The UK Electrician Report 2026

This is original data, not a survey. Every number below comes from an aggregate query of the Elec-Mate platform — real quotes sent to real clients, and real answers given to real exam questions — run on 20 August 2026.

Everything here is free to cite with attribution to Elec-Mate and a link to this page — the methodology section states exactly what was measured and when.

Between 6 September 2025 and 20 August 2026, electricians issued 1,205 quotes through Elec-Mate with a combined value of £1.38 million. The distribution tells a story that day-rate surveys miss: electrical work is a volume trade of small jobs punctuated by occasional large ones.

The median quote is £411; the middle half of all quotes sit between £160 and £1,026. The mean is £1,145 — nearly three times the median — because the biggest 5% of jobs drag it upwards. 74% of all quotes are under £1,000.

Only 29.6% of quotes included VAT — a reminder that a large share of working electricians operate below the VAT threshold, and that quoting tools need to be as good at ex-VAT sole-trader pricing as they are at VAT-registered work. For per-job benchmarks, see our per-point pricing guide and day rates guide.

Of the 1,205 quotes, 908 were accepted — a 75% acceptance rate — and 822 went on to raise an invoice. The speed is the striking part: the median time from a quote being created to the client accepting it was 5.3 hours.

The old assumption is that quotes sit in inboxes for a week. The data says that when a client can open a link on their phone and tap accept, most decisions happen the same day. For the electrician, that changes how quoting fits the working week: send the quote from the van before leaving the street, and the job is often confirmed before the next site visit is finished.

Elec-Mate's free mock exams record, for every question, how many times it has been shown and how many times it has been answered wrongly — with no user information attached at all. Between 11 July and 20 August 2026 that produced 118,303 answered questions across 35 exams. Overall, 26.4% of answers were wrong.

The 18th Edition — the regulations qualification every practising electrician holds — is the hardest subject on the platform. More than one answer in three is wrong. The biggest single dataset is the C&G 2391 inspection and testing exam, where 50,656 answers ran at a 25.9% wrong rate. Fault diagnosis, by contrast, is where electricians are strongest: 17.9% — practical reasoning beats regulation recall.

Practise any of these free: 18th Edition, 2391, AM2 and 30 more.

Zooming into the 18th Edition bank, these are the topics of the most-missed questions (each shown at least 30 times in the collection window — modest samples, stated exactly):

The pattern is consistent: the trade is weakest not on circuit theory but on device selection (RCD types — increasingly critical as EV chargers and inverter loads make Type AC devices unsuitable), ingress protection codes, and duties that sit outside BS 7671 itself, like CDM 2015. Our guides on RCD types and RCD testing cover the two most-missed device topics in depth.

1,812 certificates have been produced on the platform to the query date. The mix shows where UK electrical work actually concentrates:

Half of everything is periodic inspection. The rental sector's EICR obligations have made condition reporting the centre of gravity of domestic electrical work — which is why inspection and testing dominates the exam data above, and why the 2391 is the busiest mock exam on the platform by a factor of three.

All figures were produced by aggregate SQL queries against the live Elec-Mate production database on 20 August 2026. Specifics:

Citation: free to cite with attribution to Elec-Mate and a link to this page. For a specific aggregate cut for a story, get in touch.