PAT Testing Cost in the UK: What You Pay Per Item, Per Visit and Per Property

PAT testing costs £1 to £3 per appliance in the UK, and most contractors apply a minimum charge of £40 to £80 per visit regardless of how few items you have.

Portable appliance testing is the inspection and electrical testing of plug-in equipment, and it is priced by item, by hour or by day depending on the size of the job.

What you actually pay depends on how many appliances you have, where the site is, what kind of equipment it is, and how easy it is to reach. This guide sets out current rates, explains why the minimum fee exists, shows what a quote covers, and prices the job for landlords, small offices and larger sites separately.

Figures were sourced from published UK cost guides in September 2026 and move with regional demand and labour costs.

How Much Does PAT Testing Cost Per Appliance in 2026?

PAT testing costs £1 to £3 per appliance in the UK. The rate falls as the number of appliances rises, and almost every contractor sets a minimum charge of £40 to £80 for the visit itself, which is what a small job actually costs.

Published rates in September 2026 group roughly into volume bands:

Some contractors price by time instead. Hourly rates run £40 to £60, and a full day is commonly quoted at £200 to £250. Time-based pricing tends to appear where the appliance count is unknown before the visit, or where the equipment is spread across a site.

These are ranges, not fixed prices. A quote at the top of a band and a quote at the bottom of the same band can both be reasonable, and the reason is usually one of five things.

What Moves the Price of a PAT Test?

Five variables move the per-item rate: volume, region, appliance type, site access, and timing.

• Volume. More appliances in one visit means a lower rate per appliance, because the fixed cost of turning up is spread across more items.
• Region. London and the South East sit at the top of published bands. The Midlands and the North sit at the lower end.
• Appliance type and class. Metal-cased equipment takes longer to test than double-insulated equipment, and the rates reflect it.
• Site access. Equipment behind desks, in ceiling voids, in locked rooms or in occupied hotel rooms slows the work. So does testing that has to happen around people working.
• Timing. Weekend and out-of-hours testing carries a surcharge, commonly quoted at 20 to 30% above the standard rate.

Does the Type of Appliance Change the Rate?

Yes. Published per-item rates vary by roughly £1 between the cheapest and dearest appliance categories. Class I appliances have a metal case and rely on an earth connection for safety, so they need an earth continuity test. Class II appliances are double insulated and carry no earth, so the test sequence is shorter.

Rates published in September 2026 sit at £1.50 to £3.00 for Class I equipment, £1.00 to £2.50 for Class II, £1.00 to £2.00 for IT and office equipment, and £1.00 to £1.50 for extension leads and cables. Bulk thresholds attach to each category, commonly 25 items for cased appliances and 50 items for IT equipment and leads.

Per-item rates explain what you pay at the top of a job. They do not explain the floor underneath it.

Why Do PAT Testers Charge a Minimum Fee Even for 10 Items?

PAT testers charge a minimum fee because a visit costs them almost the same whether it covers 10 appliances or 100. Ten items at £2 each is £20 of billable work against a visit that consumes a substantial part of the tester’s day.

The costs sitting under that minimum are specific:

Travel and parking are paid before anything is tested. Setup and pack-down take the same time at every site. The instrument itself is a calibrated piece of test equipment with an annual calibration cost attached to it, and that cost is carried whether it tests ten items or ten thousand. After the visit, the results have to be recorded, the register produced and the paperwork issued, which happens off site and is rarely visible to the customer.

Then there is the time floor. A competent tester covers roughly 100 to 150 appliances in a working day. Ten appliances is a small fraction of that capacity, but the travel, setup and reporting around them is not. The minimum fee prices the visit rather than the items, and that is why a ten-item job and a thirty-item job often cost close to the same.

That is what the minimum fee covers. What the money buys is a separate question, and quotes differ more than they look.

What Is Included in a PAT Testing Quote?

A standard PAT testing quote covers the inspection and testing itself, a pass or fail label on each appliance, and a written register of results. The register is the list of every appliance tested with its identifier, test date, result and retest date, and it is the document that actually evidences the work.

A competent test to the current standard covers:

• A formal visual inspection of the appliance, its flex and its plug
• An earth continuity test on Class I appliances
• An insulation resistance test
• A polarity check on the lead and plug
• A pass or fail label applied to the appliance
• An entry in the asset register against that appliance

Several things are commonly outside the standard rate. Minor repairs are usually chargeable. Microwave leakage testing is a separate test with its own charge, published at £15 to £30 per unit. Re-testing an appliance after a repair is commonly quoted at £20 to £50. Weekend and out-of-hours attendance carries the surcharge already mentioned. When comparing two quotes, these are the lines that make an apparently cheaper quote the more expensive one.

Is the Certificate Charged Separately?

Usually not. The register of results is normally included in the quoted price, and most contractors treat it as part of the job rather than an extra.

Some do charge separately, with certificate upsells published at £10 to £25. A quote that prices the documentation as an add-on is not necessarily worse value, but it is not directly comparable with one that includes it, and the comparison should be made on the total.

What Does PAT Testing Cost for Your Situation?

The per-item mechanism is the same for everyone. The totals are not.

A landlord, an office manager and a facilities manager on a large site are buying three different jobs at three different points on the volume curve.

How Much Do Landlords Pay for PAT Testing a Rental Property?

Landlords typically pay £45 to £55 for a rental property with fewer than ten appliances, because at that volume the work is priced as a package rather than per item. Published landlord packages in September 2026 sit at around £45 to £50 for up to 10 items, £55 to £60 for up to 20, and £65 to £70 for up to 30.

Two points change the count. Only the appliances the landlord supplies fall to the landlord. A tenant’s own kettle, television or games console is the tenant’s equipment. In a furnished let the landlord’s count is usually the white goods, any supplied small appliances, and supplied extension leads, which is why most properties land in the smallest package.

Appliance testing is also a different job from the fixed electrical installation inspection. The five-yearly inspection of the installation is a separate legal duty with its own report, its own cost and its own deadlines, and appliance testing does not discharge it. Landlords pricing one should understand the other, and the current electrical safety rules for landlords set out which duty applies to which sector and by when.

How Much Does PAT Testing Cost for a Small Office?

A small office of around 80 appliances is commonly quoted at £120 to £240 per testing cycle. That range comes from the middle volume bands and moves with region and access.

The count is usually higher than the office manager expects. An appliance is anything that plugs in: kettles, microwaves, fridges, monitors, desktop machines, laptop chargers, phone chargers, desk fans, heaters, printers, and every extension lead and four-way adaptor. Extension leads are individually testable items and they are the single biggest reason a count of “about 40 things” turns out to be 80. Counting them properly before requesting quotes gives comparable prices back.

What Discount Applies to 100 or More Appliances?

Rates drop into a lower band above roughly 200 appliances, and again above 500. At exactly 100 appliances the job sits in the middle of the curve rather than at the cheap end, which surprises buyers who expect a hundred items to unlock the best rate.

Two conditions unlock the lower bands in practice. The appliances need to be at one site, because 500 appliances spread across ten addresses is ten visits and ten minimum fees rather than one large job. The testing also needs to be schedulable in continuous blocks, because a contractor pricing at the bottom of the band is pricing uninterrupted work.

Volume is one variable that moves rates. Geography is the other one buyers ask about most.

Does PAT Testing Cost More in London Than Elsewhere in the UK?

Yes. London and the South East sit at the top of every published UK pricing band, and the Midlands and the North sit at the lower end. One published comparison puts a day rate at around £200 across the UK against around £250 in London.

There is no national index for PAT testing prices, so the honest description of the London premium is a position within published ranges rather than a measured percentage. A London buyer should expect quotes toward the upper end of the per-item bands and a higher minimum fee, and should treat any figure presented as a precise national differential with caution. Prices in both directions move with local demand, and the ranges in this guide were sourced in September 2026.

Is a Quote Under £1 Per Item a Red Flag?

Not automatically, but it is worth asking what the price assumes. A rate under £1 per appliance sits below the cheapest published volume band, and there are only two explanations: the job is genuinely large enough to earn it, or something in the work has been reduced.

Where the volume does not justify it, the reductions are predictable:

• The formal visual inspection is rushed or skipped, which matters because visual inspection finds more faults than the electrical tests do
• Plugs are not opened where opening is required to check the fuse, cord grip and terminations
• Results are not recorded per appliance, so the register lists a count rather than assets
• Labels are applied without a register behind them, which produces evidence of a label and no evidence of a test

The IET Code of Practice 5th Edition is the practical standard for how this work is carried out and recorded in the UK, and it is the reference point a competent contractor works to. A record produced by someone who cannot demonstrate that competence is worth very little if it is ever examined, whether by an insurer, an enforcing authority or a client’s own auditor. The cheapest quote is not automatically the wrong one, and plenty of contractors price keenly on genuine volume. The question to ask is what the rate assumes about the work, not whether the contractor is trustworthy.

How Much Does It Cost to Fix or Replace an Appliance That Fails?

Minor repairs after a failed test are commonly quoted at £40 to £80, with a retest at £20 to £50. Most failures are not the appliance itself.

The common minor faults are a damaged or worn flex, an incorrect fuse rating, a loose cord grip, damaged plug pins, and poor terminations inside the plug. All of them are repairable in minutes by the person already on site, which is why the repair charge is usually a labour minimum rather than a parts cost.

Replacement often costs less than repair for low-value items. A £12 kettle with a damaged flex is not worth £40 of labour. For fixed or high-value equipment the arithmetic reverses.

The fault types found in routine testing are the same fault types that appear in domestic and workplace fire statistics, and our guide to the electrical appliances that cause house fires sets out which categories appear most often..

That is the arithmetic of a single visit. Over a testing cycle that repeats, a second question tends to follow.

Is It Cheaper to Train a Staff Member or Hire a Contractor?

It depends almost entirely on how many appliances there are and how often the cycle repeats. Contractor testing is a recurring cost paid every cycle for as long as the appliances exist. In-house testing is a larger one-off cost followed by small annual costs. Neither is automatically cheaper, and the honest comparison counts both sides fully.

The two lines that decide it are the ones people leave out. On the contractor side it is the minimum fee, which is charged again every time a single new appliance needs testing between cycles. On the in-house side it is the staff member’s time, which is real cost even though no invoice arrives for it.

Run the figures for the actual appliance count and the actual cycle length rather than a general case. The numbers in this guide are enough to do that arithmetic.

What Does In-House PAT Testing Actually Cost to Set Up?

In-house testing has four costs: the instrument, the consumables, the training, and the person’s time. The time is the one most often left out of the comparison, and it is usually the largest.

• The tester. Instruments are sold in capability tiers rather than as one product. Pass/fail checkers, which return a result with no readings, are published at around £239 to £259. Basic manual testers, which display readings but store nothing, run around £327 to £409. Mid-range manual and downloading testers, which add stored records and data transfer, sit roughly between £329 and £1,070 depending on features. Advanced downloading testers with large memories and integrated software run around £880 to £1,660. Most organisations testing their own equipment are buying in the lower two tiers.
• Consumables. Pass and fail labels cost roughly £10 to £20 per roll.
• Calibration. The instrument needs periodic calibration to remain evidentially useful. Published annual costs range widely, from around £30 to around £200, depending on the provider and the service level.
• Training. A one-day course to the IET Code of Practice 5th Edition is what makes the person competent to carry out combined inspection and testing. The course is a one-off cost in the low hundreds of pounds, and it varies by delivery format, with online delivery priced below in-person attendance and on-site delivery for a group priced differently again. The full breakdown of how much a PAT testing course costs covers each format.
• Time. A competent tester covers 100 to 150 appliances in a working day. An office of 80 appliances is under a day. A site of 600 is a week of someone’s time.

When Hiring a Contractor Is the Better Buy

For a landlord with one property and six appliances, hiring a contractor is the better buy, and the arithmetic is not close. A £45 package once every couple of years does not justify buying an instrument, calibrating it and training someone.

The same holds in three other situations. Low appliance counts stay cheaper to outsource whatever the cycle length. Single-site organisations with long gaps between cycles rarely recover the setup cost. Organisations with no staff member who has the capacity to absorb a day or a week of testing are buying a time problem rather than solving a cost one. And sites with complex or unusual equipment mixes may want the judgement of someone who tests full time rather than someone who tests once a year.

In-house testing suits organisations with a lot of appliances, a repeating cycle, equipment that changes through the year, and someone who can hold the competence. It is not the answer for everyone, and a contractor is the right purchase more often than in-house advocates suggest.

The same rates that make a cost for one reader make revenue for another.

What Can You Charge as a Self-Employed PAT Tester?

A self-employed PAT tester charges the same rates that appear on the quotes in this guide: £1 to £3 per appliance, with a minimum call-out of £40 to £80. The rate a tester can actually command sits inside those bands and moves with region, volume and the type of client.

The instrument is the point most people miss when they think about charging. It is a one-off purchase recovered gradually across many jobs, not a cost carried by any single job, which is why the minimum fee exists on the tester’s side as well as the buyer’s. What a tester earns across a year depends on client mix, region and how much work is repeat business, and what PAT testers earn covers that in detail.

Charging rates are only part of running the work as a business. Insurance, calibration schedules, record-keeping and finding the first clients all sit alongside the pricing, and the guide to how to start a PAT testing business sets out what is involved.

Is PAT Testing a Legal Requirement in the UK?

No. PAT testing is not a legal requirement in itself. The Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 require electrical equipment to be maintained in a safe condition to prevent danger. The regulations do not say how that is done, by whom, or how often.

The Health and Safety Executive states this directly: the law requires equipment to be maintained to prevent danger, and it does not specify inspection or testing as the method. Portable appliance testing is one well-established way of demonstrating that the duty has been met, which is why it is so widely used, but it is a method rather than the requirement itself.

The IET Code of Practice 5th Edition is the practical standard that sets out how inspection and testing should be carried out, at what intervals, and by whom. Following it is how most UK organisations show that their approach to the maintenance duty is a reasoned one rather than a guess.

Do You Have to PAT Test Every Year?

No. There is no legally fixed annual interval. Intervals follow the type of equipment and the environment it is used in, so a hand-held power tool on a construction site is checked far more often than a desktop monitor in an office.

Can Anyone PAT Test Their Own Appliances?

A competent person can, and competence is the condition rather than a job title. Visual inspection in low-risk settings can be carried out by a trained member of staff. Combined inspection and testing needs someone with the knowledge to use the instrument and interpret what it returns, which is what training to the IET Code of Practice 5th Edition provides.