JIB Rates 2026: The Uplift, the Grades, and What You Should Actually Charge

Every January the same conversation happens in vans and WhatsApp groups across the country: the new JIB rates are out, someone's cousin is on more at a firm in Manchester, and half the industry quietly wonders whether their own numbers still stack up.

Here's what the 2026 position actually means — for what you pay, what you earn, and what you should be charging.

The 2026 uplift

The JIB's current two-year deal raised graded operative rates by 3.95% from 5 January 2026, with a further 4.6% rise already agreed for January 2027. If you employ electricians on JIB terms, your labour cost went up by roughly 4% this year and will rise again next January — that's locked in, not speculation.

The grade structure is unchanged: Labourer, Adult Trainee, Electrician, Approved Electrician, and Technician, with the usual splits for transport provision and London weighting. For the official rate schedule per grade, go straight to the JIB's published tables — quoting week-old screenshots from Facebook is how payroll arguments start.

The mistake: treating a JIB rate as a charge-out rate

The JIB rate is a wage. It's what an employed electrician is paid per hour worked. It is not — not even close — what a business can charge for that hour and survive.

Between the JIB wage and a viable charge-out rate sits everything else: employer's NI and pension, holiday pay, the van, fuel, insurance, tools, test equipment calibration, software, training, certification fees, the accountant, and the hours nobody bills — quoting, driving, merchant runs, paperwork.

Rule of thumb: by the time an employed electrician's true hourly cost is counted, it's typically 1.6–1.8× the headline wage. And you can only recover it across billable hours — for most small firms that's 28–32 hours a week per operative, not 40.

What that means in practice

Take an operative on a JIB-graded wage of roughly £17/hour. True employment cost lands around £28–£30/hour once NI, pension, holiday, and overheads are loaded. Recover that across 30 billable hours instead of 40 and you're at £37–£40/hour break-even — before the business makes a penny of profit.

That's why "£45/hour sounds expensive" is the wrong frame. Against the maths above, £45/hour is a business running on a 15% margin — one bad debt or one quiet fortnight from trouble.

If you'd rather not do this arithmetic on the back of a merchant receipt, our free Day Rate Calculator does it properly: your target income, your real overheads, your honest billable hours — out comes the rate your business actually needs.

Employed rates and the subbie market

The JIB uplift moves the whole market. When employed rates rise ~4%, subcontract day rates follow within months — subbies benchmark against what employment would pay them, plus a premium for carrying their own risk. Budget your 2026/27 labour lines accordingly, and re-check any long-running maintenance contracts priced against 2024 labour assumptions. A contract that made sense two rises ago may be quietly underwater now.

One thing you can do right now

Pull your three most common job types and re-price the labour line against your current true hourly cost — 2026 wages, 2026 insurance, 2026 fuel. If the margin has drifted more than a couple of points since you last set your rates, your prices are due the same annual review your costs already had.

Field Forge keeps this honest automatically: your labour rates live in one place, every AI-drafted quote prices from them, and job costing shows actual hours against estimate — so when rates move in January, you change one number, not a hundred templates.