How often do fire extinguishers need to be inspected in a restaurant?

Most confusion about extinguishers comes from one word doing three jobs. NFPA 10 separates the monthly inspection, the annual maintenance, and the periodic internal examination or hydrostatic test. They happen on different clocks, and two of the three are not done by the company that hangs the tag.

The monthly inspection is yours

NFPA 10 calls for extinguishers to be inspected at approximately 30 day intervals. This is a quick check rather than a service: that the unit is where it is supposed to be, visible and unobstructed, the pressure gauge reads in the operable range, the pin and seal are intact, and there is no obvious damage.

You or a member of your staff can do this. It does not require a licensed contractor, and no contractor is going to visit twelve times a year to do it for you. The standard also calls for these checks to be recorded, which is the part operators skip, because a check that leaves no record is indistinguishable from a check that never happened when someone asks.

The annual maintenance is a contractor's job

Once a year an extinguisher gets maintenance by a person trained to perform it: a thorough examination of the mechanical parts, the extinguishing agent, and the expelling means. This is the visit that produces the tag on the neck of the extinguisher and, usually, a service report listing every unit on the premises.

The service report is the document worth keeping. It names every unit, its location in the building, and what was done to it. The tag on the bottle only tells you about that one bottle, and only while it is still attached to it. That distinction is the whole subject of a separate page on why the sticker is not the record, and it applies here for the same reason.

The internal examination and hydrostatic test run in years

At longer intervals an extinguisher has to be emptied and examined internally, and at longer intervals still, pressure tested. How long depends on what kind of extinguisher it is: the intervals for a stored pressure dry chemical unit, a carbon dioxide unit, and a wet chemical Class K unit are not the same, and NFPA 10 sets them out by type rather than as one number.

You do not need to memorise the table. You need to know that the interval exists, that it is measured from a date stamped on the unit rather than from when you bought the restaurant, and that a unit past its date is a finding even though nothing about it looks wrong. Your service company tracks this, and their report will say when a unit is due.

The Class K unit is the one people miss

A commercial kitchen with a fryer typically needs a wet chemical Class K extinguisher near the cooking line, in addition to the hood suppression system. It is a different unit with different service intervals from the ABC extinguisher by the back door, and because it is often installed at the same time as the suppression system, it sometimes ends up serviced by whoever does the suppression rather than whoever does the extinguishers. Either is fine. Neither being sure it is theirs is not.

What to keep

The annual service report, every year, for every location. Your own record of the monthly checks. If a unit was replaced or recharged during the year, the paperwork for that too, because a replacement resets the dates on the unit and the next inspector will ask why the tag disagrees with the report.