Lifts after RD 355/2024: what the next inspection will demand, the upgrade deadlines and the derrama to plan

The lift is the one machine in a building that every owner uses and nobody thinks about until the day it stops. Since 1 July 2024 a new set of rules decides how often it is inspected, what the inspector may write, and which upgrades an older lift must receive within fixed deadlines — and for a community of owners on Fuerteventura, where most blocks went up between the eighties and the early two-thousands, the first inspection under the new rules is the moment the bill appears. This piece sets out what the regulation demands of the community as the lift's owner, the inspection calendar, the deadlines that follow a defect, the list of mandatory upgrades with their timelines, and how the resulting levy is decided and shared.

The building-wide picture — the ITE, the certificate calendar, the reserve fund — is in our piece on building health in Fuerteventura. This one is about the lift.

The rulebook: RD 355/2024 and the ITC AEM 1

Royal Decree 355/2024 of 2 April approved the technical instruction ITC AEM 1 «Ascensores», in force since 1 July 2024. It governs the commissioning, modification, maintenance and inspection of every lift in Spain, and it added something the previous instruction did not have: Annex VII, a list of minimum safety measures that existing lifts must incorporate within set deadlines. Lifts put into service before that date keep the essential-safety rules they were built under, but the maintenance, inspection and modification rules of the new instruction apply to them from day one, and so does Annex VII.

In a community of owners the lift's titular — the owner, in the regulation's vocabulary — is the community itself, and the community's obligations are the president's and the administrator's to discharge. They are listed in article 4, and they are more specific than most boards realise.

What the community owes every year

• A maintenance contract, always. The lift may only be used while a contract with a licensed maintenance company (empresa conservadora) is in force (art. 4.1). The company keeps a maintenance plan for the lift and delivers a written record of every visit within ten days (art. 5.3 and 5.5).
• Monthly visits. For an ordinary residential lift the maintenance company must visit every month, with no fewer than twenty and no more than forty-five days between visits. Only single-family lifts and small modern lifts — CE-marked, up to three stops, serving no more than twenty dwellings — may be on a four-monthly rhythm (art. 5.4).
• A twenty-four-hour duty. Accidents are reported to the maintenance company immediately; anomalies, deficiencies or neglect within twenty-four hours (art. 4.3). When the company gives written notice that a component must be repaired or replaced, the community acts within the deadline the company sets — or asks for the lift to be taken out of service; if it disputes the diagnosis, it can commission an inspection body to check (art. 4.4).
• The inspection is the community's to book, never the maintenance company's. The periodic inspection is contracted by the owner with an independent inspection body (organismo de control, OCA), and the regulation forbids the maintenance company from contracting it (art. 4.5). The maintenance company must, however, notify the community of the deadline at least three months in advance (art. 7.6) — and if the deadline passes without an inspection, it must take the lift out of service within twenty-four hours and tell the Canary Government's industry service (art. 7.7).
• The file. The community keeps the commissioning registration, the CE or EU declaration where there is one, the technical sheet, the operating manual, the maintenance register, the contract and every inspection certificate, available to the regional authority on request (art. 4.8). When the maintenance company changes, the outgoing one hands the register to the incoming one — and the incoming one must present an inspection carried out within thirty days before the new contract (arts. 4.1 and 7.11).
• Stopping the lift on purpose. A community that takes a lift out of service temporarily notifies the region with a certificate from the maintenance company; only a maintenance company may restart it, a stop longer than three months requires a full annual-scope review, and if an inspection deadline fell during the stop, a favourable inspection comes before the restart (art. 4.7).

The inspection calendar

Article 11.4 fixes the minimum frequency of the periodic inspection by the kind of building:

• Every two years for lifts in industrial buildings or places of public concurrence — hotels, hostels, restaurants, bars, offices and shops above certain occupancies, car parks for more than five vehicles.
• Every four years for lifts in buildings with more than twenty dwellings or serving more than four floors.
• Every six years for every other lift.

Most of the blocks we administer — twenty to sixty apartments over four or five floors in Corralejo, Caleta de Fuste or Costa Calma — fall in the four-year band. A tourist complex with a reception and a licensed hotel use falls in the two-year band; a small residential building of three floors and twelve flats in the six-year one. The regulation adds a useful sentence for mixed buildings: a doctor's surgery or a law office in an otherwise residential block does not turn it into a place of public concurrence — the building's main use decides.

What the inspector can write

The inspection is carried out by an accredited OCA against the UNE 192008 protocol, and its certificate reaches the region, the community and the maintenance company within fifteen days (art. 11.10). Every defect is graded (art. 11.8), and the grade fixes the clock (art. 11.9):

• Favourable without defects. A green label goes up inside the cabin. Nothing to do until the next cycle.
• Favourable with minor defects (leves). They must be corrected within six months of detection and certified by the maintenance company to the OCA. A minor defect found again at the next inspection is a repeated defect and can be fined by the region.
• Unfavourable with serious defects (graves). The inspector sets a deadline according to the importance of the defect — never more than six months — and returns the working day after it expires, or within thirty days of the community's notice that the work is done. A second unfavourable result, or a second visit that the community or the maintenance company frustrates, goes to the region, which orders the lift stopped. The cabin carries a «CONDICIONADA» label in the meantime.
• Unfavourable with very serious defects (muy graves). The maintenance company present takes the lift out of service on the spot; it stays stopped until the defect is corrected and a complete new inspection by the same OCA is favourable, with no further deadlines granted. Labels go on the cabin and on the ground-floor landing door.

One line of article 11.8 matters more than any other for older lifts: failing to execute an Annex VII measure within its deadline is itself a serious defect. The upgrades below are not recommendations; from the day their deadline runs out they turn a favourable inspection into an unfavourable one.

Annex VII: the upgrades and their deadlines

Annex VII applies to every lift that does not carry a declaration of conformity under the 2014 Lifts Directive or the machinery rules — in practice, everything installed before 2016, which is most of the island's stock — and each measure carries its own trigger and deadline:

1. Levelling accuracy. After an accident caused by poor levelling, or when the traction unit is replaced, the lift must reach a stopping accuracy of ± 10 mm and a levelling accuracy of ± 20 mm within six months; a single-speed electric lift measured outside those values at a periodic inspection has one year — the practical answer is a frequency inverter.
2. Door protection. Lifts with automatic doors must have a protection device covering the opening from 25 mm to 1,600 mm above the sill — a light curtain — within one year of the first inspection that records its absence (six months after an accident), where it is technically viable and cheaper than replacing the doors.
3. Protection against uncontrolled movement. Required the day the traction unit and the control system are replaced together.
4. Two-way communication. Every cabin without a two-way device that lets a trapped user call a rescue centre at any moment must get one, accessible to people with disabilities, within one year of the first inspection that records its absence.
5. Guide rails. Cylindrical, rail-type or wooden guides with old safety gear must go. For lifts installed from 1 April 1967 the deadline is ten years from the first inspection that records them; for lifts from before 1967 it is three years for wooden or hollow cylindrical guides and six or eight for the rest.
6. Load control. A lift with no overload device gets one within one year of the first inspection that records its absence, where that is possible without replacing the control panel.
7. Counterweight guidance to the EN 81-20 standard, on the same three-to-ten-year ladder as the guides.
8. The 2005 measures that were already mandatory — pit stop switch, light and socket; the apron under the cabin sill; cabin doors with a position indicator; emergency light and alarm; pulley guards; the cable-slack contact; double contactors; a roof handrail where the gap exceeds 30 cm; asbestos out of the brakes when they are replaced; a hand pump on replacement hydraulic units — remain due on every existing lift.

Replacing guides, the machine or the control system counts as an important modification under article 9: the maintenance company executes it with the lift out of service and its conformity is certified through an inspection body (art. 10). Two safety valves exist. Where a measure is technically impossible, the community may ask the Canary Government's industry service for an exemption, with a favourable OCA report and equivalent alternative measures (transitional provision 1.2). And the instruction has no cost trigger of its own: what it has is the deadline, and the deadline starts at the first inspection that writes the defect down — which for a four-year-cycle lift inspected in 2025 or 2026 means the one-year items fall due in 2026 or 2027, and the ten-year items around 2036.

The bill, and how the community shares it

A lift upgrade demanded by an inspection certificate is a conservation work in the sense of article 10.1.a of the Horizontal Property Act (Ley de Propiedad Horizontal): obligatory, not subject to a vote of the meeting, and paid by every owner by quota (art. 10.2). The meeting's role is the one article 14.c gives it — to approve the budget and its execution — and, under article 10.2.a, to distribute the levy and set its payment terms. The reserve fund, which article 9.1.f keeps at no less than 10 % of the last ordinary budget precisely for conservation and repair works, is the first source; the derrama covers the rest, and our piece on community fees and derramas explains how a levy is issued and collected, including from owners abroad. Anything beyond the mandatory list — a new cabin, a machine-room-less conversion, a second lift — is an improvement under article 17 and does need the meeting's majority.

Public aid follows the same line. The State housing plan's accessibility programme funds installing a lift in a building without one, or making a lift accessible, with the caps we set out in our accessibility works piece; it does not fund the safety upgrade of an existing lift as such, and the Canary Government's last accessibility call closed in 2024. A community should budget Annex VII from its own fund and levy, and treat any grant as a bonus.

A worked example. A block in Caleta de Fuste, twenty-four apartments over five floors, one lift installed in 1996 — no CE marking, four-year inspection cycle. Its first inspection under the new instruction, in spring 2026, records four absences: two-way communication, door light curtain, load control, and levelling outside tolerance on a single-speed machine; it also records the original cylindrical guides. The certificate is favourable, the four absences carry a one-year deadline, the guides a ten-year one. The maintenance company's quotation for the four one-year items comes to €7,200 — in our buildings the communication device and the light curtain are three-figure jobs each, the inverter and the load control the larger part. The reserve fund holds €4,000; the meeting approves the budget, takes €3,000 from the fund and issues a levy of €4,200 — €175 per apartment at equal quotas, in two instalments before the anniversary of the inspection. The guides, a five-figure job, go into the ten-year plan as an annual provision, so that no meeting in 2035 has to vote a levy of that size at once.

Where we come in

For the communities we administer we hold the lift file, book the inspection with an independent OCA the moment the maintenance company's three-month notice arrives, check every certificate against Annex VII and calendar each deadline, obtain competing quotations for the upgrades, and put the budget and the levy to the meeting with the reserve-fund position already worked out. See our community maintenance and building works and grants services, or ask for a quote for your community.

Common questions

How often must our lift be inspected under the new rules?

Every two years in a building of public concurrence such as a hotel or an office building; every four years in a building with more than twenty dwellings or more than four floors served; every six years otherwise. The community books the inspection with an independent inspection body — the maintenance company may not — after the three months' notice the maintenance company must give.

What happens if the inspection deadline passes?

The maintenance company must take the lift out of service within twenty-four hours and notify the Canary Government's industry service. The lift stays stopped until a favourable inspection, and the community may be fined under the Industry Act.

Are the Annex VII upgrades really compulsory?

Yes. Each measure has a deadline counted from the first inspection that records its absence — one year for the communication device, the door curtain, the load control and levelling on single-speed lifts; three to ten years for guide rails and counterweight guidance depending on the lift's age. Missing a deadline is itself classified as a serious defect, which turns the next inspection unfavourable. Where a measure is technically impossible the community can request an exemption from the region with a favourable inspection-body report.

Does the meeting have to vote the works, and who pays?

No vote is needed for the works an inspection certificate demands: they are conservation works under article 10.1.a of the Horizontal Property Act, obligatory and paid by every owner by quota. The meeting approves the budget and decides how the levy is split into instalments; the reserve fund may pay part of it. Only improvements beyond the mandatory list — a new cabin, a second lift — need the majorities of article 17.