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Lintels, sockets and openings in masonry

Brick lintel, steel beam and brick spurs — bearing and load path

2026-07-19·12 min reading

Every door and window opening requires a load-bearing lintel. Here are the lintel types, requirements for bearing and support, and the classic brick arches — arch, flat arch and plank arch.

Introduction

Every time a hole is cut in a wall for a door or window, the masonry above must be supported. This is the lintel's job: to take the load from the masonry (and often floor and roof) over the opening and lead it down into the masonry piers on the sides. Openings occur on almost every task, and a poorly executed lintel is both a structural and a cracking fault.

Load lowering over an opening

Masonry has a built-in ability to "vault" the load around an opening: an imaginary thrust line carries part of the weight out to the sides, so the lintel in many cases only needs to bear the masonry within a triangular field above the opening plus any point loads (such as a carrying beam). But the vault effect requires sufficient masonry above and beside the opening — at openings close below a floor or close to a corner, it cannot be counted on, and the lintel bears more. The exact load is determined by the designer.

60°60°opening bwall trianglewall tilewall tileoverliesonly the brick triangle loads the lintel — the rest arches out to the pillars
Fig. Arch action over an opening: the pressure arch directs the load into the piers, so the beam roughly only carries the brick triangle with ~60° base angles over the opening

Calculated arch action — what does the beam carry?

The arch action can be defined. If the load field over the opening is calculated as an equilateral triangle with ~60° base angles (as in the EC6 Cookbook), roughly only the masonry within that triangle the lintel must carry — plus any point loads from above (floor, roof, beams).

Overlap types

  • 01Prefabricated brick lintel — a reinforced brick beam with the same facade appearance as the masonry. Supplied with CE marking and a performance declaration (DoP) according to DS/EN 845-2.
  • 02Steel beam / angle iron — hot-dip galvanised or stainless steel profile, often hidden, that carries the facing wall over wide openings.
  • 03Reinforced in-situ brick beam — built in situ with reinforcement laid in the bottom bed joints to absorb tension.
  • 04Concrete lintel — prefabricated or in-situ, used in inner wall and where load is large.

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