Predicting the fire resistance of structures has been significantly advanced by full scale fire tests in conjunction with improved understanding of compartmental fire. Despite the progress, application of insulation is still required to parts of structural steelwork to achieve over 60 minutes of fire rating. It is now recognised that uncertainties on insulation properties hinder adaptation of performance based designs for different types of structures. Intumescent coating has recently appeared to be one of most popular insulation types for steel structures, but its design method remains to be confirmed by empirical data, as technical difficulties on the determination of the material properties at elevated temperatures exist. These need to take into account of further physiochemical transitions such as moving boundary and endothermic reaction. The impetus for this research is to investigate the applicability of the conventional differential equation solution which examines the temperature rise on coated steel members by an inorganic intumescent coating, provided that the temperature-dependent thermal/mechanical insulation properties are experimentally defined in lab scale tests.