Egress requirements calculator for IBC Chapter 10.
Enter the area and the function of the space, or an occupant load you already have, and read what the code requires at that load: how many exits, how wide, exit signs, door swing, panic hardware and the exit access travel distance, each with its IBC section. Free from FireInspection360, the fire prevention platform built by fire inspectors.
What does this occupant load require?
The occupant load is IBC / IFC Table 1004.5 for the edition you pick; the requirements are IBC Sections 1005 through 1013 and Table 1017.2. Section numbers move between editions, so each item cites the number in the edition selected.
The occupant load is a number. Egress is what the number requires.
Chapter 10 of the International Building Code reads the occupant load of a space and turns it into a set of requirements, most of them switched on at thresholds. Table 1006.2.1 says how many people one exit access doorway may serve before a second is required: 49 in most occupancies, 29 in a storage occupancy, 10 in a residential or institutional one. Section 1005.3 sizes the exits: 0.2 inches of clear width per occupant for doors and corridors and 0.3 for stairways, or 0.15 and 0.2 in a building that is both sprinklered throughout and equipped with an emergency voice/alarm communication system. Section 1010 makes doors serving 50 or more people swing in the direction of travel, and gives assembly and educational doors at that load panic hardware. Exit signs and emergency egress lighting follow the same two-exit threshold.
Travel distance is the requirement the occupant load does not set. Table 1017.2 limits how far anyone can be from an exit by occupancy group and by whether the building is sprinklered throughout: 200 feet in an unsprinklered assembly, educational, mercantile or residential space and 250 with sprinklers; 200 and 300 in a business occupancy; 300 and 400 in a low-hazard storage or utility building. Group H and most Group I occupancies have no unsprinklered figure at all, because every one of them is sprinklered. The distance is measured along the path a person actually walks, around the furniture and the fixtures, and it is the rule a large open floor plan runs into first.
On an inspection these show up as the things that were right on the day of the certificate of occupancy and drifted afterwards: the second exit door that became storage, the panic bar replaced with a deadbolt, the tenant improvement that turned a stockroom into a party room and moved the space across the 50-occupant line without a permit. Knowing what the posted load requires is what lets an inspector see the drift.
How FireInspection360 keeps the requirements beside the record
The occupant load calculator inside FireInspection360 runs this same rule on every department's own site, under the code edition the department adopted, and the property record carries the posted load beside the inspection history, the permits and the open violations. A change of use comes in as a permit on the same record the inspector opens in the field.
Related tools: the occupant load calculator and the fire extinguisher placement calculator.
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