High-Rise Fire Safety, From NBC 2016 to NBCS 2026

Current as of August 2026. This is a live transition and state-level adoption varies. Confirm against your local fire authority.

For a decade, fire and life safety in Indian buildings has meant Part 4 of the National Building Code 2016. An architect designing a tower opened Part 4 and found tables: fire resistance ratings, compartment sizes, refuge area frequency, exit widths, travel distances. Compliance meant reproducing those numbers on the drawings.

That framework is being succeeded. India is transitioning to a National Building Construction Standard, and the change is not cosmetic.

The threshold has moved

Under NBC 2016, 15 metres was the number that mattered. Above 15 metres, a building attracted the full high-rise package, wet risers, yard hydrants, automatic detection, pressurised staircases, fire lifts, specified fire resistance ratings.

Under the successor framework, the trigger for mandatory central provisions has moved to 24 metres.

This single change moves a very large share of India's mid-rise stock, roughly the G+5 to G+7 band, out of automatic central regulation. That is the most consequential line in the entire transition, and it is the one least discussed.

It does not mean those buildings have become safe. It means the obligation has shifted from a national code to state-level enforcement, and state-level enforcement is uneven. The genuine risk in this transition is a building designed to exploit the higher threshold without commissioning the equivalent protection by another route.

Our position, plainly: on a residential building between 15 and 24 metres, design to the old standard anyway. The cost delta is small. The liability delta is not.

Prescription has become performance

The second structural change is the more interesting one for anyone who designs.

Under NBC 2016, the code told you what to build. Under the successor standard, you are given outcome targets, a two-hour fire resistance rating on a separating wall, for instance, and you must demonstrate compliance through evidence: BIS-listed system test reports, recognised international equivalents such as BS 476, EN 1364, ASTM E119 or UL 263, or engineered fire safety analysis using recognised modelling tools, approved by the state fire authority on the documentation submitted.

This is how fire engineering works in most mature jurisdictions and in principle it is better. It permits solutions the tables never anticipated, and it makes the reasoning explicit.

In practice it raises the bar for who can do the work. A prescriptive code can be applied by an architect with the tables. A performance standard requires a fire engineer, test documentation, and a demonstration. Practices that treated fire safety as a compliance exercise will find they now need a consultant.

Refuge areas: the provision worth understanding

Whatever the framework, the refuge area remains the most misunderstood requirement in Indian high-rise design.

Under NBC 2016, for buildings above 24 metres, the first refuge is required at or above 24 metres, and thereafter at every 15 metres of height. The area is sized at 0.3 m² per occupant of the floors served, with a 15 m² absolute minimum.

What actually makes a refuge a refuge, and what gets missed:

• Fire-rated enclosure. Two-hour rated walls, two-hour rated door. A lobby is not a refuge. A corridor is not a refuge. An open terrace is not automatically a refuge.
• Smoke protection. Positive pressure relative to the adjacent corridor, or genuine cross-ventilation through openings on opposite faces.
• Direct access from the staircase lobby. If reaching it means crossing the floor plate, it does not work.
• Ventilation that survives a power failure. An enclosed refuge without independent ventilation becomes unusable within the hour.
• Kept clear. Refuge areas in Indian buildings are used for housekeeping storage with dispiriting regularity, and fire authorities penalise it heavily at periodic audit.

The architectural cost of doing this properly is on the order of one to two per cent of rentable area. It is the best-value one to two per cent in the building.

What has not changed

• Wet risers and yard hydrants above 15 metres.
• Compartmentation as the fundamental passive strategy, containing a fire in the zone where it started for a specified duration, rather than relying on it being extinguished.
• The distinction between active and passive protection, and the fact that passive protection is the one that works when the power is out.
• Mixed-use analysis: occupancy by occupancy, with the more restrictive requirement governing where they overlap. Residential over retail is the common Indian case and it is governed by the retail requirement in the zones where they meet.
• The primacy of the local fire NOC. Code values are minimums. State Fire Services Acts and local NOC conditions routinely impose stricter limits, and the NOC is what you actually have to satisfy.

What to do about it

1. Read the NOC conditions, not just the code. The code is the floor. The NOC is the requirement.
2. On anything between 15 and 24 metres, design to the stricter standard and record that you chose to.
3. Engage a fire consultant at schematic stage, not at submission. Under a performance framework, the evidence has to be designed for, not assembled afterwards.
4. Protect the refuge area from the value-engineering conversation. It will come up. It is the wrong place to save money.
5. Assume state adoption will be uneven and slow. Design for the stricter of the two frameworks until your state's position is settled.

The transition is, on balance, an improvement. But a code that asks you to demonstrate a result rather than copy a table only produces safer buildings if someone is actually doing the demonstrating.