Pemko
Pemko is a US manufacturer of commercial door gasketing, weatherstripping, thresholds, continuous hinges, and door bottoms based in Ventura, California. Founded in 1952 and now part of ASSA ABLOY Americas, Pemko is the brand locksmiths, specifiers, and facility managers reach for when a commercial door has to hold a fire rating, pass a smoke-seal inspection, meet ADA threshold requirements, or actually stop air infiltration through the perimeter.
If you have ever watched a fire door inspector walk a building with a flashlight and a feeler gauge, you have watched someone checking Pemko gasketing. The parts are small, the margins that matter are measured in fractions of an inch, and one failed gasket is enough to take a fire door out of code compliance. Pro crews keep Pemko on hand because it is the default brand the architect wrote into the drawings and the default brand the inspector expects to see in the frame.
What Pemko makes
The catalog covers the full perimeter of a commercial opening. On the head and jambs you get perimeter gasketing in adhesive and kerf-in styles, meeting-stile seals for pairs of doors, and S-label fire and smoke gasketing in silicone and neoprene. On the bottom edge you get door shoes, drop-down automatic door bottoms in full mortise and surface mount, and sweeps for everything from warehouse openings to upscale hotel corridors. At the sill you get saddle thresholds, latching panic exit thresholds for IBC panic hardware compatibility, and ADA-compliant offset thresholds sized for accessible routes.
On this site, the full Pemko catalog is organized into three collections:
- Door Seals & Gasketing — perimeter gasketing, fire and smoke seals, automatic door bottoms, door shoes, and sweeps
- Thresholds — saddle, offset, panic exit, and ADA-compliant commercial thresholds
- Continuous Hinges — full mortise, full surface, and half surface commercial hinges
Beyond gasketing, Pemko manufactures continuous hinges through its Markar line. Full mortise, full surface, half surface, and wide throw variants in pin-and-barrel and geared types, all designed for openings where traditional butt hinges fail under the load of a heavy commercial door cycled tens of thousands of times a year. Airports, schools, and hospitals swap out butt hinges for Pemko/Markar continuous hinges when the maintenance budget stops tolerating repeat repairs.
Flagship gasketing series use PemkoPrene, a proprietary elastomer engineered for compression-set stability and temperature cycling. PemkoPrene holds its seal through the twenty-year service life a commercial fire door actually sees, and it holds through the hose-down, bleach-wipe cleaning cycles you get in healthcare and food service.
Testing and compliance
Pemko was the original innovator behind the S-label smoke gasket under UL 10C fire door assembly testing, which is the positive pressure standard every rated door in a commercial building has to meet. Fire door gasketing from Pemko ships with UL 10C listings across the core series so installers can apply it without re-rating the opening. Smoke-rated openings on corridors and stairwells in healthcare and hospitality get the UL 1784 S-label version, which measures air leakage at the perimeter under test conditions.
Fire door gasketing lives in the same compliance universe as the through-penetration firestopping the rest of the rated assembly depends on. A fire door in a rated wall only does its job if the wall and floor penetrations around it also pass ASTM E814 firestop testing. Annual firestop inspections catch failed through-penetrations at the same time inspectors check door gasketing, so facility managers often order gasketing and firestop parts in the same maintenance window.
On the exterior envelope, Pemko weatherstripping and thresholds connect directly to the air-infiltration metrics commercial energy codes track. ASTM E2112 fenestration installation calls out the detail where a door perimeter seal meets the jamb and flashing, and Pemko gasketing is the part that makes that joint actually work.
Core products carry a mix of the following certifications:
- UL 10C — Positive pressure fire door assembly testing (required on rated openings in commercial buildings)
- UL 1784 — Air leakage testing for smoke-rated door assemblies (the S-label seen on healthcare and high-rise corridor doors)
- ANSI/BHMA A156.22 — Door gasketing and edge seal systems
- ANSI/BHMA A156.21 — Thresholds
- ASTM E283 — Air infiltration through exterior doors, a metric commercial energy codes watch closely
- ASTM E90 — Airborne sound transmission loss (relevant for acoustic seal sets)
- ADA / ANSI A117.1 — Accessibility threshold height (1/2 inch max with a 1:2 bevel on anything over 1/4 inch)
- GREENGUARD Gold — Low chemical emission certification for indoor air quality, common on gasketing specified for schools and healthcare
- Warnock Hersey — Alternate fire listing accepted alongside UL on many opening schedules
Fire door gasketing is one of the line items that annual NFPA 80 fire door inspections flag most often. Worn perimeter seals, missing intumescent strips, and broken drop-down door bottoms are the most common failing conditions a certified fire door inspector writes up, and replacement has to happen fast to keep the opening in compliance. This is where facility managers, property managers, and pro locksmiths end up buying Pemko in quantity.
Where Pemko gets installed
The spec crosses basically every market where building code drives hardware selection. IBC Chapter 10 means of egress requirements put fire-rated gasketed doors on exit corridors, stairwells, and smoke compartments. IBC corridor width rules put them on hospital wings and assembly occupancies. NFPA 101 Life Safety Code pulls them into existing buildings through Chapter 43, and IBC Chapter 34 existing building provisions is the section that catches retrofits and alterations when a building is being updated to current compliance. Healthcare, K-12 and higher education, hotels and hospitality, office towers, stadiums and arenas, multifamily housing, airports, data centers, and manufacturing plants all show up in Pemko's installed base.
On any given commercial door, Pemko gasketing has to work alongside the rest of the hardware stack. That includes the closer holding the door in the frame under ANSI/BHMA A156.4, the exit device on the hinge stile meeting both ANSI/BHMA A156.3 and UL 305 panic hardware testing, and any electric strike or access control hardware in the frame. Pemko products are designed to integrate without interfering with any of it.
Replacement and specification patterns
Facility managers typically replace Pemko gasketing in one of three situations. First, the annual fire door inspection flags a failing seal and the inspector writes up a correction. Second, a door bottom drags or jams and maintenance pulls the old unit for a new one. Third, HVAC or energy audits trace air infiltration to the door perimeter and someone specs gasketing as an energy retrofit. In all three cases, the buyer already knows what they need. They just need to source it fast, get the right finish, and confirm the length.
New construction specification is different. An architect writes Pemko into the door hardware schedule during design, and the general contractor orders through the distributor the hardware supplier is running product through. The products that show up on our catalog are the replacement SKUs and the common spec sizes, not the special-order custom fabrications.
Made in USA
Every Pemko product on this site is manufactured at the Pemko facility in Ventura, California. The raw aluminum, silicone, neoprene, and hardware are sourced domestically, and the finished product ships from Ventura through the ASSA ABLOY Americas distribution network. Buying Pemko means buying commercial door hardware that stays in compliance with Buy American Act requirements on federal projects and with state-level domestic content rules on public works.
132 Products by Pemko
