California Technical Bulletin 133 was a fire safety standard that required upholstered seating furniture in public buildings (jails, hospitals, hotels, auditoriums, and similar occupancies) to survive a full-scale open-flame burn test. California repealed it effective January 22, 2019, because passing the test generally required treating furniture with flame-retardant chemicals that carried serious health risks.1Department of Consumer Affairs. State of California Office of Administrative Law – Notice of Approval Public-occupancy furniture in California is now governed by the smolder-resistance standard TB 117-2013, the same rule that applies to residential upholstered furniture statewide and, since 2021, nationwide.
What TB 133 Required
The standard’s full title was “Flammability Test Procedure for Seating Furniture for Use in Public Occupancies,” originally issued in 1991.2Department of Consumer Affairs. Technical Bulletin 133 – Flammability Test Procedure for Seating Furniture for Use in Public Occupancies The bulletin listed jails, prisons, nursing care homes, health care facilities, public auditoriums, and hotels and motels as examples of covered occupancies, but the list was illustrative rather than exhaustive. Local fire marshals and building codes decided which buildings had to comply based on occupancy classification. For hotels and motels, public assembly areas with ten or more articles of seating furniture were generally within scope.
What made TB 133 unusual was that it tested the finished piece, not just the materials. A complete chair or sofa (or a full-scale mock-up built from identical materials) was placed inside a controlled burn room roughly 12 by 10 feet with an 8-foot ceiling, and instruments recorded temperature, smoke density, carbon monoxide, and weight loss during the burn.2Department of Consumer Affairs. Technical Bulletin 133 – Flammability Test Procedure for Seating Furniture for Use in Public Occupancies A standardized square propane burner, calibrated to approximate five crumpled sheets of newspaper on a seat cushion, served as the ignition source.3ASTM International. E1537 Standard Test Method for Fire Testing of Upholstered Furniture The furniture then burned freely while the instrumentation ran.
Because the test targeted the whole assembly under direct flame, manufacturers found it very hard to pass without loading foam or fabric (or both) with chemical flame retardants.
Why California Repealed It
The chemistry that got furniture through TB 133 came at a cost. California’s Bureau found that state residents carried higher body levels of flame retardants than people in other states and that furniture flammability regulations were a likely contributor. The Bureau concluded that keeping TB 133 in force meant continued consumer exposure to “large levels of harmful chemicals,” and that moving to TB 117-2013 would cut that exposure while preserving meaningful fire safety protection.4Department of Consumer Affairs. Final Statement of Reasons – Amendment to Flammability Standards The regulatory action formally removed TB 133’s requirements and labeling provisions on January 22, 2019.1Department of Consumer Affairs. State of California Office of Administrative Law – Notice of Approval
What California Requires Now
Upholstered furniture in California public occupancies now falls under the same rule as all other upholstered furniture in the state: Technical Bulletin 117-2013. Instead of burning a finished piece, TB 117-2013 tests individual components (cover fabrics, resilient filling, barrier materials, and decking) for smolder resistance, evaluating each for char length, continued smoldering, and transition to open flame.5U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Upholstered Furniture The scenario it simulates is a dropped cigarette rather than a direct flame. This design lets manufacturers meet the standard without chemical additives, often by using a fire-resistant barrier layer under a cover fabric that would fail the smolder test on its own.6State of California Department of Consumer Affairs. Technical Bulletin 117-2013 – Requirements, Test Procedure and Apparatus for Testing the Smolder Resistance of Materials Used in Upholstered Furniture
California’s SB 1019 also requires manufacturers to label covered products indicating whether they contain added flame-retardant chemicals, which gives institutional purchasers a way to compare products on that basis.
The Federal Standard
TB 117-2013 is now the national baseline as well. The Safer Occupancy Furniture Flammability Act, signed in December 2020, directed the Consumer Product Safety Commission to adopt TB 117-2013 as a mandatory federal rule under 16 CFR Part 1640. Since June 25, 2021, all residential upholstered furniture sold in the United States must comply with TB 117-2013’s smolder-resistance tests, and since June 25, 2022, qualifying products manufactured or imported must carry a permanent label reading “Complies with U.S. CPSC requirements for upholstered furniture flammability.”5U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Upholstered Furniture
Open-Flame Testing Under NFPA 101
Even though California dropped its open-flame requirement, open-flame-level testing has not disappeared from every rulebook a public-occupancy facility has to follow. The NFPA 101 Life Safety Code requires all newly introduced upholstered furniture to pass a smoldering ignition test, and in buildings without an approved automatic sprinkler system it also requires furniture in certain occupancies to pass an open-flame heat release test under ASTM E1537. The limits are a peak heat release rate no higher than 80 kilowatts and no more than 25 megajoules of total heat in the first ten minutes.7National Fire Protection Association. NFPA 101 First Revision Report – 2026 Edition Fully sprinklered buildings are generally exempt from that open-flame requirement. ASTM E1537 was designed as a more general version of the TB 133 test procedure and measures many of the same characteristics.3ASTM International. E1537 Standard Test Method for Fire Testing of Upholstered Furniture
Anyone buying furniture for a healthcare building, assembly space, correctional facility, or similar occupancy should check the local fire code adoption to see whether ASTM E1537 testing still applies to that specific building. TB 133 is gone; the question of open-flame performance isn’t always gone with it.