Emergency electrician call-out prices: what 135 UK firms actually publish

Data last verified: 2 October 2026. Figures re-checked against their primary sources under the Whito rolling re-verification programme.

Read: 2 October 2026. 135 electrical firm websites across eight UK towns. Every price taken from the firm’s own site on that day, nothing from directories. Same method and towns as our plumber call-out study.

When the power goes off at night, you want two things: someone qualified, and a price. The first is checkable. The second, it turns out, barely exists in writing.

On 2 October 2026 we checked 135 emergency electrician websites across eight UK towns. 113 of 135 published no price at all. Only 14 of 135 published a figure in pounds, from £30 to £171 across differing units. And in Belfast, not one of the 12 firms we checked published anything, not even “no call-out charge”.

What we checked

One job, defined once: the emergency electrician call-out price, as published on the firm’s own website. A “from” price is not a fixed price, and we recorded which it is. Where a firm prices emergencies by the hour, we recorded that rate and said so. An explicit “no call-out charge” is a published fact, recorded as £0. It means no attendance fee, not free work.

Towns: Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast and Norwich. A firm counts as checked only if we opened its own site looking for a price. Prices on directories and aggregators were ignored. No town got close to the 15 price-publishing firms we set out to find.

What is published, town by town

The figures mix units: call-out fees, first hours, hourly rates and per-15-minute billing all appear. No town produced the eight published prices we require before showing a town median. Across all 22 published prices, counting the £0 entries, the median is £70.50.

The quietest trade we have measured

We have now run this check on three trades, same towns, same day, same rules. Plumbers: 117 of 179 sites publish no price (65%). Locksmiths: 69 of 139 (50%). Electricians: 113 of 135 (84%). Electricians are the least likely of the three to put any price in writing, and the least likely even to say “no call-out charge”: just 8 of 135 sites make that claim, against 38 of 179 plumbers.

The figures that do exist

Where electricians do publish, they publish properly. 17 of the 22 price-publishing firms matched unambiguously to an active Companies House record, a far higher rate than the other two trades. The clearest tariff we found states a fixed first hour of £150 on weekdays, £180 evenings and weekends, £200 bank holidays, with no separate call-out fee and 30-minute billing after the first hour. Another publishes £171 plus VAT for an urgent call-out including the first hour. One Bristol firm’s published out-of-hours first hour (£120 plus VAT) is cheaper than its same-day daytime rate (£160 plus VAT), on both of our fetches. Oddities like that are why the exact sentence behind every figure is kept in the data file.

One more pattern worth knowing: three of the eight “no call-out charge” pages, one in Cardiff and two in Glasgow, are local-looking brands whose footers name the same national company. The data file records the operator behind every matched brand.

Hiring in an emergency: agree four things before anyone travels

With 84% of firms publishing nothing, assume you will be agreeing the price on the phone: the attendance fee, if any. The rate, and what it covers. The billing unit after the first hour. Whether all of that includes VAT. 13 of the 22 published prices in this study do not state VAT, so ask even when a figure is on the site.

If you run an electrical firm

Publishing a clear emergency tariff puts you in a minority of 14 out of 135, and in three of these eight towns no firm currently publishes a figure at all. A four-line tariff answers the exact question every emergency caller asks, and costs an afternoon. More on marketing an electrical business: Whito for electricians.

What this does not prove

• A published price is not the invoiced price. The final bill depends on the job, the hour, parts and billing increments.
• This is a small sample: 135 firms found through open web search, which favours firms that are visible in search. It is not a census of any town’s electricians.
• Pages change. Every figure carries its retrieval date, 2 October 2026, and may be wrong a week later.
• A Companies House match is not a quality judgement, and an unmatched firm is not an unregistered one. A registry outage during collection is noted in the affected rows of the data file.
• £0 means no attendance fee is advertised. Labour and parts are still charged.
• The figures mix call-out fees, first-hour, hourly and per-15-minute rates. The unit column in the data file governs every comparison.
• Saved evidence pages are text renderings fetched by tool, not raw HTML archives.

How we did it

Collection date 2 October 2026. We searched openly for electrical firms serving each town, opened their own websites, and recorded a price only from a page we opened, together with the exact sentence it came from. Every price was fetched twice, and every recorded quote was machine-checked against its saved page before this page was written. Firms publishing nothing were logged as checked with no price. Nothing is ranked, no firm is named as cheapest or best, and the data file lists firms alphabetically within town. If you think a figure is wrong, use corrections.

The data behind this page

The firm-level file behind this page covers the 22 firms with a published price: URL, the price, its unit, VAT treatment, fixed or from, the verbatim sentence it came from, the retrieval date and the Companies House fields, plus the register of all 113 checked firms with no published price. It is sold as Whito Data. Nobody can pay to be added to a study, removed from one or moved within one. How Whito makes money.

Cite this research

Whito Research (2026). Emergency electrician call-out prices: of 135 UK firm websites checked on 2 October 2026, 113 published no price and only 14 published a figure in pounds. https://whito.co.uk/electricians/research/emergency-electrician-callout-prices/

These figures are free to quote with a link to this page.

Related Whito research

• Emergency plumber call-out prices: what 179 UK firms actually publish
• The fees UK agencies do not quote

Questions

How much does an emergency electrician call-out cost in the UK?

Most firms will not tell you in advance. Of 135 emergency electrician websites checked across eight UK towns on 2 October 2026, only 14 published a figure in pounds, from £30 to £171 across call-out fees, first-hour and hourly rates. Source: Whito, firm websites read 2 October 2026.

Do electricians publish prices less than other trades?

Yes, on this evidence. Checked the same day with the same rules: 84% of electrician sites published no price (113 of 135), against 65% of plumbers (117 of 179) and 50% of locksmiths (69 of 139). Source: Whito, firm websites read 2 October 2026.

What should I agree before an emergency electrician travels?

Four things: the attendance fee, if any; the rate and what it covers; the billing unit after the first hour; and whether the figures include VAT. In this study 13 of 22 published prices did not state VAT. Source: Whito, firm websites read 2 October 2026.

Whito

Whito is an independent UK research publisher. We publish research on how UK businesses are found, trusted and priced: what they cost to market, how their sectors work, and who actually gets recommended. Studies are free to read, every figure carries the date it was checked, and nobody pays to appear.

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