Gas Safe Register: what regulation 3 actually requires of you

Regulation 3 of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 does two separate things, and mixing them up is how people end up working unlawfully while believing they are fine.

Paragraph (1) is about competence:

No person shall carry out any work in relation to a gas fitting or gas storage vessel unless he is competent to do so.

Paragraph (3) is about registration:

No employer shall allow any of his employees to carry out any work in relation to a gas fitting or service pipework and no self-employed person shall carry out any such work, unless the employer or self-employed person … is a member of a class of persons approved for the time being by the Health and Safety Executive for the purposes of this paragraph.

Two duties, not one. Competence is personal and evidenced by your qualifications. Registration attaches to the business. A time-served engineer working for an unregistered firm satisfies (1) and breaches (3).

Where Gas Safe Register fits

The regulation never names a register. It names "a class of persons approved for the time being by the Health and Safety Executive". That approval is a contract, and it has changed hands.

HSE's own page records the arrangement: the scheme is operated under contract by Capita Gas Registration and Ancillary Services Ltd, it launched on 1 April 2009 replacing the previous CORGI registration scheme, and, in HSE's words, "for a gas engineering business to legally undertake gas work that is within the scope of the Regulations they must be on the Gas Safe Register".

The register covers businesses and operatives competent to work on both piped natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas.

The practical consequence of the wording "for the time being" is worth noticing: your obligation is to be in the approved class, whoever holds the approval. If the contract moves again, the duty does not change; the name on your card does.

Registration also does someone else's job for them: it is how anyone engaging you satisfies the general duty to check a contractor's competence that now sits on every building job in England, set out in competence is a legal duty on every building job in England.

What counts as work on a gas fitting

Regulation 3 covers "any work in relation to a gas fitting or gas storage vessel". That is deliberately wide: installing, servicing, maintaining, repairing, removing, renewing or replacing, and altering the position of, a fitting. It is not limited to the boiler. Pipework, meters, controls, flues and the appliance itself all sit within scope.

Regulation 3(4) carves out a genuinely small exception: replacing a hose or regulator on a portable or mobile space heater with a refillable cylinder. That is the exception people cite when they hope there are others. There are not many.

Regulation 3(8) adds requirements for gas fittings in vehicles, vessels and caravans.

And regulation 3(7) prohibits falsely claiming approved status. Presenting yourself as registered when you are not is a distinct offence, separate from doing the work.

The landlord duty in regulation 36

If you work on rented property, regulation 36 is the part your customer is relying on you for, and the dates in it are the ones they will ring you about.

The record itself has a prescribed content under regulation 36(3)(c): the date of the check, the address of the premises, the landlord's details, a description and the location of each appliance and flue checked, any defect identified and any remedial action taken, and the registration number of the person who did the check.

That last item is why an unregistered engineer cannot produce a valid record even if the work was done perfectly. The record has no lawful author. The full nine-item content list, and the two-month window that stops the anniversary date drifting, are in the landlord gas safety record: nine items, twenty-eight days.

Two dates that get confused

The twelve-month check and the annual service are different things, and customers routinely believe they are the same.

• The safety check is the regulation 36 duty. It confirms the appliance is safe: gas rate, burner pressure, ventilation, flue performance, safety devices, and that the appliance is fit for purpose.
• The service is what the manufacturer's instructions require to keep the appliance working and the warranty alive. It may be annual, it may not be.

A safety check is not a service. Selling one as the other is how a landlord ends up with a boiler that is safe and failing.

Gas work and building control

Some gas appliance work in a dwelling is also building work under the Building Regulations 2010. Schedule 3 to those regulations lists the self-certification schemes, and for gas appliance work it names, among the qualifying people, "a person, or an employee of a person, who is a member of a class of persons approved in accordance with regulation 3 of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998".

In other words your Gas Safe registration is, for that class of work, also your route to self-certifying to building control instead of submitting a building notice. One registration, two effects.

Both effects produce a dated record, and both dates are measured from the day of the work rather than the day of the paperwork — the four deadlines a plumbing business runs on are set out in the four clocks job management software has to run for you.

A short checklist

1. Check the business is registered, not just the engineer. Regulation 3(3) binds the employer and the self-employed person.
2. Carry the card and let customers check it. Registration numbers are verifiable, and the false-claim prohibition in regulation 3(7) means a wrong claim is an offence in itself.
3. Diarise landlord checks at eleven months, not twelve. The regulation says intervals of not more than twelve months; leaving no margin means a single missed appointment breaches it.
4. Issue the record within 28 days, and keep your copy. The retention rule is two further checks, not one year.
5. Do not let the safety check and the manufacturer's service blur into one line on the invoice. They answer different questions and only one of them is a legal duty.

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Position as at 29 August 2026. This article describes the law and is not legal or safety advice. The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 have been amended several times; HSE's Approved Code of Practice L56 sets out how HSE expects them to be met.

What Zirko does here: nothing about gas competence — registration and record content are matters for the Gas Safe Register and HSE, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it does hold is the appointment, the customer's property and the document you issued, so that finding last year's record for a given address is a search rather than an excavation.