How to price an electrical job in the UK

Published guides put an electrician at roughly £40 to £70 an hour outside London. Use that as a sense check and nothing more. It won't tell you if you're making money at that price, and neither will the van down the road.

Start from what you need, compare it with the market, then decide how each type of work gets charged. A fault, a consumer unit and an EICR carry very different risks, so one rate for all three is a mistake.

What the published guides say

They don't agree, so here they are side by side.

Read them with care. Fantastic Services sells electrical work and Whito runs a directory. Best Builders gives no date or method. Logic4training is a training firm surveying people it trained, and its hourly average dropped from £44 in 2025. These are outside-London figures where a guide splits them: Fantastic Services puts London at £55 to £75 an hour, and Best Builders says £65 to £100 for London and the South East. Checkatrade's hourly page still refers to 2021, so I've ignored it.

Build your rate from the van up

The sum takes three inputs: the pay you want, the cost of running the business, and the hours a customer will actually pay for.

That's inside the published range, and it shows how someone on £48 an hour can be flat out and still short. Those 1,080 hours at £48 bring in £51,840, which is £12,180 under what this example needs.

The £42,000 sits close to the £39,039 median that Logic4training quotes from ONS figures. An employee on that money doesn't buy a van, a tester or insurance, though.

The hours you never bill

That 60% is my working assumption, not a published figure. Test results, tenants who won't answer, wholesaler runs and certificates all eat the week without appearing on an invoice. Track two normal weeks and use what you find.

A swing from 50% to 70% takes £20 off the rate. Finishing certificates on site, not at home at night, is a pricing decision.

One charging method won't fit every job

A consumer unit, costed

That lands inside the Fantastic Services and Best Builders ranges. It also shows why an hourly figure misleads. The customer hears "£59 an hour", when you're selling a tested board, a certificate and a notification.

Trade2Base, a vendor, calls mark-ups of 20% to 35% typical on standard items. I've no independent figure, so treat it as a starting point. Count scheme costs too: NICEIC lists online certificates at £1.60 plus VAT per installation.

One line saves a lot of arguments: "If testing shows faults on existing circuits, I'll stop, show you and agree the price before carrying on." A new board can expose old faults that never tripped anything.

Why a £220 EICR can lose money

My clearest opinion in this guide: a cheap one-off EICR is often a loss, and pricing it low to fish for remedial work is a bad habit.

The cheaper job pays better because the driving's gone. Batch by postcode, and price by bedrooms or circuits.

Keep the report honest, too. If it calls for remedial work, a private landlord in England has 28 days or less, so your coding costs them real money. The code must come from the installation, never from what you'd like to sell. Quote remedials separately and let the landlord choose who does them. I'd expect that to win you more agency work than sharp pricing ever will.

Fixed price, or time charge?

Customers hear these words differently, so choose on purpose.

• A quote is a fixed price.
• An estimate is a best guess, and a final bill far above it can be disputed.
• With no agreed price, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 says a consumer pays a reasonable one.

A time charge or estimate is the honest way to sell fault-finding. For a board swap, I'd fix the price and use the line above about existing circuits.

The kitchen table trap

A job you agree in a customer's home is usually an off-premises contract under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013.

Urgent repairs are the big exception for this trade. There's no right to cancel where the customer specifically asked you out for urgent repairs or maintenance, but regulation 28 doesn't stretch to extra services, or goods beyond the necessary parts.

So picture a tripping RCD callout, which counts as urgent, where you find an old fuse board and price a new consumer unit at the table. The callout falls under the exception. The board probably doesn't, so hand over the notice. Contracts of £42 or less sit outside these rules.

Landlords are murkier. A company buying an EICR isn't a consumer. An individual with one flat may or may not be, so I'd give the notice anyway. Ask your scheme or trade body if it has a form. This is general information, not legal advice.

VAT on electrical work

Registration is compulsory once taxable turnover goes over £90,000 in any 12 months, or you expect that in the next 30 days. At the example rate, £59 becomes £70.80.

Three points are particular to this trade:

• HMRC's Notice 708/6 gives solar panels and batteries in homes a zero rate to 31 March 2027, then 5% from 1 April 2027. It doesn't mention EV chargers, so don't assume they qualify.
• The domestic reverse charge can apply when you and your customer are both VAT-registered and the work is reported under CIS.
• CIS deductions on work for builders hit your cash flow, so allow for them.

Ask your accountant which treatment fits each job.

Putting your rates up

• Pick one date a year.
• Tell regular customers and agents first, in a short message.
• Set a minimum charge, and stop losing money on one-socket visits.
• Chase quotes. My guess is that silence loses more of them than price does.

The text templates include a quote follow-up you can copy.

David Bell, founder of Real Business Systems

David helps small UK businesses get found, answer every enquiry and keep customers coming back. We sell some of the services mentioned here, and we say so where they come up.