Is a legionella risk assessment free?
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Key points
- Yes, £0 is legitimate, when it means a competent self-assessment of a simple system, written down and kept.
- The law asks for a competent person, not a paid one. HSWA, COSHH and ACOP L8 set the duty; they do not set a fee.
- Beware the free survey. A £0 assessment from a company that sells monitoring contracts is a sales tool; read its recommendations accordingly.
- Free stops being enough at shared tanks, TMVs on vulnerable users, cooling towers, spa pools, and CQC or HTM 04-01 settings.
- Every input you need is already free: HSE guidance, our template, and the assessment builder.
Yes, a legionella risk assessment can be free, and for a large number of duty holders the free version is not a shortcut but the intended route. The legal duty under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, COSHH and ACOP L8 is that the assessment is carried out by a competent person and recorded. Nothing in the framework requires that person to invoice you. For a simple water system, a duty holder who understands the system, the control temperatures and what to record is the competent person, and the total cost is their time.
The two kinds of free, and why only one is safe
It is worth separating two offers that share a price tag. The first is free because you did it yourself. The HSE publishes ACOP L8, HSG274 and landlord-specific guidance at no charge, and for a simple domestic let or small office they contain everything the assessment needs to cover. This route is explicitly supported by the guidance and carries no catch beyond honesty about your own competence.
The second is free because someone is selling. Water hygiene companies sometimes offer a no-cost survey. The survey itself may be competent, but the business model is the monitoring contract, sampling schedule or remedial work that follows, so the assessor is paid when the report finds work. That does not make the findings false, but it changes how you should read them: check every recommended task against the actual guidance before agreeing to it, and get a second quote for anything beyond the simplest controls. A free survey that ends in a three-year contract was never free.
The legitimacy test for a £0 assessment
A free self-assessment is legitimate when you can answer yes to all four of these:
- The system is simple. Mains-fed cold water, hot water from a combi boiler or a single cylinder at 60°C, no cooling tower, no spa pool, no shared tanks.
- You can name every outlet and its use. Including the little-used ones that need weekly flushing, and any dead ends of pipework left by old alterations. See what dead legs are.
- You know the numbers. Cold water below 20°C within two minutes, hot stored at 60°C and reaching 50°C at outlets within one minute (55°C in healthcare). The temperature checker confirms each reading against the right threshold.
- You write it down and keep it. The assessment, the controls, and the ongoing checks, recorded in a log book and kept for at least five years. An unrecorded free assessment is worth exactly what you paid for it.
Fail any one of them and the honest answer is that free was the wrong target. The fix is usually cheap: a professional assessment of a small property runs £150 to £350, and the cost calculator shows the normal range for your building type.
Free legionella risk assessment template
A structured Word document following the five-step approach in ACOP L8. Covers risk identification, written scheme, monitoring, and records. If it isn't written down, you can't evidence it.
Follows ACoP L8 and HSG274 Part 2. Free. No spam.
Where the free line ends
Complexity and vulnerability are the two things that push an assessment beyond DIY, and both are about consequences rather than paperwork. A house in multiple occupation with a shared cold water tank has a storage vessel you cannot inspect properly from a tap. A care home has thermostatic mixing valves on bathing outlets serving the highest-risk group there is, plus CQC scrutiny of the paper trail; see care home assessment costs. Anything with a cooling tower is notifiable and sits under HSG274 Part 1. In each case the fee buys competence you cannot download, and the right comparison is not £0 against £400 but £400 against an assessment that missed the tank in the loft.
What free actually looks like when it is done properly
A legitimate £0 assessment produces the same legal object as a paid one: a dated, written document that identifies the water system, the people at risk, the hazards found, the controls set, and the review date. The risk assessment builder structures exactly that, following the ACOP L8 framework, and pairs with the written scheme and log book to close the loop. It records your assessment; it never certifies your system, and neither does a contractor's report. The difference between free and paid is who walks the building, not what the law accepts.
Free is legitimate when it means competent, simple and written down. Free is a warning sign when a stranger offers it, because the invoice is coming later, wearing a different name.
For the full picture of what the duty involves beyond the assessment itself, see what a legionella risk assessment is and whether you need one.
Free legionella risk assessment template
A structured Word document following the five-step approach in ACOP L8. Covers risk identification, written scheme, monitoring, and records. If it isn't written down, you can't evidence it.
Follows ACoP L8 and HSG274 Part 2. Free. No spam.
Frequently asked questions
Can you get a legionella risk assessment for free?
Yes, legitimately, in one way: by doing it yourself. The law requires the assessment to be carried out by a competent person, not a paid one, and for simple water systems most duty holders can reach that standard using free HSE guidance and a structured template. A professional assessment is never free, so any offer of a £0 survey from a contractor should be read as a sales call, not a favour.
Is a free legionella risk assessment legitimate?
A self-assessment costing £0 is fully legitimate for simple systems, and HSE landlord guidance explicitly supports it. A free assessment offered by a company that also sells monitoring contracts, sampling or remedial work is legitimate only as marketing: the assessor's incentive is to find work, so read the report for scope creep before accepting its recommendations.
What do I need to do my own legionella risk assessment?
Three things: an understanding of your water system, including where hot water is stored and which outlets are little used; the control temperatures, cold below 20°C, hot stored at 60°C and delivered at 50°C; and a written record of what you found and the controls you set. Free guidance from the HSE plus a structured template covers all three for a simple system.
When is a free self-assessment not enough?
When the system or the people exposed are beyond your competence: shared cold water tanks, multiple calorifiers, thermostatic mixing valves serving vulnerable people, cooling towers, spa pools, or any setting regulated by the CQC or working to HTM 04-01. In those cases the cost of a competent assessor is small against the cost of an assessment that misses something.
Is the HSE legionella guidance free?
Yes. ACOP L8, the HSG274 technical guidance and the HSE's landlord-specific guidance are all published free of charge on the HSE website. They tell you what the assessment must cover, which is why a competent self-assessment is achievable without paying for anything except, optionally, a thermometer.
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