What Should You Charge for an Emergency or Out-of-Hours Callout?

A customer’s boiler goes on a Sunday night, and you’re the one deciding what “emergency” costs on top of your normal rate. Charge too little and you’re working nights for barely more than daytime money; charge too much and word gets round that you gouge people out of hours. Here’s what UK plumbers, electricians and heating engineers are actually adding for an emergency or out-of-hours callout right now, and how a large national emergency service prices the identical job.

What tradespeople actually charge extra

Trade	Standard call-out	Emergency / out-of-hours
Plumber [1][2]	£80-£150 daytime call-out	£120-£220 evenings/weekends; £150-£300+ nights, Sundays, bank holidays
Electrician [4][5]	£50-£100 call-out (£40-£95/hr)	£80-£200 call-out, 1.5x-2.5x the hourly rate depending on the time
Heating/gas engineer [7][8]	£43/hr; £75-£86 average call-out	£109 average emergency call-out; £150+ once out of normal hours

Across plumbing, a same-day visit during normal working hours commonly runs £80-£150, but push the same job into the evening or a weekend and the opening charge climbs to £120-£220 [1]. Send someone out late at night, on a Sunday or over a bank holiday and quoted prices commonly reach £150-£300 or more, reflecting how few plumbers are actually working at that hour [1]. A separate national cost guide, updated in August 2026, puts a typical emergency call-out fee nearer £75 plus roughly £60 an hour on top, with a clear regional split of £90-£120 in London against £70-£90 elsewhere in the UK [2].

Electricians tend to price the uplift as a multiplier rather than a flat jump. One 2026 rates guide sets a standard hourly rate of £40-£60, rising to 1.5 times that rate for a Saturday or a weekday evening between 6pm and 10pm, doubling on a Sunday or bank holiday, and reaching 2-2.5 times the standard rate for genuine night work between 10pm and 8am [4]. Call-out charges follow the same shape: £50-£100 in normal hours, climbing to £80-£130 in the evening, £100-£150 at weekends and £120-£200 for an immediate emergency attendance [4]. Housekeep’s own cost guide, dated March 2026, is more conservative, putting a standard electrician’s hourly rate including VAT at £50-£95 and an emergency rate at £80-£110 [5].

A 2026 review of published electrician prices found the average out-of-hours premium was smaller than many tradespeople assume, at around 1.33 times the standard rate, against a median standard call-out minimum of £92 and a median out-of-hours minimum of £120 [6]. That average hides a wide spread between firms, with some pricing out-of-hours work only a little above their day rate and others charging close to double [6].

Heating and gas engineers show a similar split. One 2026 rates guide puts the average heating engineer’s hourly labour rate at £43, with a typical gas engineer’s call-out charge of £75 rising to £150 or more once the visit falls outside normal working hours [7]. Pricing data drawn from more than 7,000 gas engineering businesses puts the average call-out fee at £86 against an average emergency call-out fee of £109, roughly a 27% premium across those businesses’ own live pricing [8].

How a national emergency service prices the same job

Not every business adds a premium at all. Pimlico Plumbers, one of the best-known 24-hour emergency plumbing, heating and electrical providers in London, states it charges the same rates every day of the week, with no separate call-out charge for evenings, weekends or its one-hour emergency response [3]. Instead of a time-of-day uplift, the model bills a single minimum charge from the first hour, then in 15-minute units after that, whatever time the job comes in [3]. That’s the opposite of the multiplier approach most independent trades use above, and it’s only really viable at scale: a large operation can staff a genuine round-the-clock rota, so a single job at 2am doesn’t need to carry its own scarcity premium the way it does for a sole trader choosing to give up their evening.

Flat premium or a time-of-day multiplier

The figures above split into two pricing models. A flat premium adds a fixed amount to the call-out fee regardless of exactly when the job falls - simple to quote over the phone, but it treats a 7pm weekday job the same as a 3am Sunday one. A time-of-day multiplier, like the 1.5x/2x/2.5x bands used in electrical pricing, scales the charge with how disruptive the hour actually is to you [4]. Neither model shows up as clearly more common across the sources here - what matters is picking one and applying it consistently, because a customer charged a different multiple each time they call out of hours has a legitimate reason to distrust the invoice.

Setting your own out-of-hours premium

None of the figures above is a target to hit - they’re a spread across trades, regions and business sizes with very different overheads behind them [1][2][4][5][6][7][8]. Work out what genuinely changes when a job falls outside your normal hours: lost evening or family time, the real chance of a wasted trip on a night that could otherwise have gone to a paying weekday job, and in several trades a measurable drop in your own alertness doing skilled or safety-critical work at 3am. Price against that, not against a headline figure copied from a competitor’s website.

Whatever premium you land on, state it before you set off, not on the invoice once the job is done. A customer who’s told upfront that a night call-out costs more than a daytime one rarely argues about it; a customer who finds out only when the bill arrives usually does.

What to do next

If you don’t currently charge anything extra for evenings, weekends or genuine emergencies, or you’re not sure your current premium reflects what it actually costs you to be available at short notice, get someone outside the business to check your figure against what’s actually being charged in your trade before you change your pricing. Loomwork Ai runs a short paid review for trades pricing their call-out and emergency charges.