Scaffolding Accreditation: What Every Scheme Actually Costs

Last Updated on September 8, 2026

Scaffolding is unusual. There is no register to join and no offence for staying out, yet a working firm can easily spend several thousand pounds a year on schemes. This guide sets out what each one costs, what it buys, and which parts are worth telling a client about.

Every figure below was read on the scheme’s own page on 8 September 2026.

CISRS cards

CISRS is a card scheme, not a register. The grades are Labourer, Scaffolder, Advanced, Basic Scaffold Inspection, Advanced Scaffold Inspection and Scaffolding Supervisor, with optional inspection endorsements and systems product training endorsements.

CISRS states its own caveat plainly: prices vary from centre to centre and regionally, so ring around. Booking fees may also exclude NVQ or SCQF registration, which adds cost.

Two things we could not establish and will not guess at: the card validity period, because two candidate CISRS pages returned errors, and the number of cardholders, which is not published on any page we opened.

NASC, and the audit cycle worth selling

Turnover is taken from the year end accounts for the period ending two years before the current year. The intermediate bands sit in a separate PDF we did not read, so only the two endpoints are given here.

The genuinely saleable part is the audit. NASC publishes its cycle for contractor members:

Then it repeats. Members get one month’s notice before a desktop audit and two months before a site audit.

A client who has never heard of NASC understands independent inspection of your yard and your live sites on a published rotation. That is a concrete thing to sell, and almost every NASC member sells the logo instead.

One caution before you quote membership numbers: NASC publishes over 950 on its homepage body and over 800 in its homepage footer, on its About page and in its FAQs. Both figures are NASC’s own. We report both rather than pick one.

TG20 and SG4, and the paywall

Members receive one free copy of the TG20:21 full suite, and books require a current portal subscription. SG4:22, on preventing falls in scaffolding operations, is published as a free download on the NASC homepage.

So the technical guidance the industry runs on costs a non-member £300 a year to access and a member £75. That gap is worth naming when a client asks why a cheaper quote might be cheaper.

CHAS, SSIP and Constructionline

CHAS states its prices scale with organisation size, so those three figures are floors rather than quotes. SSIP’s portal is genuinely free for clients to verify an assessment against, and SSIP publishes that 90,860 suppliers are registered with a member scheme, which makes it the most useful free check in the whole group.

Considerate Constructors

Site registration for projects of twelve weeks or more, based on annualised contract value, from the 2026 schedule:

Organisation registration is annual and by turnover: £414 under £250k, £835 to £3.5m, £1,681 to £10m, £2,552 to £50m, £3,462 to £100m and £4,464 above, with a 10 per cent re-registration discount after the first year. Additional monitoring is charged at a £545 day rate for 2026 with a half-day minimum.

The CITB levy, which is the number that actually moves

That applies to the 2025 levy, assessed spring 2026, and the 2026 levy, assessed spring 2027.

For a labour-heavy scaffolding business this is the single most commercially significant figure on the page. Subcontract labour is levied at more than three and a half times the payroll rate. It is a business model decision that arrives as an assessment, and it belongs in the model rather than in a surprise.

What all of this adds up to

A five-person scaffolding firm doing domestic and light commercial work, joining NASC and CHAS Standard, with five CISRS cards already held and one refresher a year, is looking at £1,200 plus VAT once, then roughly £1,162 plus £429 plus £375 plus VAT, plus the levy on its wage bill. Call it a little over £2,000 a year on schemes before the levy.

That is a real cost, and it is invisible on your website unless you write it down. In a trade where the client’s only visible variable is price, the point of spending it is to be able to explain it.

Common questions

Do I legally need to be NASC or CISRS?

No. There is no statutory register of scaffolders and no protected title. The hard legal duties are behavioural, under the Work at Height Regulations 2005, principally regulation 5 on competence and regulations 12 and 13 on inspection. Schemes are voluntary or client-imposed, not legal requirements.

Is NASC membership worth it?

That depends on whether your clients ask for it, and on whether you will sell the audit rather than the logo. Principal contractors increasingly require SSIP or CHAS regardless. The published five year audit cycle is the part with real explanatory value to a domestic or small commercial client.

What does it cost to get a CISRS card?

£33 for a new dual card application, £38 for a replacement. The training behind it is where the cost sits: £175 plus VAT for the operative scheme, £1,250 plus VAT for Part 1 and £1,300 plus VAT for Part 2 or Advanced, on CISRS’s own published guide prices, which it says vary by centre and region.

Whito

Whito is an independent UK research bureau. We ask the AI engines what they recommend, then check the businesses they name against Companies House and the sector registers. Figures we publish carry the date they were checked. Companies cannot pay to appear or to rank.

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