Electrician hourly rate UK 2026: what to charge (not what to pay)

If you're searching "electrician hourly rate UK 2026" hoping for a single number to copy onto your quotes, here's the honest answer: there isn't one, because your rate has to cover your costs, not the market's. Two electricians running identical vans in the same postcode can have completely different true costs, so the number that's right for one of them could sink the other. What follows is the method for working out your own rate, refreshed for the year, plus a worked example with clearly labelled example numbers so you can see how it fits together before you plug in your own.

What is a fair electrician hourly rate in the UK for 2026?

There's no published "fair" rate to copy, and any page claiming one has either invented the figure or lifted it from a survey that doesn't reflect your overheads, your van, your area or your workload. The only reliable rate is one built from your own numbers: what your business needs to bring in over the year, divided by the hours you can actually charge a customer for, then loaded with the margin you need to keep the business alive and growing. That's the method. The rest of this guide walks through it.

Step 1: work out what your business needs to cover in a year

Start with everything the business has to pay for over twelve months, whether or not you're on a job that day:

• Your own wage or drawings, what you need to live on
• Van costs: lease or finance, fuel, insurance, servicing
• Tools and equipment, including replacement and calibration
• Insurance: public liability, tools, income protection
• Training, certification and scheme membership renewals
• Software, phone, admin and accountancy costs
• A buffer for slow months, bad debt and the unexpected

Add it up. That's your annual cost of doing business, before profit.

Step 2: work out your genuinely billable hours, not your working hours

This is where most tradespeople get their rate wrong. They divide their annual cost by something like 2,000 hours, a standard working year, and end up undercharging, because most of those hours aren't billable.

A working year has holidays, sick days and bank holidays taken out of it first. Then, from what's left, subtract the time that's real but not chargeable:

• Driving between jobs
• Quoting and estimating
• Chasing payment and doing admin
• Ordering and collecting materials
• Callbacks, snagging and warranty work

Once all of that comes out, the hours you can genuinely put on an invoice are usually far fewer than the hours you work. That gap is the single biggest reason tradespeople who "do the maths" still end up underpaid.

Step 3: divide, then add your margin

Your true hourly cost is: annual cost of doing business divided by genuinely billable hours.

That number is your break-even. It is not your charge-out rate. Your charge-out rate has to sit above it, enough to cover the jobs that overrun, the invoices that pay late, and the profit that lets you reinvest in the business, or just have a normal life, rather than standing still.

Worked example (illustrative numbers only, swap in your own)

Say your annual cost of doing business comes to £54,000. Say your genuinely billable hours, after holidays, driving, quoting and admin are stripped out, come to 1,200 hours a year. That gives a true hourly cost of £45 an hour.

If you want the business to actually turn a profit and cope with a bad month, you might charge £65 to £75 an hour, not £45. The £45 figure only tells you where you stop losing money. Everything above it is what pays you for the risk of running a business rather than being employed.

These are example numbers to show the working, not a market rate. Your own annual costs and your own billable hours will give you a different figure, and that's the one that matters.

Should I charge the same rate for every job?

Not necessarily. Small jobs carry proportionally more of your fixed costs, driving, parking, admin, than a full day on one site, which is why many electricians add a callout fee or a minimum charge for short jobs rather than pretending a 20 minute fault find costs the same to run as a full rewire. We've covered that trade-off in detail in should I charge a callout fee for small jobs?

How often should I review my rate?

At least once a year, and sooner if your costs jump: an insurance renewal, a new van, a material price rise. A rate set two years ago on old costs is quietly losing you money every month it stays unchanged. If you're not sure whether it's time, we've written a separate guide on when to raise your prices. Getting your rate right also feeds into other decisions, like whether to put prices on your website at all.

Where OptiTech Automation fits

None of the above needs software. It needs an hour with a calculator and your last year of bank statements. Where OptiTech Automation fits is afterwards: once you know your rate, the platform handles online booking, quoting, dispatch and payments so the billable hours you fought to calculate don't quietly leak away to missed calls, forgotten quotes or a slow invoice.

Payments land straight into your own Stripe account. We don't take a cut of what you charge, only the standard card fee applies. Full detail is on our pricing page: Standard is £599 a month for up to 15 workers, Growth is £1,749 a month for up to 30. We're new, so we're launching with the first ten businesses getting the one-off onboarding investment waived and today's monthly rate locked for life.

If you're a sole trader taking two calls a week, this is more than you need, plain and simple, and a notebook and a phone will do you fine for now. If you're weighing up what a booking website should cost you as well, we've covered that separately.

Once your rate is set, the billable hours still have to survive the week, and the live demo shows the booking and quoting side of that.

FAQ

Is there an official UK electrician hourly rate for 2026?
No. There's no regulator or trade body that sets a national rate. Any figure you see quoted is either a survey average that won't match your costs, or a guess. Build your rate from your own numbers using the method above.

Why does my rate need to be higher than my true cost per hour?
Your true hourly cost is your break-even, not your income. It doesn't allow for jobs that overrun, materials that come in over budget, invoices paid late, or the margin that lets the business grow instead of just surviving. Break-even is where you stop losing money, nothing more.

Should I charge more for emergency or out-of-hours callouts?
Most electricians do, because emergency work disrupts planned jobs, often means working outside normal hours, and carries more risk. The uplift should still be based on your own costs and the disruption involved, not a number you've seen elsewhere. Write the out-of-hours rate down before the phone rings, not while it is ringing.

How do VAT and being a limited company change the calculation?
They change what has to be inside your "annual cost of doing business" figure, not the method itself. If you're VAT registered or run through a limited company, make sure corporation tax, VAT you can't reclaim and any accountancy costs are all counted before you divide by your billable hours.

Does raising my rate mean I'll lose customers?
Not automatically. Customers who chose you on price alone were always the most likely to leave for a cheaper quote next time. A rate that reflects your real costs is what keeps the business standing in a year's time. Expect to lose a few of the cheapest jobs and to get some of your evenings back.