SIOP and SIOPA are the two courses behind the Polish fire inspector authorisation, and confusing them is expensive: the full course is for candidates, the updating one for holders, and missing the renewal window by a day sends you back to the full course. Our free date search collects every upcoming course from all authorised providers in Poland.
What the role is
A fire protection inspector (inspektor ochrony przeciwpożarowej) is the person authorised to carry out fire-safety duties at a workplace. The authorisation comes from article 4a of the Polish fire protection act, and the scope and programme of both courses are set by a 2015 ministerial regulation (consolidated text, Dz.U. 2023 poz. 2203).
For a company operating in Poland, this is one of the site-level roles that has to be filled by someone with a current certificate, which makes the five-year expiry a diary item rather than a detail.
SIOP and SIOPA
SIOP is the full course, for a candidate obtaining the authorisation for the first time.
SIOPA is the updating course, for someone who already holds it. It has to be completed while the authorisation is still valid, within five years of the certificate date. Miss that window and there is nothing left to update: the full SIOP course is required again, with the corresponding difference in time and cost.
A closed list of providers
Only three kinds of organisation may deliver these courses: State Fire Service schools, the training centres of regional PSP headquarters, and CNBOP-PIB. The tool builds its provider list from the register kept by the national PSP headquarters (KG PSP register), so a "fire safety course" from an unauthorised provider never shows up in the results.
That sounds obvious until you see how many such offers circulate in search results. Schools and CNBOP recruit nationally; regional centres tend to recruit locally, which is why the tool filters by voivodeship, course type and delivery mode: classroom, online or hybrid.
Prices and enrolment
In practice SIOP runs 1,800–3,000 PLN and SIOPA 900–1,500 PLN. Polish law caps the fee at 50% of the average wage, so the spread comes from real differences: format, facilities, and whether accommodation is included.
Some centres publish prices only in attachments or inside a registration system. For those dates the tool says "confirm with the provider" rather than inventing a figure nobody promised. Enrolment differs too: most providers take an application form by email or post, while some run full online registration where payment confirmation is what actually secures the place. Every entry links the provider's own page and shows when we last verified it; the data is refreshed roughly every two weeks.
When the authorisation is about to expire
This is the most common reason anyone opens the tool, and the point where a cheap mistake gets expensive. The deadline is set by the certificate itself, not by memory: five years run from the date it was issued, so the first move is to find the document and read that date.
After that it is ordinary calendar arithmetic. The updating course has to finish inside the validity period, not merely start, so add the course length and a buffer for the likelihood that the nearest date is full. Each entry in the tool shows its enrolment status (places available, enrolment opening soon, full, or cancelled), and the calendar view beats the list here, because it shows at a glance how many dates fall before your deadline.
Two filters cut the search short. Delivery mode, if travelling across the country is not realistic, leave online and hybrid only. And voivodeship, when you want a classroom course within a sensible distance. The filtered view can be copied as a link and sent to whoever books training in your organisation; the filters travel with it.
After the certificate
The authorisation is a formality. The daily work is not: the fire safety instruction document, escape routes, extinguishing equipment, evacuation drills, and people who are expected to act correctly in a moment they have rehearsed once a year, if at all.
Two of our other tools come up constantly in that work. The fire load density calculator computes Q_d under PN-B-02852 and shows the thresholds where the building's requirements change. The ISO 7010 safety signs index helps check the signage for equipment and escape routes without paging through the standard.
And if the aim is for employees to actually use an extinguisher rather than watch a slide about one, fire extinguisher training: classroom vs VR compares the formats. Ready-made fire scenarios are in the VR training catalogue, and the rest of our free tools covers the neighbouring questions.
