Landlord electrical safety checks: what to charge and how to certify

What the regulations require, and why it matters for CIS trades

Every private rented home in England has required a valid electrical inspection report since 1 April 2021, when the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 finished phasing in across existing tenancies. The maximum financial penalty a local housing authority can impose on a landlord in breach was raised from £30,000 to £40,000 by the 2025 amendment regulations, which also extended the regime into the social rented sector from 1 November 2025. For an electrician, that is not a compliance story. It is a legally mandated, calendar-driven job that repeats every five years across a client's entire portfolio.

This guide sets out the duties the landlord is buying help with, what the market is paying in 2026, how to build a landlord and letting agent client base, and how CIS deductions, VAT and expenses apply once the work starts flowing. If you want the product-level detail on the report itself, its validity period and how the coding works, see our companion guide to EICR certificates and how to price the job. This page is about the landlord market specifically.

The duties sit on the landlord, not on you. But the landlord almost never knows what they are, and the electrician who can recite them accurately on a first phone call converts far better than the one quoting a price alone. The table below is the whole regime in one place.

Duty	Deadline
Inspection and test by a qualified person	At least every 5 years, or sooner if the report specifies
Report supplied to the existing tenant	Within 28 days of the inspection and test
Report supplied to a new tenant	Before they occupy the premises
Report supplied to a prospective tenant	Within 28 days of a request
Report supplied to the local housing authority	Within 7 days of a request
Landlord retains a copy of the report	Until the next inspection is due or carried out
Remedial or further investigative work where the report is unsatisfactory	Within 28 days, or any shorter period the report specifies
Written confirmation of remedial work to tenant and local authority	Within 28 days of the work being completed

The standard being tested against is BS 7671, the 18th Edition Wiring Regulations. The regulations do not name a certification scheme, and they do not use the phrase "landlord electrical safety certificate" at all. What they require is a report, and in practice that is an EICR on the model BS 7671 form.

The 28-day remedial rule is where a subcontractor's margin lives

The inspection itself is a low-margin, high-competition product. The remedial work is not. When a report comes back unsatisfactory because of a C1 (danger present), a C2 (potentially dangerous) or an FI (further investigation required), the landlord has 28 days to get it put right and then needs written confirmation from the qualified person who carried out the work.

That written confirmation requirement is the commercial point. The landlord is not shopping around for a second electrician to do the repairs when the clock is running and the paperwork has to tie back to a competent person. If you are on site, have the fault list, and can quote the remedial work before you leave, the job is usually yours.

Three habits turn that into money rather than goodwill:

• Quote the remedials on site, in writing, the same day. A verbal "that consumer unit needs doing" is not a quote and does not create urgency.
• Separate the report fee and the remedial work on the invoice. It keeps the pricing honest, it makes the labour and materials split visible for CIS purposes, and it stops a landlord treating the whole thing as one inflated inspection bill.
• Make a C1 safe before you leave and bill the making-safe separately. It is a distinct piece of work and it is not part of an inspection fee.

The trap to avoid is coding defensively to manufacture remedial work. Scheme assessors and landlord bodies both watch for it, and one contested report can cost you an agent relationship worth several years of steady jobs.

What to charge, and the expenses that shape the price

Published 2026 UK cost guides put a domestic inspection somewhere between £100 and £300, with a standard three-bedroom house typically quoted at £150 to £250 and London and the South East running roughly 15% to 30% higher. Those are consumer-facing directory figures rather than a survey of trade invoices, so use them as a market signal and price the actual job from the circuit count, the age of the installation and the access.

Property type	Typical published 2026 range	What actually moves the price
1-bed flat	£100 to £150	Circuit count is low, but shared supplies and landlord access to meter cupboards cost time
2-bed house or flat	£120 to £180	Straightforward if the board is modern and accessible
3-bed house	£150 to £250	The volume job. Pre-2000 installations take materially longer
4-bed and larger	£200 to £300	Circuit count, outbuildings, extensions on separate boards
HMO	Priced per circuit or per day	Multiple consumer units, fire alarm interfaces, tenant access across several rooms

Ranges are drawn from published 2026 UK trade cost guides and are indicative only. A typical domestic inspection is commonly quoted at two to four hours on site, which is the number that matters: an inspection at £180 that runs to four hours plus an hour of report writing and an hour of travel is not a £180 job, it is roughly £30 an hour before any cost at all.

The costs that quietly eat this work are travel between scattered properties, abortive visits where nobody answers the door, and the report write-up time nobody quotes for. Build all three into the price. If you cover a wide area of rented stock, log every mile: the AMAP flat rate from 6 April 2026 is 55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles and 25p after that, so 12,000 business miles is a £6,000 deduction. Your multifunction tester, its annual calibration, scheme registration and assessment fees, insurance and certification software are all allowable, and larger equipment purchases normally qualify in full in the year of purchase under the Annual Investment Allowance. The full list is in our guide to allowable expenses for CIS subcontractors.

Building a landlord client base as a CIS electrician

One-off inspections found through a directory are the lowest-value version of this work. The volume sits with the people who hold multiple properties: letting agents, block managers, portfolio landlords and, since November 2025, housing associations and councils working through the social rented sector extension.

What those buyers want is not the cheapest price. It is a tester who turns up, issues the report the same week, uses consistent coding, and hands them a document they can forward to a tenant without editing. Practical ways in:

• Approach letting agents with the compliance calendar, not a price list. An agent managing 200 properties has 40 reports falling due a year and usually no system for spotting them.
• Offer to audit an agent's existing reports for expiry dates. It is an hour of work and it hands you a diarised pipeline.
• Put the next-inspection date in your own diary the moment you issue a report, and contact the landlord 90 days before it expires. Five-year renewals are worthless if you have to be reminded by the client.
• Take gas and EPC renewal dates too where the landlord will share them. You are not doing that work, but knowing the compliance calendar makes you the person they call.
• Agree an abortive visit fee in writing before the first job. No-access visits are the single biggest margin leak in rented stock.

On access: the 2025 amendment regulations confirmed that a landlord who took all reasonable steps is not in breach simply because a tenant refused entry. That defence runs on evidence, so document every appointment offered and every failed visit and send it to the client the same day. It protects them and it justifies your fee.

Do landlord inspection jobs carry a CIS deduction?

This is where electricians get caught out, and the honest answer is that it depends on who is paying you and for what.

CIS applies where a contractor pays a subcontractor for construction operations. A private landlord instructing you directly is normally not a contractor at all, so no deduction arises and you invoice in full. A letting agent paying out of client money on the landlord's behalf is usually in the same position. But a property maintenance company that subcontracts the work to you is a contractor, and any business that has spent over £3 million on construction operations in the previous 12 months can become a deemed contractor, which catches larger letting and property management groups.

The second question is whether the work itself is a construction operation. Remedial and installation electrical work plainly is. Pure inspection, testing and report writing is less clear cut, and HMRC's list of excluded operations does not settle it either way. The safe operating position is to assume the remedial element is within CIS, split labour and materials on every invoice, and ask the payer for their CIS status in writing before the first job rather than after the first deduction lands. Remember that deductions apply to the labour element only: materials are excluded from the deduction base, so a £900 remedial job with £500 labour and £400 materials carries a 20% deduction of £100, not £180.

If you are unsure how a mixed inspection and remedial invoice should break down, our CIS invoice splitter shows the deduction on the labour element and the net figure you should expect to receive. For the wider picture of which jobs fall inside the scheme, start with what the Construction Industry Scheme actually covers.

VAT: landlords are usually end users

The VAT domestic reverse charge applies to specified construction services between parties who are both VAT-registered and CIS-registered, where the customer is not an end user. A private landlord having their own rented property inspected and repaired is consuming the service rather than selling it on, so they are an end user and you charge VAT in the normal way.

Where you are subcontracting to a building contractor or a property maintenance firm that is itself supplying the landlord, the reverse charge can apply and the VAT treatment flips. Get the end user statement in writing and keep it on file. Our guide to the VAT reverse charge in construction covers the end user exception and the 5% de minimis rule in full.

One further point of timing. If your gross turnover crossed £50,000 for the 2024/25 tax year you have been inside Making Tax Digital for Income Tax since 6 April 2026, and the threshold drops to £30,000 for 2025/26 income (from April 2027) and £20,000 for 2026/27 income (from April 2028). A steady book of landlord compliance work is exactly the kind of income that pushes a sole-trader electrician over those lines, and gross means turnover before any CIS deduction, not what lands in the bank.

Turning a legal duty into a limited company revenue line

The strength of this work is that it is not discretionary and it is not weather-dependent. A landlord cannot decide to skip it, and every satisfactory report you issue creates a dated obligation to come back. Once the volume justifies it, the structure question follows: a growing testing book with retained agent relationships often reaches the point where operating through a limited company, and reclaiming CIS deductions in real time through the Employer Payment Summary rather than waiting for a Self Assessment refund, changes the cash flow materially. Our comparison of CIS as a sole trader versus a limited company sets out where that line usually sits.

Landlord electrical safety work rewards the electrician who treats it as a compliance service rather than a job. Know the duties better than the landlord does, quote the remedials before you leave site, diary every five-year renewal, and get the CIS and VAT position agreed in writing before the first invoice. The reports are the entry point; the portfolio relationship is the business.

If you want your testing income, expenses and CIS position reviewed properly before the next tax year, our accounting service for electricians covers the whole picture.