CEN's technical committee for foot and leg protectors has finished revising EN 15090, the European standard governing footwear for firefighters. Ratification closed in August 2026, publication was recorded for late September, and the new edition supersedes the 2012 text. Like its predecessor it is a harmonised standard written in support of the EU's personal protective equipment regulation, and it is intended to be applied alongside the general safety footwear standard EN ISO 20345:2022, with test work following the EN ISO 20344 methods.
Where Chemical Protection Now Sits
The document keeps its three-type structure, and that is where most of the commercial consequence lies. Type 1 covers outdoor and rescue work. Type 2 addresses fire suppression, including wildland operations, with toe and puncture protection on top. Type 3 adds chemical protection to the highest tier, requiring resistance to both chemical degradation and permeation. Two construction classes remain side by side, covering leather-based footwear and all-polymeric or rubber boots. The edition also tightens outsole geometry, sets marking requirements, and adds annexes dealing with customized insocks and individually adapted boots.
For buyers, the practical effect of a chemical requirement being written into a mainstream footwear standard is that it becomes quotable in a tender. A fire and rescue service that once had to draft its own wording for chemical protection can now point to a recognised type, and the requirement is testable - which moves the discussion away from a general claim of chemical resistance and towards evidence.
What Type 3 Does Not Cover
The boundary is worth stating precisely. EN 15090 is a firefighter footwear standard, and its chemical provisions address the industrial and hazardous materials exposure profile of fire and rescue work. It is not an agent-level protective footwear standard. Where a unit expects to meet chemical warfare agents, unidentified substances or sustained vapor exposure, the evidence that matters remains agent-specific permeation and penetration testing against named challenges - a different report, from a different programme, answering a different question. Type 3 certification belongs in a specification as a baseline for hazardous materials response, not as a substitute for agent-level qualification.
The Glove Side of the Same Ensemble
Hand protection has not moved in step with footwear, and that asymmetry deserves attention from anyone drafting specifications now. The firefighter glove standard, EN 659, is built around heat, flame, cut and abrasion performance, with only limited resistance to incidental chemical contact; it is not intended for deliberate handling of liquid chemicals. A team carrying a Type 3 boot into a spill or a chemical incident can therefore end up with matched footwear and unmatched hand protection. Closing that gap means specifying a chemical protective glove from the appropriate chemical glove family, chosen against the agents the team genuinely expects to face, and confirming that both interfaces line up with the gas-tight suit system in service.
Documenting the Transition
A new edition always starts a documentation cycle. Type-examination against a superseded text invites questions, so suppliers that have been recycling reports produced to the previous edition will need to re-test or re-issue declarations, with the certified configuration matched precisely to the article being quoted. Buyers can protect themselves with three additions to the next footwear tender: confirm which edition the test report cites, ask for degradation and permeation data rather than a blanket resistance statement, and require batch traceability together with a stated shelf life.