EICR and PAT testing software: a UK guide

Last updated: August 2026

You spent two hours in a first floor flat, half of it in a meter cupboard and half of it under the stairs, and the schedule of test results is on a clipboard on the passenger seat. Three more properties this week look the same. The agent will not release payment until the PDF is on their portal, one of the reports is unsatisfactory so a statutory clock started the moment you packed up, and somewhere in a spreadsheet sit forty properties whose reports expire this autumn that nobody has phoned yet.

That last line is the business. Everything else is a day’s work.

The next inspection date is the whole business

A test and inspect firm sells a document, not a repair. The distinguishing feature of that document is that it carries its own next due date: BS 7671 requires an EICR to state a recommended interval together with an explanation for it. The inspector writes down the date on which he will next be paid, and hands it to the customer.

Five years later that date is either in something that puts it in front of a human being, or it is in a filing cabinet, and the landlord books with whoever rings first. England’s duty applied to new tenancies from 1 July 2020 and to all existing tenancies by 1 April 2021, so the first statutory wave has been expiring through 2025 and 2026. Whatever you inspected in one quarter five years ago is due in one quarter now.

A five year reminder on its own is not enough either. Renewals slip: the tenant is away, the engineer cancels, the agent takes a fortnight to rebook, and a job booked in January against a May expiry lands in June. The round has to be worked months ahead, with slippage designed into it.

This is also the gap in the software most testers already pay for. Almost every certification product is organised around producing a document, so the next inspection date is a field on a stored record rather than a working queue. That is why the expiry list ends up in a spreadsheet anyway.

Installation and contracting work belongs to job management software for electricians, the gas version of this round to gas safety certificate software, and the instructing agent’s side to property maintenance for letting agents.

PAT testing is not a legal requirement, and saying so wins work

There is no law called PAT testing and no legal duty to PAT test. Asked directly whether PAT testing is a legal requirement, HSE answers it in one word: no. The law requires only that electrical equipment is maintained so as to prevent danger, a duty in regulation 4(2) of the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989, which says nothing about what, by whom, or how often.

HSE goes further than most testers expect. The approach should be risk based, so a power tool on a construction site is examined more often than a lamp in a hotel bedroom. There is no legal requirement to label tested equipment or to keep records of the activity, and for most portable equipment in a low risk workplace a test is not needed at all.

The IET moved the same way. The fifth edition of its Code of Practice for In Service Inspection and Testing of Electrical Equipment removed the frequency of testing table from the fourth edition and did not replace it, putting risk assessment guidance and worked examples there instead. Its framework is three levels: user checks, formal visual inspection, and combined inspection and testing. Most faults are found by looking.

None of this shrinks the market. It changes the pitch. A firm selling on “the law says annual testing” wins the naive half of the buyers and is caught out by the informed half. The defensible line is that the client has a maintenance duty, that a risk assessment decides the interval, and that your register is their evidence of having discharged it. You are selling evidence rather than a mandated test, so the register has to be worth buying.

Two 28 day clocks, and both start on the day you tested

In England, regulation 3 requires the landlord to supply the report to an existing tenant within 28 days of the inspection and test, and where the report calls for remedial or further investigative work, that work must be completed within 28 days of the inspection as well, or sooner if the report specifies. Both clocks start on the day you were in the property. Neither waits for the landlord to read anything.

This is the most misreported point in published content on the subject, and it is the strongest commercial argument the trade has. A tester who takes ten days to write up an unsatisfactory report has consumed a third of the customer’s statutory window before the customer knows there is a problem. Same day issue is not a convenience. It is the product.

Access is the other half. A booked EICR needs somebody to be in, and the regulations anticipate that failing: a landlord is not in breach if they took all reasonable steps, and specifically is not treated as having failed solely because they did not bring legal proceedings against the tenant. That defence is assembled out of records, which in practice means yours: attendance dates and times, the message you sent, the no access note written at the door. From 1 May 2026 all assured tenancies in England are periodic and section 21 is gone, so landlords lean harder on documented attempts.

A no access is also a whole slot lost, booked weeks earlier, and it is rebooked through the agent rather than with the person who was not at home.

Four nations, four rule sets, and most content says UK when it means England

England requires inspection at no more than five year intervals by a qualified person, and the report kept until the next inspection is due. The 2025 amendment raised the maximum penalty from £30,000 to £40,000, so anything published before late 2025 understates it; the GOV.UK guidance carries the current position.

That amendment also extended the England regulations to registered providers of social housing, with a first inspection deadline of 1 November 2026 across roughly four million homes. It also created a duty England did not have before: social landlords must have the appliances they supply, cookers and fridges and similar, checked at regular intervals by a qualified person. Private landlords are not subject to it, and almost nothing published covers the difference.

Wales gives seven days, not 28. Under regulation 6 the report goes to the contract holder within seven days of the inspection being completed, and a dwelling is treated as unfit for human habitation for any period the landlord is not complying, which runs through the occupation contract rather than arriving as a council penalty notice.

Scotland runs on the repairing standard: an EICR at no more than five year intervals, and in service inspection and testing of landlord supplied appliances on the same maximum, which makes Scotland the one nation where the appliance round is genuinely required of private landlords. The landlord keeps the report for six years rather than until the next inspection.

Northern Ireland commenced on 1 April 2025 under SR 2024/201, older tenancies having until 1 December 2025. Enforcement there is criminal: breach is an offence carrying a fine up to level 5 on the standard scale, so do not quote the £40,000 figure.

Codes, arguments, and where the margin actually is

Four codes appear on an EICR. C1 is danger present, immediate remedial action required. C2 is potentially dangerous, urgent remedial action required. Either makes the report unsatisfactory. C3 is improvement recommended, and it does not: the IET has published as a myth correction that a landlord is not obliged to act on a C3 and that it does not fail the report.

FI, further investigation, is mid change. BS 7671:2018+A4:2026 decoupled FI from C1 and C2 and softened the wording from further investigation required without delay to further investigation is advised, noting that it should rarely be used in domestic work and never for an obvious defect. Government guidance for the rented sector still treats an FI as compelling further investigation and remedial action. Both are current as at August 2026, so say in writing which you are working to, and date it.

An EICR is also not retrospective. An installation designed to an earlier edition of BS 7671 does not fail on age alone, and non compliance with the current standard does not automatically mean unsafe. That is the root of most arguments between landlords and inspectors.

Those arguments have a commercial cause. The inspection is priced tight and the remedial work carries the margin, so the trade has an incentive problem its customers discuss openly and unkindly in landlord forums. The IET’s guidance points the honest way through: an observation should be a factual description of the problem rather than a proposal for the remedial works, and the detail belongs on a separate quotation. A photograph of the actual defect, attached to the actual code, is what ends the argument.

Getting paid, and the CIS line most testers miss

Published cost guides put a domestic EICR at roughly £100 to £250, averaging around £180, and landlord reports typically £150 to £250 by size and circuit count. PAT is priced per item with volume tapering, broadly £1 to £3 an item against a minimum call, with a typical half day session around £150. A day of EICRs might be three £160 invoices, so per invoice admin cost matters far more than in a trade doing £4,000 jobs.

The payer is rarely the person on site. The agent instructs, the landlord pays, the tenant lets you in, and payment is not processed until the PDF is on their system. A report sitting in a van is unbilled revenue, and the remedial quote behind it is a second sale to a decision maker who was never there.

Then the line most testers miss: pure inspection and testing sits outside the Construction Industry Scheme, because HMRC’s manual treats it as a survey where the work is no more than inspecting and making a report, under the exclusion for the professional work of consultants in building and engineering. The remedial work that follows is inside CIS, because making good a physical deficiency is a construction operation.

That flows into VAT. The domestic reverse charge applies only to supplies reported under CIS, so an EICR or PAT round invoiced to a landlord, agent or business is standard rated in the normal way. It bites on remedial work supplied to a contractor customer who is not an end user. One trap: where excluded services form part of a single combined supply with covered ones, all of it can be pulled in. Invoice inspection and remedials separately, and check your own position with your accountant.

How Dispatch helps

Dispatch runs everything around the certificate: the customers, their sites, the visits, the evidence and the money, while your testing software keeps producing the report.

Finished certificates attach to the job as PDFs, images or Word files and are kept for the life of the job, alongside RAMS and method statements, so a landlord asking for a copy of a report from three years ago is a ten second job. A written completion report with up to twelve photographs is required before a job can be marked Completed, which is what turns a same day write up from an intention into a habit, and the 28 day clock in England starts at the inspection date rather than when you get round to it.

Book onto a week calendar, tell the customer automatically when you are coming, and keep the access conversation on a two way thread with photographs, opened from a link you text. Completion history for a customer is grouped by site address, so a landlord with nine properties reads as nine histories.

Invoice with full VAT, take card payment into your own Stripe account, and let overdue invoices chase themselves at 3, 10 and 21 days.

Every feature is on every plan, everything runs in the UK, and there is a free plan to try on one property.