Searching for emergency lighting testing requirements returns a great many confident numbers and very few citations, which is a problem because the requirement that binds your building is not the one on a vendor blog. Three different kinds of document are being quoted at you at once: a federal workplace rule, a model code your state or city may have adopted in some edition, and the judgement of the authority having jurisdiction who will actually walk your site. This page separates them so you can find out which one you are subject to instead of averaging the internet.
The federal rule says the lighting must work, not how to test it
29 CFR 1910.37(a)(4) requires that safeguards designed to protect employees during an emergency, which it names as sprinkler systems, alarm systems, fire doors and exit lighting, be in proper working order at all times, and 1910.37(b)(1) requires each exit route to be adequately lighted. That is the federal hook and it is the whole of it: no interval, no duration, no form. An inspector asking how you know the lighting works is asking you to produce a testing regime the rule assumes you have rather than one it specifies.
The interval and the duration come from a model code, in an edition
The numbers people quote come from NFPA 101, whose section 7.9.3 sets out the periodic testing options. The Minnesota Department of Health's guidance on battery-operated emergency lights, cited below, walks through those options for healthcare facilities and states that a minimum of 90 minutes of illumination is required, while noting that its own state fire code requires only 30 minutes in existing buildings. That parenthesis is the entire lesson: the same building, two documents, two numbers, both correct in their own scope.
The authority having jurisdiction decides which of those you are held to
Adoption is local and lagging. Your state, county or city adopts a specific edition of a model code, sometimes with amendments, and the fire marshal or the insurer who visits you enforces that edition. This is why the honest answer to what your requirements are is a phone call, and why software that ships a hard-coded interval is guessing on your behalf. Write the interval your AHJ names into your own schedule and make the record match it.
Write the schedule, then make the record prove it
A requirement you cannot evidence is a requirement you have not met. Whatever interval and duration you land on, the thing that survives the argument is a device-level record: this fitting, this date, this duration, this result, this technician. The free emergency lighting test log on this site sizes what that schedule costs you in hours and dollars a year before you commit to it, which is the figure most people work out after they have promised it.
Questions people ask about emergency lighting testing requirements
Is there a single national emergency lighting testing requirement in the US?
No. The federal workplace rule requires the lighting to be in proper working order, and the testing intervals come from model codes adopted state by state and city by city, in editions that differ. Anyone giving you one national number is quoting a model code and not telling you which edition or whether your jurisdiction adopted it.
Does this site publish the code?
No, and it will not. Extinvo cites public documents it has read, names them, and links to them; it does not reproduce model code text, and it does not tell you what your building is subject to. That is your authority having jurisdiction's answer and it is worth the call.
What should my record contain?
At device level: which fitting, where it is, the date, whether it was the short functional test or the full-duration one, how long it ran, the result, and who did it. If any of those are missing the record answers a question nobody asks. Everything the paid plan on this site does is in service of keeping those six things without a second piece of admin.
What does the federal exit route rule actually require of the lighting?
That each exit route is adequately lighted so an employee with normal vision can see along it, and that exit lighting, with the sprinklers, alarms and fire doors, is kept in proper working order at all times. Those are the words of 29 CFR 1910.37(a)(4) and (b)(1). Nothing about batteries, intervals or minutes; those come from the code your jurisdiction adopted.
Is a healthcare facility held to something different?
Often, and more strictly, because a healthcare occupancy is surveyed against the Life Safety Code edition its accrediting body and its state adopted, and the guidance cited on this page is written for exactly that setting. The device-level record is the same; the interval and the duration are the ones that document names.