Many electricians charge a minimum call-out fee. What that fee buys varies from firm to firm, and no published source establishes a convention, so it belongs in the booking call rather than in your assumptions.
Ask what the fee covers
Some firms roll travel, the first hour on site and basic fault finding into a single figure. Others charge the call-out for attendance alone and start the labour clock once work begins. Neither arrangement is unusual, and no publisher reports which is more common, so the difference between the two is down entirely to who you ring. On a small job that difference can be most of the bill.
It is worth settling in one sentence before anyone sets off: does the charge include the first hour, or is labour on top of it? An electrician who prices this way will answer without hesitating, and an evasive answer is itself informative.
Why a small job costs more than it looks like it should
Whatever the fee covers, an electrician driving across South London to reset a tripping circuit spends most of the visit not working on your electrics: loading the van, sitting in traffic, finding somewhere to park, then diagnosing before touching anything. Where a first hour is charged as a block, that is where all of it lands.
So a twenty-minute fix that costs the same as an hour is not necessarily overcharging. You may have bought an hour, and the job took less of it than the travel did.
The one published figure
Checkatrade's hourly-rate guide gives a single London-flavoured example: in a major city like London you could pay up to £100 for a minimum call-out charge, an emergency call-out, or a one-hour small job, with additional hours at £45. Both figures exclude VAT.
That is the only published call-out number worth quoting. The £65 to £120 band that circulates widely does not come from a surveyed source, and no publisher gives a UK-wide call-out figure at all. Treat any precise national number you find with suspicion.
Out-of-hours is a different rate again
Emergency work covering evenings, weekends, bank holidays and overnight is published at £90 an hour within a range of £80 to £100 excluding VAT. Against the £50 standard UK average that is close to double.
Nobody publishes a standard multiplier or surcharge, so the premium is set firm by firm. Where a genuine emergency is not involved, waiting until a working day is the single cheapest decision available on a small job.
What the published rate defines is when the work happens, not how serious the fault is: evenings, weekends, bank holidays and overnight all attract it. No authoritative source sets out a list of faults that do and do not justify calling someone out at that rate, so treat any list you find online as somebody's opinion rather than a standard. If you think there is a danger present, the out-of-hours rate is the wrong thing to be weighing.
Bundling is the practical saving
Checkatrade's explicit consumer advice is to group small jobs into one visit rather than paying multiple call-out fees, and the same logic runs through its job pricing: if several sockets are needed, having them installed during one visit costs less than booking each separately.
The arithmetic is easy. Three separate visits for three small jobs mean three lots of travel and three first hours. One visit means one. On a published London first hour of up to £100 that difference is the price of the work itself.
So keep a list. A dead socket, a light fitting to swap, an outdoor socket for the garden and a dimmer switch are individually trivial and collectively a comfortable half day. The published figures for those jobs assume the electrician is already there: £50 to £200 for a light fitting, £30 to £100 for a dimmer, and £100 to £500 for an outdoor socket, all excluding VAT and from a November 2025 survey of nineteen traders.
Fees that get waived, and fees that do not
Practice varies, so ask rather than assume. Some firms waive the call-out charge if you go ahead with the repair, effectively rolling it into the job price. Some deduct it from the final invoice. Some charge it regardless, on the basis that diagnosis is the skilled part and the visit cost them the same either way.
None of those is unfair, but they produce very different bills for the same visit. The questions worth asking when you book are whether there is a minimum charge, what it covers, whether it is deducted if the work proceeds, and whether the rate quoted is standard or out-of-hours.
Quotes and estimates are a separate question
A call-out fee is for attending and diagnosing. Visiting to price a defined piece of work is normally free, whether that is a rewire, a consumer unit change or an EV charger, because the electrician is competing for the job rather than performing it.
The line blurs on fault finding, where the diagnosis is the work. If someone attends to trace an intermittent fault, expect that time to be chargeable whether or not the repair follows, and expect a competent electrician to say so before setting off.
Small jobs are where an unverified trader is most likely to turn up, so it pays to book from a checked list.