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NFPA 704 Diamond Generator

Set the four quadrants and get a correctly proportioned fire diamond you can print or download as an SVG. Each rating shows what it means as you pick it, so you can sanity check a number before it goes on a door.

This builds the placard, it does not assign the ratings Section 16 of the safety data sheet for your specific product is the right source, because ratings apply to that formulation rather than to the pure chemical. NOAA CAMEO Chemicals publishes ratings for many substances as well. This tool will not infer a rating from flashpoint or any other property, because assigning one is a judgment made under the NFPA 704 standard, and a number guessed here could end up on a building where responders rely on it.

Build the Diamond

Health (blue)
Flammability (red)
Instability (yellow)
Special notice (white)

How to Read It

What each quadrant is for

The diamond is turned on point. Blue on the left is the health hazard, red on top is flammability, yellow on the right is instability or reactivity, and white at the bottom carries special notices rather than a number.

Blue, red and yellow are rated 0 through 4. Zero means no special hazard beyond that of ordinary combustible material. Four is the most severe. The scale is about the degree of hazard to emergency responders during a short, intense exposure, which is why it does not line up with chronic health measures like a permissible exposure limit.

NFPA 704 is not a DOT placard

These get mixed up constantly. NFPA 704 is a fixed facility marking. Its job is to tell a responder arriving at a building, tank or storage room what they are walking into.

DOT placards under 49 CFR part 172 subpart F mark hazardous materials in transport, and they are driven by hazard class and quantity, not by a 0 to 4 rating. A drum going on a truck needs the DOT marking and labels, not a fire diamond.

If you need the transport side, use the DOT Placard Calculator or the UN Number Lookup.

When is a diamond actually required?

NFPA 704 is a consensus standard, not a federal regulation. It becomes enforceable where a state or local fire code adopts it, which many jurisdictions do by adopting the International Fire Code or a similar model code. Whether you must post one, how large it must be, and where it goes on the building are all questions for the fire code official with jurisdiction over your site.

Separately, OSHA hazard communication at 29 CFR 1910.1200 requires labels on containers in the workplace, but that is the GHS label system with its own pictograms, not NFPA 704. Meeting one does not satisfy the other.

Why this tool will not guess a rating

It would be easy to map a flashpoint to a flammability number and show something. We do not, for two reasons.

The first is that the classification criteria belong to the NFPA 704 standard itself, which is copyrighted, so reproducing the thresholds here is not ours to do. The second matters more: ratings are assigned to a specific product, and a formulation can behave differently from the pure substance it is named after. A number derived here from a boiling point would be a guess wearing the authority of a placard, and someone would eventually make an entry decision on it.

Read it off the SDS, or off CAMEO. Then use this to render it properly.

This is a drawing tool. SpillNerd is not affiliated with the National Fire Protection Association. NFPA 704 is a copyrighted consensus standard; this page describes how the marking system is read and renders a placard from values you supply, and does not reproduce the standard, its classification criteria, or its chemical rating tables. Confirm the ratings against the safety data sheet for your product and confirm posting requirements with your local fire code official before relying on any placard.