Dead Load

Dead load is the permanent, static weight of the building and its fixed components — structural slab, raised access floor, ceiling systems, fixed partitions, and installed MEP services. Unlike live loads (furniture, people, equipment), dead loads do not change once construction is complete.

In fit-out projects, understanding the structural slab's dead and live load capacity is critical before specifying heavy elements: a stone reception desk, a server room with dense equipment racking, a raised access floor with a 300 mm void, or a mezzanine. A project in Hadapsar retrofitted a dense battery bank for a large UPS without checking the slab's dead load capacity — the resulting structural remediation cost was significant. Always get a structural engineer to confirm capacity before adding any significant non-standard load to an existing floor.

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