Electrician Marketing Statistics 2026: EICR Demand, EV Chargers and Pay Data

Electrical is the trade that has changed most in the last five years. A domestic sparks in 2019 was mostly doing rewires, consumer units and fault-finding. In 2026 the same business is quoting EV chargers, battery storage, solar tie-ins and a steady book of five-yearly landlord inspections.

That shift matters for marketing, because it changes which searches are worth bidding on, which certifications a customer looks for, and how much a lead is actually worth once you factor in the average job value.

What follows is verified data only. Every figure below came off a primary source page that was fetched and checked. Where the number is a survey estimate rather than a count, it says so.

Key electrician marketing statistics for 2026

• The UK had 119,080 public EV charging devices as at 1 April 2026, of which 27,372 were rapid (50kW+) or above, according to the Department for Transport [1]
• 13,281 public charging devices were added across 2025, with a further 3,028 in the first quarter of 2026 alone (DfT) [1]
• The Workplace Charging Scheme has funded 69,439 socket installations since late 2016, including 7,479 in the last 12 months (DfT/OZEV) [2]
• MCS certified 369,000 small-scale renewable installations in 2025, up 34% on 2024, including 267,032 solar PV installs [3]
• Battery storage installations more than doubled to over 40,000 in 2025, the biggest year on record (MCS) [3]
• The number of MCS certified installers grew 7% during 2025 (MCS) [3]
• Median gross annual pay for electricians and electrical fitters was £39,187 in 2025, with median hourly pay of £19.19, up 6.5% year on year (ONS ASHE) [4]
• NICEIC assesses over 40,000 certified businesses; NAPIT reports over 22,000 registered installers [5][6]
• "EICR" draws 27,000 UK searches a month and "electrician near me" 24,000, at CPCs of US$2.50 and US$1.90 (Ahrefs) [7]
• Home and home improvement paid search averaged a $8.33 CPC and a $90.92 cost per lead in 2026 (LocaliQ) [8]
• 19% of English households now rent privately, and the electrical safety inspection duty was extended to social landlords in 2025 (English Housing Survey / MHCLG) [9][10]
• 4.0 million English dwellings (15%) failed the Decent Homes Standard in 2024 and 2.3 million carried a Category 1 hazard (English Housing Survey) [13]

How many registered electricians are there in the UK?

There is no single register. The closest thing to a headcount comes from the competent person scheme operators, and the two largest between them account for over 60,000 registered businesses and installers.

NICEIC states it assesses "over 40,000 NICEIC-certified businesses", a figure its own footnote dates to 31 December 2023 [5]. NAPIT says it has "over 22,000 registered installers" across electrical, heating, plumbing, ventilation and microgeneration [6].

ELECSA, once a third recognisable brand, no longer exists as a separate front door. Its domain now redirects straight to NICEIC, both having sat under Certsure. If you are still writing "NICEIC, NAPIT or ELECSA registered" in your website copy, that is a small tell that the copy has not been touched in a while.

Two cautions on these numbers. They count businesses and installers, not individual qualified electricians, and they overlap: a firm can hold more than one registration. Adding scheme totals together to claim a national figure is a mistake plenty of trade blogs make.

The ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings offers a different lens: 97,000 employee jobs in the "electricians and electrical fitters" occupation in 2025 [4]. That undercounts the trade badly, because ASHE surveys employees only and a large share of domestic electricians are self-employed or sole directors.

What do electricians actually earn in 2026?

Median gross annual pay for employed electricians and electrical fitters was £39,187 in 2025, up 3.0% on the year. Median gross hourly pay was £19.19, up 6.5%, comfortably ahead of the 5.1% rise across all UK employees.

Source: ONS ASHE 2025 provisional, Table 14 [4]

The hourly figure is the one worth watching. Pay rising faster than the national average, in a trade with a well-documented recruitment problem, is what a supply squeeze looks like in the data. Supervisor hourly pay up 9.3% suggests the pinch is sharpest at the experienced end.

For marketing, that has a blunt implication. If labour is your constraint rather than demand, spending more on lead generation does not grow the business, it just grows your unconverted quote pile. Several electrical contractors would get more from raising prices and improving quote-to-job conversion than from another £800 a month on Google Ads.

Be careful quoting "electrician day rates" from cost guides as if they were earnings. A £350 day rate charged to a customer is revenue, not take-home, and it has to cover van, materials, insurance, scheme fees and unbilled hours.

How big is the EICR and landlord compliance market?

Compliance work is now a structural revenue line rather than an occasional job. Landlords in England must have the electrical installations in rented properties inspected at least every five years by a qualified person, under the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020.

The English Housing Survey put the private rented sector at 19% of English households in 2024-25, second only to owner occupation at 65% [9].

In 2025 the duty was extended. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government confirms the 2020 regulations were amended by the Extension to the Social Rented Sector Regulations 2025, bringing social landlords into scope and requiring landlord-supplied electrical equipment to be tested too [10].

That is the single biggest addition to guaranteed electrical inspection work in years, because the social rented sector accounts for a further 16% of English households [9].

Stock condition supports the demand case. The English Housing Survey recorded 4.0 million dwellings (15%) failing the Decent Homes Standard in 2024, and 2.3 million (9%) carrying an HHSRS Category 1 hazard, with private rented and owner-occupied stock both at 9-10% [13].

The catch for marketers: EICR work is a five-year cycle, so it is a retention and reminder business, not a constant acquisition business. The electricians doing best out of it run a diarised renewal list and email it, rather than paying to re-acquire the same landlord every five years.

Is EV charger installation still a growth lead source?

Yes, but the growth has flattened into a steady run rate rather than an explosion. The UK reached 119,080 public charging devices on 1 April 2026, 27,372 of them rapid or above.

The Department for Transport reports 3,028 devices added in Q1 2026, an increase it describes as similar to the equivalent period in 2025, when 13,281 devices were added across the full year [1].

Source: DfT/OZEV grant schemes statistics, 1 April 2026 [2]

The renters and flat owners grant is the standout. It has installed 24,759 sockets in total, and 10,648 of those came in the last 12 months, meaning roughly 43% of its lifetime volume landed in a single year [2]. That is a genuinely accelerating segment, and it points at a customer who lives in a flat or rents, which is a very different marketing target from the detached-house driveway install.

Regional density is uneven in a way that should shape local targeting. The UK average is 171.9 public chargers per 100,000 people, but London sits at 340.0 and Northern Ireland at just 59.4 [1]. Low density is not automatically low opportunity, though, since a thin public network usually means more demand for private home units.

How fast is solar and battery work growing?

Faster than EV charging, on current numbers. MCS certified around 369,000 small-scale renewable installations in 2025, a 34% increase on 2024 and the equivalent of one every 90 seconds [3].

Within that: 267,032 solar PV installations, over 60,000 heat pumps, and over 40,000 battery storage systems, with battery volumes close to doubling their previous record [3]. Cumulative MCS certified installations since 2009 passed 2.4 million, and more than a quarter of that total was installed in the last two years alone [3].

An earlier MCS release in November 2025 recorded battery storage installations up 122% year on year to the end of September, and noted that new builds accounted for 35% of 2025 solar installs, up from 32% historically [11].

That new build share is the number most domestic electricians should read twice. A third of solar volume is being fitted by developers' contractors before a homeowner ever exists to market to, so headline growth overstates the retrofit opportunity a local firm can actually win.

The competitive picture is tightening too. MCS reports the number of certified installers grew 7% during 2025 [3]. Demand is growing faster than supply on those figures, but the gap is closing, and the easy years of accreditation being a rare differentiator are ending.

What do electrician searches cost, and how much demand is there?

UK search demand for electrical work is concentrated in a handful of high-intent terms, and the compliance terms are bigger than the trade terms.

Source: Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, GB, August 2026 [7]

Three things stand out. "EICR" alone outdraws "electrician" by nearly 70%, which tells you the compliance customer is searching by the certificate name, not by the trade. Second, keyword difficulty on the money terms is remarkably low: "electrician near me" scores 4 and "ev charger installers near me" scores 2, so local organic and Google Business Profile work is still very winnable.

Third, CPC rises with urgency and job value. "Emergency electrician near me" costs US$3.50 a click and "battery storage installation" US$4.50, against US$0.50 for "electrician apprenticeship" [7]. Ahrefs reports CPC in US dollars, so treat these as relative signals rather than a sterling budget.

What does a lead actually cost an electrical contractor?

Broader benchmark data suggests paid search leads in home services cost roughly £70 to £90 equivalent, though electrical-specific figures are not published separately.

LocaliQ, analysing thousands of Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns, put the Home and Home Improvement category at an average $8.33 CPC, 6.47% click-through rate, 8.05% conversion rate and $90.92 cost per lead in its June 2026 update [8].

Note the mismatch between that $8.33 average CPC and the US$1.90 Ahrefs reports for "electrician near me". The LocaliQ figure spans an entire category including high-value categories like roofing and remodelling, and reflects what advertisers actually paid in competitive auctions rather than a modelled average. Neither is wrong; they measure different things.

The useful comparison in LocaliQ's own data is Automotive Repair, at a $4.35 CPC, a 15.51% conversion rate and a $29.96 cost per lead [8]. Repair-intent categories convert roughly twice as well as project-intent ones. Emergency and fault-finding campaigns should therefore be budgeted and judged separately from EV charger or solar campaigns, because the economics are not comparable.

How do homeowners verify an electrician is registered?

The main public route is the Registered Competent Person Electrical register, a single government-backed mark introduced to replace consumers having to know which scheme is which.

Electrical Competent Person Scheme Operators Ltd runs the register, which went live on 30 June 2014 and lists electricians registered to work in homes in England and Wales, plus inspectors registered to carry out electrical safety reports [12]. Registered firms are authorised by government to self-certify that their work complies with Building Regulations.

The register does not publish a headline count of listed businesses, which is a gap. It means nobody can state with confidence how many domestic electricians in England and Wales are actually registered to self-certify, and any article claiming a precise national figure is estimating.

For a contractor's website, the practical takeaway is to name your scheme and registration number in plain text on the page, not just as a logo image. Scheme logos are trivially copied and are invisible to search engines and AI answer systems, whereas a stated registration number is checkable.

How to read these numbers

DfT charging device statistics come from Zapmap's platform, which counts devices visible to that platform. Private home chargepoints outside the grant schemes are not in the 119,080 figure, so the real installed base of electrical work is larger than the public count.

MCS data counts certified installations only. Solar or battery work done outside the scheme does not appear, so MCS figures are a floor for market activity, not a ceiling.

ASHE surveys employees. It excludes the self-employed, which in a trade where sole traders are common means the £39,187 median describes employed electricians rather than the trade as a whole.

Ahrefs search volumes are clickstream-modelled estimates, not counts from Google. CPC is a modelled average in US dollars. Treat both as directional.

LocaliQ's benchmarks are drawn from its own client base, which skews towards small and mid-sized advertisers using managed services. That is a useful population if you are one of them, and a misleading one if you are not.

The scheme registration totals from NICEIC and NAPIT are self-reported by the schemes, and NICEIC's is footnoted to December 2023. Neither has been independently audited.

What this means going into 2027

Compliance is the most defensible revenue line. The extension of electrical safety inspection duties to social landlords adds a large, legally mandated, recurring workload that is not sensitive to consumer confidence or interest rates.

EV charger installation has matured from a gold rush into a normal market. With growth in Q1 2026 running level with Q1 2025, contractors should expect to compete on price and speed rather than scarcity, and should look hard at the renters and flat owners segment where grant volumes are still climbing sharply.

Battery storage is where the growth curve currently is. It carries the highest CPC in the electrical keyword set, which is usually the market pricing in a high average job value before the volume arrives.

Search visibility remains unusually cheap in this trade. Keyword difficulty scores of 2 to 10 on high-intent local terms are the sort of thing that disappears once bigger national players notice, and 2026 is a better time to build local organic presence than 2027 will be.

Finally, the pay data is a warning as much as an opportunity. With hourly pay rising 6.5% and supervisor pay 9.3%, the binding constraint for many electrical firms is people, not enquiries. Marketing spend that raises average job value beats marketing spend that raises enquiry volume. If you want help working out how findable your electrical business really is in search and AI answers, you can book a call with me.