BS3632 Standard Explained: What It Means for Your Park Home
If you're buying a park home, you'll see "BS3632" mentioned everywhere: on manufacturer sites, in park brochures, in the small print of a listing. It's the British Standard that decides whether a home is fit to live in all year round, and it's worth understanding before you buy.
What BS3632 actually is
BS3632 is a British Standard published by the British Standards Institution. First introduced in 1963, it sets out what a residential park home has to achieve to count as a permanent home rather than a holiday unit: insulation, ventilation, structural stability, and room size. A home built to BS3632 is designed for someone living in it 365 days a year, not visiting for a fortnight in August.
The standard gets revised every so often to keep pace with building science and with what residents actually need. The most recent revision, BS3632:2023, came into effect on 30 September 2023 and replaced BS3632:2015.
What changed in the 2023 update
The main changes sit in three areas: heat loss, moisture, and safety.
On heat loss, the standard tightened the U-values required for the external structure. A U-value measures how much heat escapes through a material, so a lower number means a better insulator. Roof performance stayed at 0.2 W/m²K. Wall performance improved from 0.35 to 0.3 W/m²K. Floor performance improved from 0.35 to 0.26 W/m²K. In practice, that means better insulation in the walls and under the floor, and lower heating bills over a winter.
On moisture, every room now needs a permanently open trickle vent, and wardrobe ventilation has increased too. Roof ventilation guidance was rewritten to cover roof designs the old standard didn't address. Both changes target the same problem: better insulation traps more moisture inside if the ventilation doesn't keep pace, so the standard raised both together rather than one at a time.
On safety, smoke and heat alarms now need to meet a defined grade and category, entrance doors have to meet means-of-escape requirements, and there's new guidance on window safety, internal door widths, and protection around steps and high-level bunks.
Homes now also carry serial number markings in at least three places, which makes it easier to identify a home and confirm what it was built to if a dispute comes up later.
BS3632 or EN1647? Check which one you're buying
Not every home on a park meets BS3632. Holiday lodges and static caravans are often built to EN1647 instead, the European standard for seasonal use. EN1647 homes don't carry the same level of insulation, because they're not designed for someone to live in through a full winter.
Some newer holiday lodges are built to BS3632 anyway, since a 12-month site licence makes the extra insulation worth having even without full residential status. Build standard and site licence are separate things though, and one doesn't imply the other. Our guide to the difference between a residential park and a holiday park covers how the site licence decides where you're actually allowed to live full time.
How to check a park home meets BS3632
Ask the seller or the park for the Manufacturer's Declaration of Compliance. Every home built by an NCC (National Caravan Council) member goes through a self-certification scheme, gets tested and inspected, and is issued this declaration along with an NCC badge on despatch. No declaration, no proof, so ask before you commit to a purchase.
You can also check the serial number plate fitted to the home. If a seller can't produce either, treat that as a question to chase down, not a detail to skip past, particularly on an older or private-sale home where paperwork sometimes goes missing.
Does BS3632 affect resale value?
A home built to a current BS3632 revision is generally easier to sell than an older home built to a superseded version, since better insulation means lower running costs for whoever buys it next. Plenty of older BS3632 homes still sell well if they're well maintained, so build standard is one factor among several, not the only thing that decides a sale. If you're weighing up whether your own home's age or spec might be holding back a sale, our guide to park home vs bungalow covers how park homes are valued differently to bricks and mortar in the first place.