Calculator
Electrician day rate: what you pay, and what you have to charge
The record
- Benchmark wage
- £18.38 an hour
- Charged out at
- £29.78 an hour, £238.24 a day
- Agreement
- JIB Industrial Determination 2026-2028, 5 January 2026
What the 35% is made of
What the wage does not show, and none of it is optional.
- Employer's National Insurance15% above £5,000 a year
- Holiday pay12.07%
- Pension, auto-enrolment minimum3%
- CITB levy0.35% of payroll
- Sick pay, training and employer's liability insurancethe remainder
At 0% you are pricing a CIS subcontractor's labour - National Insurance, holiday and pension are then theirs to carry, not the job's.
Working for yourself is a different sum and the tool knows it: 25% rather than 35%. Lower than an employer's 35% because there is no employer's National Insurance on your own labour - that 15% is the whole of the difference.
Where the wage comes from
Electricians are graded under the JIB Industrial Determination 2026-2028 at the electrician / craftsperson rate of £18.38 an hour, effective 5 January 2026. Promulgated by the JIB National Board on 27 June 2025. Figures are National Standard Rates, Job Employed (Transport Provided) - the column that describes a firm running its own vans, which is nearly every electrical subcontractor. London rates and Own Transport rates are higher and are what the location slider is for.
That is an agreement rate - the negotiated floor for a graded operative, not what the market pays. The market pays more, and how much more is the thing nobody publishes. It is what the figures contributed through this page are measuring.
What does an electrician actually get paid an hour?
An employed electrician working to the national agreement is on £18.38 an hour at the Electrician grade, rising to £20.08 as an Approved Electrician and £22.70 at Technician. Those are the JIB National Standard Rates that took effect on 5 January 2026, for operatives their employer transports to site.
Two things move them before you have priced anything. Own transport adds roughly a pound an hour, because the operative is getting themselves there. London adds around £2.20. So the same graded electrician is somewhere between £18.38 and £21.89 an hour depending only on where they work and whose van they are in.
This is the reason electricians sit apart from the rest of the trades on this site. Bricklayers, plasterers and joiners are graded under the construction agreement at a single craft rate; electricians are graded under their own, in bands, and pricing one as a general tradesperson understates the wage by about two pounds an hour before a penny of overhead goes on top.
Why grading matters more than experience when you are pricing
The grade is the number your costs are built on, and it is evidenced rather than claimed. Approved Electrician status is a recognised grade with a card behind it, and it carries a premium of roughly £1.70 an hour over the Electrician grade - a little over nine per cent on the wage, and it flows straight through your on-costs and your margin to land as nearer £2.20 on the charge-out.
Where firms lose money is quoting a job at the Electrician rate and sending an Approved Electrician, because that is who was free. Over a five-day job with one operative that is a hundred pounds of margin gone, silently, on a job that priced correctly and staffed wrongly. If your gang is mixed, price the grade you will actually send.
What electricians most often forget to charge for
Testing and certification. The inspection, the testing and the paperwork at the end of a job are real hours by a competent person, and on domestic work they are routinely absorbed into the price as though they were admin. A full test and certificate on a rewire is not fifteen minutes.
- Notification. Notifiable work carries a registration cost and a per-notification cost. Both are yours to carry whether or not you charged for them.
- Return visits. First fix, plaster, second fix is three appearances on site for one job. Two of them involve travelling to a site where you do half a day’s work.
- Standing time. Waiting for a plasterer to finish so you can get accessories on is time the customer is not paying for unless somebody put it in the price.
None of these are in the hourly rate above, and none of them should be. They belong in the hours you price, which is why the honest question is never “what is my hourly rate” but “how many hours am I actually going to be on this job”.
Questions people ask
What is a fair day rate for an electrician in 2026?
Work it out rather than copying one. An employed electrician on the JIB Electrician grade costs £18.38 an hour in wages; add employment on-costs of around 35% and an overhead and profit margin of around 20% and the charge-out lands near £29.78 an hour, or about £238 for an eight-hour day. A self-employed electrician carrying their own holiday, sick pay and insurance would use a lower on-cost figure and a different starting wage.
Why is an Approved Electrician more expensive?
Because the grade carries a higher agreed wage - about £1.70 an hour more than the Electrician grade under the 2026 JIB rates. It is a recognised competence grade with a card behind it, not a description of experience, and the difference flows through on-costs and margin to roughly £2.20 an hour on what you charge.
Should I charge a different rate in London?
The wage itself is different. The JIB sets a separate London rate that runs about £2.20 an hour above the national standard rate for the same grade, so your cost base genuinely is higher before any decision about margin. That is what the location control on the calculator is for.
Pricing a job like these?
HubTrack is where small construction firms keep their compliance documents, their jobs and their evidence trail in one place - method statements and risk assessments prepared for you to check and sign off, and a record of who signed what and when. The same engine that reads the contract documents behind this page reads yours inside HubTrack.