What certificate do you get for a consumer unit change?

A consumer unit change gets a full Electrical Installation Certificate (EIC), never a minor works certificate, and in England and Wales it is notifiable under Part P of the Building Regulations, so a Building Regulations compliance certificate should follow it. If someone replaced your fuse board and left anything less, the paperwork is wrong, whatever the workmanship.

Why it can never be minor works

A Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificate covers an addition or alteration to one existing circuit. A consumer unit is the origin of every circuit in the installation: replacing it disturbs and reconnects all of them, changes the protective devices they rely on, and involves design decisions: device ratings and types, RCD arrangements, main bonding verification. That is certifiable design, construction, inspection and testing across the installation, which is precisely what the EIC exists to declare. The EIC's schedules should list every circuit on the new board with its test results, not just "board changed".

The two documents a board change should produce

1. The EIC, signed for design, construction, and inspection & testing (often one signature wearing all three hats), with the schedule of inspections and the full schedule of circuit details and test results for every way on the new board.
2. A Building Regulations compliance certificate. A consumer unit replacement is notifiable in England and Wales. An electrician registered with a competent person scheme self-certifies, and the scheme issues the compliance certificate to the property owner (typically by post or email within a few weeks). Outside a scheme, the route is building control, arranged before the work starts.

Keep both. A future EICR, a house sale, or an insurance claim can ask for either.

"The old board had problems. Is that an EICR?"

A common tangle. If an inspection led to the board change, there may be three documents in play: the EICR that found the problems, the EIC for the replacement, and the compliance certificate for the notification. Each answers a different question (condition as found, work as done, regulations as notified) and none substitutes for another. What a board change does not do is certify the rest of the installation: an EIC for the new unit says nothing about the forty-year-old wiring behind the walls, which is the EICR's territory.

How long does the job take?

Most straightforward domestic changes are a day or less on site: power down, swap, reconnect, then dead and live testing of every circuit before re-energising, the testing being the part cut-price jobs skip. Add time where bonding needs upgrading (very common on older installations, and required before the new board goes live) or where circuit faults surface once modern RCDs finally see them.

For the trade

A board change is the certification workload of a small installation compressed into a day: every circuit on the schedule, columns 1 to 32. It is also exactly where doing the paperwork at the board pays: in Pascal the schedule fills as you test, device details come from real BS EN ranges, and the EIC is finished when the last circuit is, not at the kitchen table that evening.