Day January 15, 2026

An Electrical Installation Condition Report, or EICR for short, sounds straightforward enough. You hire an electrician, they test your wiring, you get a report. Simple. Except it's not. Because the EICR industry in the UK is littered with cowboys charging £80 for inspections that take 45 minutes, landlords panicking over C3 codes they don't need to fix, and homeowners being told their perfectly safe 1990s consumer unit is "dangerous" and needs replacing immediately for £800.

In 2015, if you told a self-employed electrician they'd be running their entire business from a smartphone within a decade, they'd have laughed you out of the van. Apps were for spirit levels and torch features, not serious business administration. Invoices got written on carbon-copy pads. Quotes went out as PDFs emailed from a laptop at home. Certification meant filling out paper test certificates with a pen. By 2026, that same electrician can't legally operate without apps. HMRC's Making Tax Digital mandate requires digital record-keeping. Clients expect instant quotes with approve buttons. Insurance companies want digital certification records.

The "degree premium" has been gospel in UK education policy for decades. Go to university, earn more over your lifetime, retire comfortably. Simple. Except the data from 2015 to 2025 tells a different story, particularly if you're comparing median graduate earnings to skilled construction trades like electricians, plumbers, and carpenters. As of 2025, median annual earnings for electricians sit at £39,039 according to ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) data. The median graduate salary, per HESA Graduate Outcomes data, is £27,500 for recent first-degree holders. That's an £11,539 gap in favour of the electrician. 

In January 2018, a regulation called Lot 20 came into force across the EU and UK, setting minimum energy efficiency standards for electric heaters. Electricians panicked. Landlords received scare-tactic sales calls. Forums filled with theories about Trading Standards raiding van stocks for non-compliant heaters. Seven years later, in 2026, Lot 20 has become invisible. The features that were premium in 2018 (electronic thermostats, 24/7 programming, adaptive start controls, open-window detection) are now baseline expectations.