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Illinois
Illinois has no statewide fire code. Here is what still applies to your kitchen.
Every commercial kitchen in Illinois is held to the same five fire standards — the hood, the suppression system, the sprinklers, the alarm and the extinguishers. What changes is which code your city or county has adopted. Here is what applies, and the record each standard leaves behind.
Adopted code
No statewide fire code. The Office of the State Fire Marshal adopts NFPA 101, Life Safety Code (2015 edition), at 41 Ill. Adm. Code 100
Source: Office of the State Fire Marshal · verified 14 September 2026
The five standards your kitchen is held to
These five are national standards, adopted by reference into the code Illinois enforces. Each one governs a different part of the kitchen, and each one leaves a document behind. The document is what an inspector asks for — not the equipment, and not the tag on it.
| Standard | What it covers | The record it leaves |
|---|---|---|
| NFPA 96 | Cleaning the hood, the ducts and the fan to bare metal, on the interval NFPA 96 sets for what the kitchen cooks. | A signed cleaning report, dated, with any inaccessible area noted. |
| NFPA 17A | The wet chemical suppression system over the cookline, and its service. | The service report and the tag on the system, both dated. |
| NFPA 25 | The sprinklers that protect the rest of the building. | The inspection report, with the next date noted on it. |
| NFPA 72 | The fire alarm, its devices and the path the signal takes offsite. | The test report, dated, naming what was tested. |
| NFPA 10 | The extinguishers on the wall, and the check the owner owes them. | The service tag once a year, and an initialed tag every month. |
The five standards are published by the National Fire Protection Association and adopted by reference in state and local fire codes.
How often the hood has to be cleaned
The interval follows what the kitchen cooks, not which county it sits in. A wood-fired line and a church kitchen are held to the same standard on different clocks.
NFPA 96 Table 12.4. A local jurisdiction may set a shorter minimum; where one is verified it is named on that county’s page.
Who asks to see them
The fire inspector
Your city or county adopts its own fire code enforces the code in your kitchen. They arrive on their own schedule, and what they ask for is the report behind the tag — dated, signed, naming what was done. A tag with no report is a citation waiting to be written.
Your insurance carrier
Many restaurant property policies carry a protective safeguards endorsement, which makes keeping these systems in service a condition of the coverage. The carrier rarely asks while nothing is wrong. It asks after a fire, for the whole policy period at once.
Questions people ask
What fire code does Illinois use?
Illinois has no statewide fire code. No statewide fire code. The Office of the State Fire Marshal adopts NFPA 101, Life Safety Code (2015 edition), at 41 Ill. Adm. Code 100, effective 1 January 2020. Your city or county adopts its own fire code.
How often does a restaurant hood have to be cleaned in Illinois?
NFPA 96 Table 12.4 sets the interval by what the kitchen cooks: monthly for solid fuel, quarterly for high-volume cooking, semiannually for moderate volume, annually for low-volume or seasonal cooking. The code Illinois adopts takes that schedule by reference, so the interval is set by the cookline, not by the county. A county may set a shorter minimum of its own.
Does Illinois require a fire suppression inspection twice a year?
NFPA 17A calls for the wet chemical system over the cookline to be serviced every six months, and that is the interval a fire inspector reads it at. What they ask for is the service report and the tag, both dated — the tag alone is not the record.
Who is telling you this
EvidLY is commercial kitchen risk management.
The page you are reading was written from the state’s own rule, not from a summary of it. We do the same thing for the county your kitchen sits in: identify the authority, read what it has adopted, and say plainly which records it asks a kitchen to produce. Where the public record is incomplete, we say so rather than fill the gap.
The people who built EvidLY have been inside these kitchens. Cleaning Pros Plus performs more than 350 fire safety services a year and holds an IKECA membership; its owner was retained as the NFPA 96 expert in a commercial kitchen fire case. That is where the standards in the table above come from — the work, not a feature list.
EvidLY · Commercial Kitchen Risk Management
a Cleaning Pros Plus, LLC company
Could your Illinois kitchen produce these five today?
Ten questions, three minutes, no account. You get back which of the five you could send right now, which are late, and a date on every one that isn’t.