Anyone can call themselves an electrician. Here's how to check who's actually registered.

In the UK, anyone can legally call themselves an electrician. There is no licence, and the title is not protected. To check an electrician in England or Wales, ask which competent person scheme their business is registered with, such as NICEIC or NAPIT, then look the business up on that scheme's public register before any work starts. The Registered Competent Person Electrical search covers all the schemes in one lookup.

If that first sentence surprised you, you are not alone. Gas has a mandatory register: a business must be on the Gas Safe Register before it may legally touch your boiler, full stop. Electrical work has no equivalent. Nobody has to be on any register to rewire your house. What exists instead is a quieter system that attaches a legal process to certain jobs rather than to the person doing them, and once you understand it, checking takes two minutes.

There is no electrician's licence

The building regulations do not restrict who may carry out electrical installation work; that is the Planning Portal's own wording, and it applies to professionals and homeowners alike. There is no statutory register of electricians anywhere in the UK. Campaigners, Electrical Safety First among them, have backed calls for statutory regulation of the trade, including protection of the title. Until that changes, the protection you have is a mix of building regulations, voluntary competent person schemes, and your own two-minute check. Used properly, that mix works. The fire figures are why it needs to. Government fire statistics do not publish a single electrical category, but Electrical Safety First's analysis of Home Office data for 2023/24 attributes 14,186 accidental dwelling fires in England, 53.4% of the total, to an electrical origin.

What Part P actually covers

Part P of the building regulations makes certain domestic electrical work notifiable: the law requires a sign-off process for the job, whoever does it. In England the notifiable list is short: installing a new circuit, which is why an EV charge point is normally notifiable since it needs its own dedicated circuit; replacing the consumer unit, the fuse board itself; and additions or alterations in the area around a bath or shower. Like-for-like replacements, repairs and maintenance are not notifiable, so swapping a broken socket for the same kind needs no paperwork.

Wales kept a wider list. There, work in kitchens, gardens and other outdoor installations, and special installations like outdoor lighting and power also count as notifiable. If you are in Wales, assume more of your job is covered, not less. Scotland and Northern Ireland do not use Part P at all; we cover their systems further down.

The three legal routes, and the penalty for skipping them

For a notifiable job in England there are three legal routes. The usual one is a business registered with a competent person scheme, which does the work and certifies it itself, with no council involvement. The second route, and England is alone in having it, is a registered third-party certifier who checks work done by someone else, including competent DIY. The third is notifying the council's building control before work starts, paying their fees, and having them inspect. Wales has the first and third. Whichever route the job takes, you should end up holding a certificate for the electrical work itself and a building regulations compliance certificate. Keep both; a buyer's solicitor will ask for them one day.

Skipping all three routes is a building regulations breach, and the Building Safety Act sharpened the penalties: an unlimited fine, up to two years' imprisonment in serious cases, and a daily fine while the breach continues. Those penalties took effect in England in October 2023 and, as of this month, July 2026, they apply in Wales too. Separately, the council can serve a notice requiring non-compliant work to be altered or removed up to ten years after completion, with 28 days to comply. None of this lands on you for hiring an unregistered electrician, which is legal. It lands when notifiable work happens with no sign-off route at all, and in practice the person left holding the problem at sale time is the homeowner.

The two-minute check (England and Wales)

1. Ask which competent person scheme the business is registered with. Registered firms answer instantly; it is the basis of their whole sign-off ability.
2. Look the business up on that scheme's public register, or use the Registered Competent Person Electrical search, which covers all the schemes at once. Check the name matches the business in front of you.
3. Read their public record here: dated reviews, company status, and any credentials we hold with the date we last checked them. Our records complement the live register; they never replace it.
4. If the business is not scheme-registered, that can still be fine for non-notifiable work, and for notifiable work if another route is used. Agree in writing, before work starts, who is notifying building control.
5. At the end, collect the certificates. The paperwork is the point of the whole system.

What we hold and re-check

A word on what sits behind step three. We found 7,479 UK businesses listed on NICEIC's public register and we re-check those listings continuously: as of 17 July 2026, the typical listing was re-checked 86 days ago, and 100% of them had been re-checked within the last 90 days. Two honesty notes. First, our records describe what we found when we last looked; registrations change, so the scheme's live register is always the current answer, and a business missing from our records is not unregistered, just unmatched. Second, scheme registration covers businesses doing electrical work across many trades, from dedicated electricians to builders and renewables installers, so we say businesses rather than electricians.

The jobs where checking matters most

Four jobs account for most of the moments this check earns its keep. An EV charge point, because it normally needs a new dedicated circuit and is therefore normally notifiable. A consumer unit replacement, notifiable everywhere in England and Wales. A rewire, which is new circuits by definition. And an electrical installation condition report, the EICR: not building work at all, but an inspection you want done by someone whose competence somebody else has assessed. If you are a landlord in England, an EICR at least every five years is a legal requirement for private rentals. For everyone else it is the standard health check when buying a house or after any worrying discovery.

If the work has already been done

Found out after the fact that notifiable work was never signed off? Do not panic, and do not repaint over it either. In England a registered third-party certifier can inspect and certify work done by someone else, which is often the cleanest fix. Or the council's building control can regularise it retrospectively for a fee. If the work worries you on safety grounds, have a scheme-registered business inspect it before anything else. What you should not do is nothing: the council's power to require fixing lasts up to ten years, and the missing certificate will surface the day you sell.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Scotland runs a building standards system with building warrants and approved certifiers rather than Part P; a proposal to protect the title electrician in Scotland has been consulted on but is not law. Northern Ireland has no Part P equivalent, and registration is voluntary there too. In both places the core of the check still works, because NICEIC's and NAPIT's own registers cover businesses across the UK: ask the scheme, look the business up. The all-schemes single search covers England and Wales only.

Questions homeowners ask