This presentation is primarily intended to stimulate and facilitate a future development towards an improved situation for a reliability based structural fire engineering design of timber structures. The state of the art is reviewed and a structure of a design guide or a model code is outlined. The document is written in a partially operational manner, allowing practical application for some types of timber structures. The need of further research and development is stressed and exemplified. The study relates to reseach grant 81-4902 from the Swedish Board for Technical Development (STU).