Pricing electrical work per point: how it works, when it fails

Per-point pricing means charging a set rate for each "point", meaning each outlet position an installation needs: a socket, a switch, a light. It works because on a standard domestic install, points predict labour and materials well enough to quote fast and consistently. It fails wherever that prediction breaks: awkward access, finished decorations, non-standard runs, and anything that is not actually installation work. Use it as an engine for producing quotes, never as a substitute for looking at the job.

What counts as a point

Convention, not law, which is why two sparks comparing rates are often comparing different things. A common scheme: each socket outlet position is a point (a double counts once, positions being the cost driver); each switch position a point; each luminaire position a point; two-way and intermediate switching counted with an uplift or as extra points; and dedicated circuits (shower, cooker, EV) never as points but as priced items in their own right. Whatever your scheme, write it down once and reuse it: consistency is the entire value.

Setting the rate

Work backwards from reality: labour minutes per point at your actual pace (first fix and second fix), materials at supplier prices with your margin, divided into the day rate your business genuinely needs: van, insurance, scheme fees, certification time, the unpaid admin hours. Then sanity-check against a recent finished job: points × rate versus what that job truly took. If the two disagree, believe the job, not the spreadsheet. Rates vary by region and finish level; a rate copied from a forum carries someone else's cost base and someone else's shortcuts.

Where per-point makes money

New builds, rewires and extensions at first-fix stage: repetitive positions, clean access, materials in known lengths. Here per-point is faster to quote and it disciplines scope conversations ("another six points in the loft room is £X" is a sentence a builder understands immediately).

Where it quietly loses money

• Occupied and finished houses. Chasing walls someone repainted last month, lifting engineered oak, working around furniture: the point is identical, the hour count is not.
• Old installations. Every point touched risks opening a can of history, and per-point pricing assumes the existing wiring cooperates.
• Anything that isn't a point. Consumer unit changes, bonding upgrades, fault-finding, testing and certification: these are jobs or line items, and folding them into a per-point figure hides your most defensible charges.
• Travel-heavy small jobs. Four points an hour away is a call-out with decoration, not sixteen quid times four.

The fix is a hybrid quote: points for the pointable work, plus explicit lines for the board, the bonding, the certification and anything the survey flagged, with access assumptions stated in writing.

Per-point versus day rate versus itemised

Day rate wins for open-ended and fault work; fully itemised wins for large or commercial tenders that demand it; per-point wins the standard domestic middle by being fast and repeatable. Most healthy pricing uses all three, chosen per job. The method is a tool, and the poor outcomes come from owning only one tool.

Making the method compound

A pricing scheme only compounds if quotes, jobs and invoices stay connected: quote from your point scheme, and when the job closes, compare what it took against what you priced, because that feedback loop is the rate-setter. In Pascal the quote's lines become the job and the invoice without retyping, and the reporting shows the gap between priced and actual, which is how a per-point rate stops being folklore and starts being data.