How Much Does an EICR Cost? A 2026 Guide for Landlords

Ask three electricians what an EICR costs and you will get three different answers. That is not because anyone is being cagey, it is because the job genuinely varies. A one bed flat with six circuits and a modern board is a couple of hours. A six bed HMO with two boards, added extensions and forty years of alterations behind the plaster is most of a day.

So rather than give you one number that turns out to be wrong, here is how the pricing actually works, what moves it, and where the extra costs tend to appear.

The short answer

For a standard rented home in 2026, expect somewhere between £120 and £300. Most two and three bed properties land in the middle of that.

Here is the usual spread by property size.

Property	Typical EICR cost	Rough time on site
1 bed flat	£120 to £180	1.5 to 2 hours
2 bed house or flat	£140 to £220	2 to 3 hours
3 bed house	£160 to £260	3 to 4 hours
4 to 5 bed house	£200 to £350	4 to 5 hours
HMO, 6+ bedrooms	£300 to £500+	Half to full day
Small commercial unit	£250 to £600+	Depends on circuits

Prices in London and the South East usually sit at the top of those bands. Around Liverpool and the North West you are generally at the lower to middle end.

What actually drives the price

The number that matters most is not bedrooms, it is circuits. An EICR is priced on how much there is to test, and every circuit on the board has to be individually inspected and tested. Two properties with the same number of bedrooms can differ by fifty quid because one has an extension, an outside supply and a garage circuit.

A few other things move the figure.

Age of the installation. Older wiring takes longer because there is more to look at and more that needs a judgement call. Rubber or fabric insulated cable, no earth on the lighting circuits, an old rewireable fuse box, all of that slows the job down.

How many consumer units there are. Converted houses often have two or three boards in odd places. Each one adds time.

Access. If the electrician has to move furniture, lift carpets or work around a tenant who is in all day, that gets factored in. Loft and underfloor access matters too. Sockets behind a fitted wardrobe are a genuine time cost.

Whether the property is occupied. An empty property between tenancies is quicker and usually cheaper, because the power can go off without anyone minding.

How far you are from the electrician. Travel gets built in, which is why a local firm is often cheaper than a national booking platform sending someone across two counties.

The bit people forget: remedial work

The EICR itself is only the inspection. It tells you the condition of the installation, it does not put anything right. If the report comes back unsatisfactory, the repairs are priced separately.

That catches a lot of landlords out, especially the ones who booked the cheapest inspection they could find. Here is what remedials typically run to.

Remedial work	Typical cost
Replacing a damaged socket or switch	£45 to £90
Adding or repairing main protective bonding	£90 to £220
Sorting a poor or loose connection	£60 to £150
Replacing a faulty RCD or breaker	£90 to £200
New consumer unit with RCD protection	£450 to £800
Rewiring one problem circuit	£250 to £600

Only C1 and C2 coded items have to be fixed for the report to become satisfactory. C3 is a recommendation, not a fault, and you can leave it. A decent electrician will tell you which is which rather than quoting you for the lot.

Why the cheapest quote is often the dearest

There is a reason a £60 EICR exists, and it is not efficiency. A proper inspection on a three bed house takes hours. If someone is in and out in forty minutes, they have not tested every circuit, and you are holding a certificate that will not stand up if anything goes wrong.

Two things tend to happen with the bargain inspections. Either the report is thin and the council or your insurer questions it, or it comes back stuffed with C2 codes and a suspiciously large quote for the remedials. The inspection was the loss leader.

What you actually want to check before booking is whether they are registered with NAPIT or NICEIC, whether the price is fixed rather than hourly, and whether they will send you a sample report so you can see the level of detail. Ours are always fixed price, agreed before we turn up.

How often you are paying for this

For a rented property the maximum interval is five years, so this is not an annual cost. You need a satisfactory EICR before a new tenancy starts, a copy goes to your tenants, and another goes to the council if they ask for it.

The report can specify a shorter interval than five years if the electrician thinks the installation warrants it. If yours says three years, that is the date you work to.

Worth knowing that the maximum penalty for breaching the electrical safety rules went up from £30,000 to £40,000 in November 2025, and it applies per breach. Set against that, the inspection is not the expensive part of the equation.

Ways to keep the cost sensible

Book it between tenancies. Empty property, power off, no coordinating with anyone. Quicker and often cheaper.

Get several properties done together. If you have a portfolio, most electricians will price a batch better than a one off. We do this a lot for letting agents.

Have the paperwork ready. If you can hand over the previous EICR and any certificates for work since, the electrician is not starting from scratch guessing what has been done.

Do not leave it to the last week. If remedials come up you have 28 days to sort them, and rushing that costs more than planning it.

Sort the known problems first. If you already know the fuse box is ancient, replacing it before the inspection is often cheaper than doing it as a remedial afterwards.

What you should get for your money

A real EICR gives you a full schedule of circuits, the actual test results recorded against each one, every observation coded C1, C2, C3 or FI, an overall satisfactory or unsatisfactory verdict, and the name and registration number of whoever carried it out.

If what lands in your inbox is a single page with a tick on it, that is not an EICR.

If you want a fixed price for your property, we cover Liverpool and the whole of Merseyside for landlords and letting agents, and you can read more about what the inspection involves on our electrical inspection and testing page.

Common questions

Is an EICR the same as a landlord electrical safety certificate?

Effectively yes. There is no separate document called a landlord certificate, people just use that phrase for the EICR on a rented property. If an agent asks for your landlord safety certificate, they mean the EICR.

Does the tenant ever pay for the EICR?

No. It is the landlord’s legal duty and the landlord’s cost. You cannot pass it on to the tenant or take it from the deposit.

Can I get an EICR done cheaper if I am there to let them in?

Sometimes, marginally, because it saves the electrician waiting around. The bigger saving is an empty property where the power can be switched off freely.

Why was my HMO so much more expensive?

More circuits, more sockets, more bedrooms to test, usually more than one board, and often emergency lighting and fire detection in the mix. There is simply more installation to inspect.

Do I need a new EICR if I have only just bought the property?

Not if there is a valid satisfactory report less than five years old and no unresolved C1 or C2 items. If the previous owner cannot produce one, get one before you let it.