What to charge as a self-employed electrician: day rates, hourly rates and CIS

What self-employed electricians charge in 2026, before CIS and expenses

Published UK cost guides put a domestic electrician's hourly rate at roughly £45 to £60 in 2026, rising to £80 to £100 in London and the South East, with day rates commonly quoted between £250 and £400. Those figures come from consumer-facing quote guides, so they describe what a householder is told to expect, not what a subcontractor is paid on site. The gap between the two is where most pricing mistakes live.

Below are the ranges the main public guides report for 2026, what basis each one is quoted on, and where the number comes from. Treat every row as a trade-reported benchmark to test your own numbers against. None of these are official statistics and none of them know your overheads.

Basis	Typical published range (2026)	Source and caveat
Domestic hourly, most of the UK	£45 to £60	Checkatrade and MyBuilder consumer cost guides; supply and fit, gross of materials
Domestic hourly, London and South East	£80 to £100	Same guides; regional uplift, higher cost base
Emergency or out of hours call-out	Around £80 to £100 per hour	Consumer guides; usually a minimum charge plus hourly thereafter
Domestic day rate (8 hours)	£250 to £400	Checkatrade quotes roughly £400 (8 hours at around £50); trade guides report £250 to £350 as more typical
Commercial day rate	£300 to £500	Trade training and estimating guides; wider spread by contract and region
Specialist (testing and inspection, EV, data centres)	£300 to £450	Trade guides; premium reflects qualification, calibrated kit and liability
Add a new socket in a new position	£100 to £200 typical, supply and fit	Consumer cost guides; a like-for-like swap is often quoted around £75

Two corrections before you use any of it. First, a labour-only subcontract day rate is usually below the domestic figure, because the main contractor supplies the materials, provides continuity of work and absorbs the cost of winning it. Second, if you are benchmarking against employed operatives, look up the current JIB national standard rates directly rather than working from a blog, because they are revised and a stale figure is worse than no figure.

Subcontractor day rates versus direct customer pricing

The commercial trade-off between the two is real, and it is not only about the headline number.

Subcontract work through a main contractor gives you volume, predictable weeks and no sales cost. In exchange you accept a lower rate, payment terms you did not set, retention on some contracts, and the 20% CIS deduction on your labour. Direct domestic work pays more per hour but you carry the quoting, the chasing, the material purchasing, the warranty calls and the gaps between jobs.

Most self-employed electricians run a mix, and the mix is the actual pricing decision. A subcontract day rate that fills four days a week at a predictable margin can outperform a higher domestic rate that fills two and a half days. Work out your realistic chargeable days under each before you decide which rate is better.

If you are new to working under the scheme, start with our guide to how the Construction Industry Scheme works, then the detail of CIS deduction rates and how they are applied.

Pricing models: hourly, day rate, per point and per job for CIS subcontractors

Four models cover almost all electrical work. Each one puts the risk of a job overrunning in a different place.

• Hourly, usually with a minimum charge. Best for fault finding, reactive call-outs and small alterations where the time genuinely cannot be known in advance. The customer carries the overrun risk, so keep a written minimum and a clear start time.
• Day rate. Best for subcontract site work, where a contractor books you for a period and supplies materials. The contractor carries the overrun risk. Confirm what happens to a half day and to travel days before you start.
• Per point. A fixed price per socket, light point or circuit. Best for repeat first-fix work on new build and refurbishment where the work is uniform and you can measure your own output per day accurately.
• Per job (fixed price). Best for defined domestic work: consumer unit changes, rewires, EV charger installations. You carry the overrun risk and keep the gain when it runs short, which is why it is the most profitable model for an electrician who estimates well and the most damaging for one who does not.

A practical rule for fixed pricing: never quote a fixed price on a property you have not surveyed. Behind plaster, in loft spaces and under floors is where fixed-price jobs are lost.

What your rate must cover: expenses, insurance and non-chargeable days

A day rate is not income. It is turnover from which everything else has to come first, and the two costs electricians most often forget are non-chargeable time and vehicle depreciation.

There are around 253 working days in a year before holiday. A self-employed electrician who takes four weeks off, loses a few days to sickness, and spends one day a fortnight quoting, ordering, certifying and chasing invoices is realistically charging for around 200 days. That is a 21% reduction in chargeable days against the theoretical maximum, so your rate needs to be roughly 25% higher than a naive salary calculation suggests.

Then the annual running costs. The categories below are the ones that recur for a working domestic and light commercial electrician. The amounts vary widely, so treat the structure as the point rather than the figures.

Cost	Why it hits electricians specifically
Van running costs	Claimed either at the AMAP flat rate of 55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles from 6 April 2026 (25p after), or as actual costs with capital allowances
Test equipment and calibration	Multifunction testers are capital items, and calibration is a recurring annual cost that certification schemes expect to see
Competent person scheme membership and assessment	Notifiable domestic work in England and Wales has to be certified, either through scheme registration or by notifying building control per job
Public liability and professional indemnity insurance	Design and certification work carries liability that general public liability cover may not reach
Qualification renewals and update courses	Wiring regulations updates, ECS card renewal and inspection and testing requalification
Tax and NIC set-aside	Not an expense, but the single largest cash outflow most subcontractors fail to plan for
Pension	No employer contribution exists when you work for yourself, so it has to come out of the rate

The full picture of what an electrician can deduct is set out in our guide to allowable expenses for CIS subcontractors, and the capital side (van, testers, tooling) in vans, tools and capital allowances for trades in 2026/27.

The CIS deduction is not a cost, but it is a cash flow problem

When a contractor pays you, they deduct 20% if you are registered, 30% if you are not, or nothing at all if you hold gross payment status. Critically, the deduction applies to the labour element only. Materials you have bought for the job are excluded from the deduction base, as is VAT.

Worked through: an invoice of £1,400 made up of £900 labour and £500 materials produces a deduction of 20% on the £900, which is £180, and a payment to you of £1,220. If the contractor deducts on the full £1,400 you lose £100 of cash flow on that one invoice for no reason. Split labour and materials explicitly on every invoice.

None of that changes your price. The deduction is an advance payment of the income tax and Class 4 National Insurance you would owe anyway, and it is credited back on your Self Assessment return. What it does is remove a fifth of your labour income before you have paid for anything, which is why so many electricians have a profitable year and a difficult cash year at the same time.

From day rate to take-home: a worked 2026/27 self-assessment example

Take a sole-trader electrician working mainly subcontract, at a £280 day rate over 200 chargeable days in 2026/27, registered for CIS so deductions run at 20%.

Item	Amount
Gross labour invoiced (200 days at £280)	£56,000
CIS deducted at 20% on labour	£11,200
Cash actually received during the year	£44,800
Van: 14,000 business miles (10,000 at 55p, 4,000 at 25p)	£6,500
Test equipment, tooling and calibration	£2,200
Public liability and tools insurance	£700
Phone (business proportion)	£350
PPE and workwear	£300
Scheme membership and qualification renewals	£250
Software, stationery and admin	£300
Use of home (101+ hours per month, 12 months)	£312
Total expenses	£10,912
Taxable profit	£45,088
Personal allowance (2026/27)	-£12,570
Income subject to tax	£32,518
Income tax at 20%	£6,504
Class 4 NIC at 6% on £32,518	£1,951
Class 2 NIC (profits above £7,105, treated as paid)	£0
Total tax and NIC liability	£8,455
CIS already deducted	£11,200
Refund due	£2,745
Net income after expenses and tax	£36,633
Effective take-home per chargeable day	£183

The headline rate is £280. The number that matters is £183, which is what a chargeable day is worth once the van, the kit, the insurance and the tax have been paid. Every pricing decision, whether to take a contract, whether to buy a second van, whether a job is worth the drive, should be tested against that figure and not against the day rate.

Note also that the refund exists because expenses are counted at the end of the year while deductions are taken throughout it. It is not a bonus, it is your own money returning after a delay of up to a year.

To model your own figures, put your day rate and expected days through our CIS take-home calculator, which applies the 2026/27 rates and shows what a rate change does to the bottom line.

Rate rises, VAT registration and the £90,000 turnover point

Two thresholds should shape how you plan rate increases rather than surprise you after the fact.

The first is VAT registration at £90,000 of taxable turnover on a rolling twelve-month basis. For subcontract and commercial work this is largely neutral, because your customers recover the VAT and the domestic reverse charge frequently means no VAT is charged on the invoice at all. For domestic customers it is a 20% price increase you cannot pass on, so an electrician approaching the threshold on mainly domestic work has a genuine strategic decision to make about mix and pricing.

The second is MTD for Income Tax. From April 2026, sole traders with gross income above £50,000 are in scope for quarterly digital reporting, and the threshold drops to £30,000 from April 2027. The word that catches CIS subcontractors out is gross. In the example above, the test figure is the £56,000 invoiced, not the £44,800 actually received after deductions. Our guide to MTD for Income Tax and CIS covers the mechanics.

If your turnover is growing towards these levels, it is also the point at which the trading structure question becomes live. The comparison is set out in CIS: sole trader or limited company, and the practical difference is that a limited company can recover CIS deductions in real time through the Employer Payment Summary rather than waiting for a year-end refund.

Pricing mistakes that cost electrician subcontractors money

Four patterns recur when reviewing the numbers behind an electrical business.

Pricing off a salary figure. Dividing a target salary by 253 days ignores holiday, sickness, quoting time and the absence of employer pension contributions. Use 200 chargeable days as a starting assumption and adjust from your own diary.

Not splitting labour and materials on invoices. On a materials-heavy job this is straightforwardly expensive, because the contractor deducts 20% from money that should never have entered the calculation. The correction is a two-line invoice, nothing more.

Holding a rate for years. Van costs, insurance, calibration and material prices move every year. A rate held for three years is a real-terms pay cut, and the easiest time to raise it is when you take on a new contractor or a new domestic customer, not mid-contract.

Treating the CIS refund as profit. It is the return of an overpayment, and it is already inside the £36,633 in the example above. Spending it as a windfall means spending money that was always yours and was already counted.

Setting a rate is an arithmetic problem before it is a market problem: work out your realistic chargeable days, your true annual running costs and your tax position, and the floor beneath your price becomes obvious. The published benchmarks tell you whether that floor is competitive in your region, and the gap between the two is your margin. Where the benchmarks and your own numbers disagree, your numbers win.

If you want your rates, expenses and CIS position reviewed together rather than in isolation, see how we work with self-employed electricians and electrical contractors.