This grading lets a maintenance regime be tuned to a building's risk profile and budget without ever cutting the tasks the law requires.
The first reason is statutory compliance. Duty holders under legislation such as the Health and Safety at Work Act, the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order and the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations must be able to show that building services are maintained in a safe condition. Basing a maintenance regime on SFG20 gives that obligation a recognised, auditable structure.
The second is asset life and cost. Maintenance done to a defined standard, at defined intervals, keeps plant running efficiently and catches deterioration before it becomes failure. Over the life of a boiler plant room or an air conditioning installation, that is the difference between planned replacement on your terms and emergency replacement on the asset's terms.
The third is defensibility. If an incident occurs — a fire, a legionella outbreak, an electrical failure — the first questions asked will be about the maintenance regime and its records. A regime mapped to SFG20, with completed task schedules and dated records for every asset, is evidence that the duty holder took their obligations seriously. An ad hoc regime with patchy paperwork is the opposite.
It starts with an asset register. A surveyor walks the building and records every maintainable asset: boilers, pumps, AHUs, chillers, distribution boards, emergency lighting, fire dampers, water systems and so on, each with its location, make and condition. Without an accurate register, no maintenance regime can be complete — you cannot maintain what you have not listed.
Each asset is then matched to its SFG20 task schedule, which generates a planned preventative maintenance (PPM) calendar for the year: which engineer visits when, what they do on each visit, and which tasks are statutory rather than discretionary. Statutory tasks are locked in; the rest can be tuned to the building's criticality and the client's budget.
Every visit produces a record: the tasks completed against the schedule, readings and test results, defects found, and recommendations. Over time this builds a maintenance history for every asset — the documentation a landlord, managing agent or duty holder needs for insurers, fire risk assessors and, if it ever comes to it, the HSE.
A compliance-led maintenance regime for a commercial building or residential block typically covers fixed wire testing (EICR) to BS 7671, emergency lighting testing to BS 5266, fire detection and alarm servicing to BS 5839, fire damper drop testing to BS 9999, gas safety inspection of plant and appliances, water hygiene monitoring under the L8 approved code of practice, and F-Gas leak checks on air conditioning systems.
The exact list depends on the building. A commercial kitchen adds ductwork cleaning to TR19 Grease; a building with lifting equipment adds LOLER thorough examination; a block of flats adds obligations under the Fire Safety Order and, for taller buildings, the Building Safety Act. The asset register and SFG20 mapping are what turn that general picture into a specific, complete compliance calendar for one building.
The framing matters: these are standards and legal duties that a competent maintenance provider works to as method. What a duty holder should look for is a contractor whose engineers carry out these tasks to the relevant British Standards and codes of practice, and whose records prove it.
Planned maintenance reduces failures; it does not eliminate them. Components fail, weather intervenes, and buildings get used in ways designers never intended. A complete maintenance arrangement therefore pairs the SFG20-based PPM programme with reactive cover: a route to report a fault at any hour, an agreed response time, and engineers who can make safe first and repair second.
The two feed each other. Reactive callouts reveal assets that are failing more often than they should, which prompts a review of their PPM frequency or a recommendation to replace. Conversely, a well-run PPM programme drives reactive volume down over time, because faults are caught at service visits rather than discovered at failure.
AMPM delivers both under one contract: SFG20-aligned planned maintenance with 24-hour, 365-day reactive cover across London and the South East, covering mechanical, electrical, public health and building fabric — hard FM under a single point of responsibility.
No. SFG20 itself is an industry standard, not legislation. However, many of the tasks within it are statutory — gas safety checks, fixed wire inspection, fire system testing — and duty holders are legally required to keep building services in a safe, maintained condition. Working to SFG20 is the widely accepted way of demonstrating that those duties are being met.
SFG20 is the standard: a library of task schedules defining what maintenance each asset type needs and how often. A PPM (planned preventative maintenance) contract is the service built on it: an asset register for your building, a visit calendar generated from the relevant schedules, engineers carrying out the tasks, and records of everything done. SFG20 defines the work; the contract delivers it.
SFG20 is primarily a building services standard, focused on mechanical, electrical and public health assets. Fabric items such as roofing, facades, doors and drainage need their own inspection and maintenance regime alongside it. A hard FM provider that self-delivers both M&E and fabric can run the two as a single programme with one set of records.