For publicans, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 is not interested in your average attendance during the week. It is interested in your peak: the highest number of people you have on the site.

“We’re only busy Friday and Saturday” is usually true, and it does not take a pub out of scope. If the busiest night of the year puts 200 or more people on the premises, that is the figure that settles the position.

The threshold is 200 or more individuals reasonably expected on site from time to time. It is not an average, a median, or a typical week. It describes any occasion you can reasonably foresee.

So a site that is half empty from Monday to Thursday and full on Saturday is assessed on the Saturday. You must always take your peak levels, not your average attendance. When a major sporting fixture is on and the pub is packed, that is the top number to use to see whether you breach the 200-person threshold.

There are a number of ways publicans can establish that figure, and most of them use records the site already keeps:

• Historic footfall. What the busiest nights of the last year or two actually produced. Most sites hold something usable here, even if it was never collected for this purpose.
• Door counts, where they exist. At some hospitality events there are people counting literally as customers come in the door and out of it. Where that has happened, you should be able to see historic records of exactly who has been there.
• Fire capacity calculations, as an input. A capacity calculation can help you sense-check how many people are physically in the building when it is full, which is useful when you are estimating a peak you never counted.
• Your outside space, every time. Whichever of the above you start from, you still need to take your outside spaces into account as well.

This one needs stating plainly, because it is the easiest wrong turn to take. Fire capacity is not the scope test under Martyn’s Law. The test is expected attendance — how many people you reasonably expect on the site from time to time — and that is a different number from what the building is permitted to hold.

A capacity figure is legitimate as one input into an estimate. It tells you something about the ceiling of the indoor space, which is worth knowing if you are reconstructing a busy night from memory. It does not tell you what to expect, and it is not the number a regulator’s question is about.

There is a practical reason to be careful with it too: a fire capacity calculation for the building says nothing at all about your beer garden, and the garden is where a lot of pubs find their peak. Capacity and expected attendance are separate questions and they routinely produce different answers.

Every figure above needs your outside space added to it. Beer gardens, terraces, yards and covered areas are part of the premises, so the people on them are part of the count.

That is also why the peak so often lands on a warm evening with a big fixture on the screens. The garden absorbs numbers the room never could, and it is the part of the site most often left out of the sum.

And the count is everyone on site, not just customers. The bar team, the kitchen, floor and cellar staff and anyone else working that night are inside the same 200.

It has to be a reasonable estimate, honestly arrived at from the evidence available to you. Nobody is asking for a turnstile, and there is no expectation that you counted precisely on a night two summers ago.

What that standard asks of you in practice, and what to do when your figure lands close to 200, is a question of reasonable effort — and it is worth reading alongside this.

Our Am I in Scope? tool asks for the attendance you expect and returns your scope position from it. If that position is in scope, the duty is four public protection procedures in place so far as is reasonably practicable — evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication, as four distinct items. That standard is not a size test, and a small site is not asked for less by virtue of being small.

Nothing is submitted to the regulator for approval at standard tier, and you have to be able to evidence those procedures if you are inspected.

Prova Risk works out what is reasonably practicable for your site, builds all four procedures around it, holds the training and exercise records, and produces a single compliance document you can put in front of a regulator. £399 per year per site.

This answer comes in two parts. The clip below is the companion to the one above.

• Counting attendance without a clicker on the door
• Which hospitality premises are covered, and does a beer garden count?
• Capacity is not the same as expected attendance
• Do peak days and qualifying events count?
• How do I know if my premises reaches the 200-person threshold?
• Martyn’s Law for hospitality
• Martyn’s Law hub