The Facility Guidelines Institute is renaming its flagship documents. The 2026 edition of what has been the Guidelines for Design and Construction becomes the FGI Facility Code, with the codes and a companion set of handbooks scheduled for release in fall 2026.

The rename is the headline, and it is the least consequential part of the change. What actually matters to a facility director is the structural split underneath it.

Advisory text is leaving the document

Previous editions carried enforceable requirements in the body and advisory guidance in appendices, bound together. The 2026 documents drop the appendix guidance entirely. That material moves into a new series of FGI Handbooks released alongside the code, expanded with best practices, checklists, and diagrams.

The result is that the 2026 Facility Code is written end to end in enforceable language. There is no longer a recommendation register sitting inside the same covers as the requirements.

This is a deliberate alignment with how building codes are structured and adopted, and it removes a genuine and long-standing ambiguity — the appendix note that a reviewer treated as binding and a designer treated as optional. But it also means the two documents now have to be bought, distributed, and referenced separately, and a project team working only from the code no longer has the reasoning in front of it.

The practical consequences for facility teams

Your internal standards probably cite appendix language. Design standards, room data sheets, and vendor specifications written against past editions frequently quote or paraphrase appendix guidance without flagging it as advisory. When those references are updated to the 2026 edition, some of them will point at text that is no longer in the code at all — it is in a handbook. Every internal citation needs a source check, not a version bump.

Enforceable language changes review dynamics. Guidance that used to be negotiable in plan review is either a requirement now or it is not in the code. Teams accustomed to arguing appendix intent will find the conversation shorter and less flexible in both directions.

Budget for both documents. A facility department that buys the code and skips the handbooks loses the diagrams and checklists that made the appendices useful for staff who are not code specialists.

What is new in the content

Beyond the restructuring, the draft 2026 documents add and revise substantive requirements:

  • A new chapter on short-term outpatient care facilities, reflecting how much acute-adjacent care has moved out of the hospital.
  • A new chapter on residential behavioral and mental health treatment facilities — a building type that has been served indirectly for years.
  • Revised design considerations for rural emergency hospitals, following that designation’s establishment as a distinct facility class.
  • Updated room sizes and clearances for rehabilitation hospitals.
  • Revised planning requirements for procedure rooms and operating rooms.
  • Standards for discharged patient waiting facilities — discharge lounges — in the 2026 Hospital Code.

The discharge lounge addition is worth flagging for anyone running throughput initiatives. A space many hospitals improvised into a corridor alcove or a converted waiting area now has design standards attached, which changes both new construction and any renovation that formalises one.

Adoption is the part nobody should assume

The 2026 code being published in fall 2026 does not make it the governing document anywhere. FGI editions take effect through adoption — by state authorities having jurisdiction, and by accrediting organisations that reference a specific edition. Those adoptions run on their own schedules and routinely lag publication by years, and states adopt different editions from one another.

The practical position for a facility director this fall is therefore two-sided. Projects in design now are still governed by whichever edition the state has actually adopted, and nothing about the 2026 release changes that. But projects that will still be in design or construction when a state does adopt need to be checked against the new structure early, because a late edition change is expensive precisely in the areas the 2026 code touches — room clearances, procedure and OR planning, and a discharge lounge that may not have been programmed at all.

Find out where the state AHJ sits on adoption before deciding how urgently any of this applies. That single question determines whether the fall release is a planning input or a filing item.