The UK Electrician Report 2026
What 1,205 real quotes and 118,303 real exam answers say about the state of the trade: what electricians charge, how fast clients say yes, and the BS 7671 topics the industry gets wrong. No surveys, no estimates — aggregate platform data, queried 20 August 2026, with every sample size stated.
£411
Median electrical quote (n = 1,205)
5.3 hrs
Median time from quote sent to acceptance
75%
Of quotes were accepted
35.8%
Of 18th Edition answers wrong (n = 8,607)
118,303
Exam answers analysed across 35 exams
52%
Of all certificates produced are EICRs
What UK electricians actually charge
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.
Quote value distribution (n = 1,205)
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 the per-point pricing guide and day rates guide.
How fast clients say yes
908
Quotes accepted of 1,205 sent
75%
Acceptance rate
5.3 hrs
Median time to acceptance
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.
The knowledge gap: 118,303 answers analysed
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.
Wrong-answer rate by exam (exams with 1,000+ answers)
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.
The topics electricians get wrong most
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. The guides on RCD types and RCD testing cover the two most-missed device topics in depth.
The certificate mix: what the work actually is
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.
Methodology
All figures were produced by aggregate SQL queries against the live Elec-Mate production database on 20 August 2026. Specifics:
- Quotes: all 1,205 quotes with a total between £1 and £500,000, created 6 September 2025 – 20 August 2026. Median, quartiles and distribution computed across the full set. Acceptance = an acceptance recorded on the quote; time-to-acceptance measured from quote creation.
- Exam answers: per-question shown/wrong counters across 35 public mock exams, 11 July – 20 August 2026, totalling 118,303 answers. The counters carry no user identifiers. Per-question figures are only quoted where a question was shown at least 30 times, with the exact n stated.
- Certificates: counts by type across all 1,812 certificates on the platform at the query date.
- What this is not: a survey, a model, or a national census. It is the observed behaviour of electricians using one platform — stated exactly, with sample sizes, so you can judge its weight.
Citing this report
Free to cite with attribution to Elec-Mate and a link to this page. The chart pack contains every chart above as a branded PNG plus the underlying aggregates as CSV — embed them as they are. Need a specific cut for a story — a region, a trade, one exam? Email the founder and we will run the query where the data supports it. Media assets and boilerplate are on the press page.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the data in this report come from?
Every figure comes from aggregate queries run against the live Elec-Mate platform database on 20 August 2026. The pricing figures cover 1,205 quotes with a value between £1 and £500,000 issued between 6 September 2025 and 20 August 2026. The skills figures cover 118,303 answered questions across 35 free mock exams, collected between 11 July and 20 August 2026. The certificate figures cover all 1,812 certificates produced on the platform to the query date. No third-party data, surveys or estimates are included, and no individual user, client or job is identifiable — the exam statistics are stored with no user information at all.
Can I cite these figures in an article or report?
Yes — the report is free to cite with attribution to Elec-Mate and a link to this page. If you need a specific cut of the data for a story (for example a single trade, region or exam), contact us and we will run the aggregate query where the data supports it.
Why is the median quote so much lower than the average?
The median quote is £411 while the mean is £1,145 because electrical work is heavily skewed by a small number of large jobs. 74% of all quotes are under £1,000 — the day-to-day reality of domestic electrical work — while the largest 5% of quotes (rewires, commercial fit-outs, consumer unit programmes above £2,500) pull the average far above what a typical job costs. Anyone using "average job value" to describe electrical work is describing the big jobs, not the common ones.
Does a 35.8% wrong-answer rate mean electricians are not competent?
No — it means the 18th Edition is genuinely hard, and that practice exposes the gaps before the real exam does. These are practice attempts, often taken cold, on questions drawn from a 300-question bank covering the whole of BS 7671:2018+A4:2026. The pattern of what gets answered wrong is the interesting part: device selection (RCD types), ingress protection codes, and regulatory duties outside BS 7671 itself (such as CDM 2015) trip up far more attempts than core circuit theory. That is precisely the material worth revising before sitting the paper.
Will this report be updated?
Yes. The intention is to re-run the queries and update the figures as the dataset grows — the exam statistics alone are accumulating at well over 100,000 answers per six weeks. Each update will state its query date, and superseded figures will remain in the page history rather than being silently rewritten.
