FENSA Registered Installer
It is not a badge. It is a Building Regulations route with a paper trail
What FENSA actually is
Replacement windows and doors are notifiable work under Building Regulations. Thermal performance, safety glazing, means of escape, ventilation — all of it has to be signed off, and there are only two ways to do that. Either building control inspects the job and charges the homeowner for the privilege, or the installer belongs to a competent person scheme and self-certifies.
FENSA — the Fenestration Self-Assessment scheme — is the largest of those schemes. Registration costs around £450 a year, renewing annually, and in exchange you gain the legal ability to sign off your own installations and issue the customer a FENSA certificate.
That certificate is the part most installers undersell. It is not a marketing asset. It is a document the homeowner’s solicitor will ask for when they sell the house, sometimes fifteen years later, and its absence is a live problem at that point — the buyer’s side will want either a retrospective indemnity policy or a building control regularisation certificate before the sale completes.
So the honest description of what you are selling is not “we are accredited”. It is: when you sell this house, the paperwork will be there.
What you need to get it
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Installer qualifications.
NVQ Level 2 in Installing Windows and Doors, City & Guilds 6129, or demonstrable equivalent competence assessed on your work. Evidence: qualification certificates, or an on-site assessment.
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Public liability insurance.
A minimum of £2m, and specifically covering fenestration installation — a general trade policy is not automatically enough. Evidence: your insurance schedule.
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A deposit protection arrangement.
FENSA requires members to offer insurance-backed deposit protection to customers, arranged through an approved provider. Evidence: confirmation from the provider.
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A technical review.
FENSA assesses your application and may inspect recent installations, checking both quality and your understanding of thermal performance requirements. Evidence: completed application, with recent jobs available to look at.
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The annual fee.
Typically £350 to £600 depending on the size of the company. Evidence: payment confirmation.
What you have to keep doing
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Issue a certificate for every notifiable installation, within 30 days.
This is the obligation that actually bites. Missing certificates do not surface for years and then surface all at once, during somebody’s house sale, as an angry phone call about a job you barely remember.
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Pass the annual audit.
FENSA may inspect completed installations each year to confirm you are still working to standard.
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Renew every year.
Registration lapses on a date, and a lapsed registration means the jobs you did after it are unnotified.
The paperwork is the product, and it is where installers lose money
Almost every fenestration business treats FENSA as a cost of doing business and the certificate as an administrative afterthought. That is backwards, for two reasons.
The first is that unregistered notification is expensive to fix. If a job goes in without a certificate, the route back is a regularisation application to building control, and it costs the customer more than the certificate would have. Where the installer is still trading, the customer’s solicitor sends the bill to the installer.
The second is that this is the one thing a nervous customer can actually verify before they buy. They cannot judge your welds or your fixings. They can type your name into the FENSA register — and a great many of them do, which is why “fensa register check” and “fensa registered installer” are searched constantly. A business that is registered but hard to find in the register, or registered under a trading name the customer does not recognise, loses that check.
So the marketing job is unusually concrete. Be findable in the register under the name you advertise. Say on the website that the certificate is issued within 30 days and that you keep a copy. Explain, in one sentence a homeowner understands, why that matters when they come to sell.
If you are a homeowner looking for your certificate
You are probably on the wrong page, and the short answer is that FENSA holds the record, not the installer. Search the FENSA website for the property address and you can order a replacement certificate for a small fee. If the installation is not on the register at all, the installer either was not registered or never notified it, and your route is a regularisation application through your local authority’s building control department.
We publish this page for installers, but that question is the most common reason people land on it, so it seemed dishonest to make you hunt for the answer.
Is it worth it?
At £450 a year, against the value of an average replacement window job, the fee is not the question. Whether you can legally do notifiable work without it is the question, and you cannot — not without the customer paying building control instead, which loses you jobs against every competitor who can self-certify.
The comparison that actually matters is FENSA against the alternatives. CERTASS runs a competing competent person scheme, generally at a lower fee, and is accepted for exactly the same purpose. Some installers hold neither and route everything through building control, which works, and is slower, and costs the customer more. The right answer depends on volume: if you are doing notifiable work most weeks, a scheme pays for itself immediately; if you are doing three jobs a year, it may not.
What is not in doubt is that the choice should be made deliberately rather than inherited from whoever set the business up.
The mistakes we see most
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Treating the certificate as optional paperwork.
It is the deliverable. The window is the means.
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Letting registration lapse mid-year.
Everything installed after the lapse is unnotified, and nobody notices until a sale falls through.
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Trading under a name that is not the registered one.
The customer checks the register, does not find you, and quietly goes elsewhere.
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Hiding the logo in the footer.
You are paying £450 a year for a thing customers explicitly search for. It belongs on the pages where they decide.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Registration renewal dates and audit dates sit against the business record with reminders before they expire, so a lapse is something you are warned about rather than something you discover.
Certificates are logged against the job and the property, which means the “can you send me my FENSA certificate” call — the one that arrives four years later during a house sale — is answered in about thirty seconds instead of being a search through an old email account.
Questions fenestration installers ask
How long does registration take? Weeks rather than days, and longer if the technical review turns up something. Apply before you need it, not when a job is waiting.
Is CERTASS as good? For Building Regulations purposes they do the same job. FENSA is better known to homeowners, which matters if customers are checking you.
What happens if I install without being registered? The work is unnotified. It has to be regularised through building control retrospectively, and that cost usually lands on you.
Does it help me win work? It removes a reason to say no, and it is one of the few claims a customer can independently verify. That is a different thing from a badge, and a more useful one.
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