Salary Intelligence
Electrician
A tradesperson who installs, inspects, maintains and repairs electrical wiring, equipment and fixtures.
An Office for National Statistics estimate. This figure is the ONS's own published estimate, reused under the Open Government Licence, not a figure WageOra has worked out itself. See Salaries for how WageOra checks and uses figures like this one.
Median gross annual earnings
£39,647.00 per year — median gross annual earnings for full-time employee jobs, United Kingdom.
Provenance
| Source | Office for National Statistics — Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), 2025 (provisional, corrected 19 December 2025) |
|---|---|
| Table | ASHE Table 14 |
| Occupation code (SOC 2020) | 5241 — Electricians and electrical fitters |
| Geography | United Kingdom |
| Reference period | Tax year ending 5 April 2025 |
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
What an electrician does
Electricians install, test and maintain the wiring and equipment that carry electricity around buildings. The work runs from rewiring a house to keeping machinery going on an industrial site, and the day to day job looks quite different at either end of that range. Domestic work usually means small teams and a lot of travel between jobs. Commercial and industrial work more often means a longer stretch on one site.
Most qualified electricians hold a Level 3 apprenticeship or an equivalent competency based qualification, together with a current qualification in the BS 7671 wiring regulations. Those are the requirements for an ECS Installation Electrician card, which many employers and larger sites ask to see.
What the ONS figure covers
It covers people employed by someone else. A great many electricians work for themselves, either as sole traders or through their own company, and none of them appear in it. If that's your position, your income comes down to your day rate, how much work you win and what your costs are. This figure says nothing useful about any of that.
What can affect an electrician's pay?
Working arrangement matters more than job title.
Larger projects tend to pay more, and often add travel or lodging money on top of the rate. Much of the electrical contracting industry works to graded rates agreed nationally between employers and the union, so pay can follow a grade rather than a negotiation. Overtime, weekends and nights are usually paid at a premium, and over a year that adds up. Specialised work pays better than general installation, particularly testing and inspection, hazardous area work, and industrial control systems.
What this could mean for take-home pay
Using the 2026/27 tax year and the median above as a gross salary (England, Wales & Northern Ireland, no pension or student loan), our calculator works out a take-home pay of £32,065.44 per year (£2,672.12 per month). This is a worked example, not a claim about what you'd actually take home — try your own numbers on the Salary Calculator.