Access control is about controlling who gets in. Fire and life-safety rules are about making sure everyone can get out. Those two goals meet at the same door, and the second one wins.
The underlying principle
People must be able to leave a building without needing a key, a code, a fob, or any special knowledge. That principle is remarkably consistent across codes even where the details differ, and almost every specific requirement is a version of it.
Which is why the interesting questions are all on the inside face of the door. Securing the outside is rarely controversial. Restricting the exit is where the rules live.
Where installs commonly go wrong
Putting a maglock on an exit door without any of the release arrangements that normally accompany one. Fitting a reader on the inside of a door that people need to leave through. Relying on a single push-to-exit button as if it were the whole answer. Not connecting the hardware to the fire alarm, so a fire condition does not release the doors.
Each of these tends to come from treating the door as a security problem in isolation, which is exactly the frame that misses the life-safety half.
Why this article will not give you the rule
Because there is not one rule. What applies depends on the occupancy classification of the building, which code edition your jurisdiction has adopted, whether the building is sprinklered, and the interpretation of the authority having jurisdiction. Two buildings a mile apart can get different answers.
Anyone who gives you a definite requirement without knowing those things is telling you what was true on their last job. Publishing a specific threshold here would be doing the same thing at scale, so this guide deliberately does not.
What to actually do
Identify which doors are in a means of egress before designing anything, because that is the set with constraints. Get the egress arrangement confirmed with the AHJ rather than assumed. Make sure the fire alarm interface is part of the scope and not an afterthought. And have it tested at handover, with someone watching the doors when the alarm goes.
None of this is difficult. It is just routinely skipped, and it is not the sort of thing you want to discover during an inspection or, worse, during an evacuation.
The paperwork worth keeping
The part of this that protects you later is the record. Keep whatever the AHJ confirmed and when, the specification of what was installed on each controlled door, and the results of the fire alarm interface test at handover.
The reason is unglamorous. Buildings change hands, tenants change, and the people who remember why a door was arranged a particular way leave. Two years on, an inspection or an incident will raise the question, and the answer needs to exist somewhere other than in an installer’s memory.
It matters more where doors get modified piecemeal. A building that was compliant when the system went in can stop being so because somebody added a lock, changed a closer, or repurposed a room into a different occupancy. Each of those is reasonable on its own and none of them automatically triggers a review.
A short annual walk of the controlled doors, checking they still release as designed, catches almost all of this.
Elite Security treats the egress question as part of the design rather than a formality at the end, and confirms it locally on every job. More like this in the blog, and access control is where to start.