Landscape gardeners build and maintain playgrounds for municipalities, schools and housing associations. Here are the rules: when a playground is publicly accessible, what the building regulations require, why the equipment does not need CE marking, what free height of fall means, and how inspection has changed from 2025.
Introduction
A playground is a construction like a terrace or a path — but the users are children. Children climb, hang upside down and fall. That is why the requirements are stricter, and there are rules on who is responsible and how the playground must be maintained.
Public or private?
The first question is whether the playground is publicly accessible. That decides which rules apply. The building regulations' guidance on playgrounds divides it like this:
| Status | Examples |
|---|---|
| Publicly accessible | Parks, restaurants, shops, shopping centres, amusement venues and public offices |
| Publicly accessible | Schools and childcare institutions — even when they are locked outside opening hours |
| Publicly accessible | Common areas for more than one home, e.g. housing associations, courtyards and terraced houses — even if they are locked |
| Not publicly accessible | Private garden for at most one dwelling |
It is the municipality that decides in the specific case. A gate with a lock does not make a housing association's playground private.
Which rules apply?
- 01Public playgrounds: the Danish Building Regulations BR18, chapter 16 (§§ 358-367). § 358 requires that design, construction, operation and maintenance «must be carried out so that satisfactory safety against personal injury is achieved».
- 02Public playground equipment does not need CE marking. The standards in the DS/EN 1176 series (equipment) and DS/EN 1177 (impact-absorbing surfacing) are non-harmonised. They are one way of meeting the safety requirement.
- 03Private playgrounds: equipment sold as toys for private use must be CE marked under the toy rules (DS/EN 71).
- 04Public playgrounds require a building permit and a completion notice from the municipality. Second-hand equipment moved to a new playground is treated as new.
Height of fall and impact-absorbing surfacing
Free height of fall is «the greatest vertical distance from the surfaces that users are encouraged to access down to the impact area below». In other words, the height from the platform, branch or path the child is tempted up onto, down to the surface. Equipment with a free height of fall of at most 1.0 m is not regarded as a risk of personal injury in case of failure (the building regulations' guidance on playgrounds, section 3.1.1).
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