EICR and PAT testing cover different parts of your commercial property's electrical safety. Here's what each one checks, how often you actually need them, and why insurers care more than the law does.
If you've searched for this, you're probably staring at an insurance renewal form, a fire risk assessment, or a lease clause that mentions both terms and doesn't explain either. Here's the short version: an EICR checks the fixed wiring in your building. PAT testing checks the appliances plugged into it. You almost always need both, and one doesn't substitute for the other.
For a commercial landlord, business owner, or facilities manager, this isn't really a "what does the law require" question, because for commercial premises, the law doesn't set a fixed testing calendar the way it does for residential rentals. It's a "what can I prove if something goes wrong" question. That distinction changes how you should think about both of these.
| EICR | PAT Testing | |
|---|---|---|
| Checks | Fixed installation — consumer unit, wiring, sockets, distribution boards | Portable appliances — kettles, monitors, catering equipment, power tools |
| Legal basis | Electricity at Work Regulations 1989, BS 7671 (IET Wiring Regulations) | Electricity at Work Regulations 1989, HSE guidance |
| Fixed legal interval? | No — risk-based, set by a competent person | No — risk-based, set by the duty holder |
| Typical commercial interval | 3–5 years (offices/retail), 3 years or less for kitchens and higher-risk environments | Annual for offices, more frequent for catering and workshop equipment |
| Who's usually responsible | Landlord for communal areas/main infrastructure; tenant for their demised space | Whoever owns and uses the appliance, usually the tenant or business occupier |
An Electrical Installation Condition Report examines everything that's fixed to the building: the consumer unit, the distribution boards, the wiring behind the walls, the sockets and switches themselves. A qualified electrician tests insulation resistance, earth fault loop impedance, polarity, and continuity, then grades any issues found using a C1–C3 and FI coding system, from immediate danger down to items worth noting for future work.
There's no single legally mandated interval for commercial EICRs the way there is for residential rentals under the Housing and Planning Act 2016. Instead, the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 requires that electrical systems be maintained in a safe condition on an ongoing basis, and BS 7671 (via the IET's Guidance Note 3) sets out the intervals most electricians actually work to. In practice, that guidance is risk-based rather than one-size-fits-all: standard offices typically sit on a five-year cycle, while restaurants, kitchens, and premises with heavier footfall or harsher environments are often brought down to three years or less because heat, grease, and constant equipment cycling degrade cable sheaths and terminations faster (Electrician 24/7 London, retrieved 2026-09-03).
The interval on your own report isn't a suggestion you can ignore, either: HSE guidance treats the recommended re-inspection date, set by a competent person based on the installation's use and condition, as the practical benchmark landlords and businesses are expected to follow (London Safety Certificate, retrieved 2026-09-03).
Portable Appliance Testing is the visual inspection and electrical testing of anything staff or customers plug in and use day to day: kettles, monitors, extension leads, catering equipment, vacuum cleaners, power tools. A clean EICR tells you the building's wiring is safe. It tells you nothing about whether the kettle in the staff kitchen has a perished flex, or whether the extension lead someone brought in from home is overloaded.
The HSE has never set a fixed national interval for PAT testing, and it's explicit that testing frequency should be based on risk, not a blanket calendar: treating equipment identically regardless of how it's used wastes money in low-risk settings and creates real danger in high-risk ones (HSE, retrieved 2026-09-03). In practice, most businesses still work from the IET's Code of Practice intervals as a starting point: office IT equipment commonly sits on a 12-month combined inspection-and-test cycle (with some low-risk stationary items stretching to 4 years), while equipment in workshops, kitchens, and construction environments is checked far more often, sometimes as frequently as every three months for handheld tools on site (PAT Testing Course, retrieved 2026-09-03).
What most businesses actually need isn't a fixed annual test of everything: it's a documented, risk-based testing regime that you can point to if an insurer or the HSE ever asks how you decided on your intervals (CHAS, retrieved 2026-09-03).
This is where a lot of commercial property owners get caught out. A pristine EICR and a fully in-date PAT register can both exist on the same premises while a genuine hazard sits between them.
Picture a shared kitchen in a small office building. The distribution board is sound, the wiring is compliant, the EICR is two years old and satisfactory. But someone's been running a kettle, a toaster, and a microwave off a single overloaded four-way extension block that's never been tested, with a cracked plug nobody's reported. The EICR passed. The installation is fine. The appliance chain plugged into it isn't, and that's exactly the kind of fault PAT testing exists to catch.
The reverse is just as real. A business can PAT test every appliance on the premises religiously and still be sitting on a distribution board with a degraded connection that's overheating behind a wall, invisible to anyone who isn't inspecting the fixed installation itself. Neither test is a substitute for the other because they're built to catch entirely different categories of fault: one in the building, one in what's plugged into it.
For commercial premises specifically, this matters more than it does residentially. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, you carry a duty of care toward anyone using the premises, staff, contractors, customers, delivery drivers, not just toward a single tenant family. Treating PAT testing as "good practice" you'll get around to eventually, the way a residential landlord might, doesn't sit well against that broader duty (BES Group, retrieved 2026-09-03).
Here's the sharper point, and it's the one that tends to get glossed over in generic compliance explainers: for a commercial property, the question that actually decides outcomes isn't usually "does the law technically require this." It's "can I prove it, if I ever need to."
Commercial insurance policies frequently make cover conditional on documented, in-date electrical testing, and IET Guidance Note 3 intervals, while not statute, are routinely referenced by insurers, lease covenants, and HSE inspectors as the standard a reasonable duty holder would have followed (Electrician 24/7 London, retrieved 2026-09-03). If a fire starts, an employee is injured, or a claim is made and you can't produce a current EICR or PAT records, an insurer has grounds to challenge the payout, not because you broke a specific law, but because you can't demonstrate you managed a foreseeable risk. Many commercial leases go further and make it a hard tenant obligation: five-year EICR intervals are a standard clause in office leases across central London, independent of whatever the "minimum legal" position might be.
In other words, the paperwork isn't the compliance box-ticking exercise it can feel like. It's the evidence your insurer, your landlord, or a court will ask for after the fact, which is a much stronger reason to stay current than "the regulations technically permit flexibility."
This is the question that trips up more commercial occupiers than almost anything else, because unlike a single-let residential property, responsibility in a shared commercial building splits, and the split isn't always obvious from the lease alone.
As a general rule, whoever has control over a given part of the installation carries the duty for it. In a multi-let office block, that typically means:
Where it gets genuinely confusing is fit-out work. If a tenant commissions their own office fit-out, new sockets, new circuits, a kitchenette added mid-lease, that installation becomes part of what they're responsible for maintaining and getting inspected, even though the building's core infrastructure remains the landlord's problem (Elsys Electrical, retrieved 2026-09-03). This is precisely the kind of split that gets missed at lease signing and then argued over after an incident, worth clarifying explicitly with your landlord or letting agent rather than assuming it's covered.
Electrical testing rarely sits in isolation on a commercial premises. If you're already commissioning an EICR or PAT testing programme, it's worth reviewing the rest of your fire and life-safety compliance at the same time: catering equipment servicing, fire alarm testing, CCTV, and access control all tend to sit on similar risk-based inspection cycles, and coordinating them means fewer separate contractor visits and one clearer compliance calendar instead of five.
TLECC covers all of this under one roof for commercial clients: EICR and PAT testing alongside catering equipment compliance, fire alarms, CCTV, and access control. If you're not sure what your building actually needs or how often, get in touch for a free, no-obligation quote and we'll walk through it with you.
There's no single law that names "EICR" as a mandatory certificate for commercial premises the way there is for residential rentals. But the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 and Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 both require you to keep your electrical installation safe on an ongoing basis, and an EICR is the standard way to demonstrate you're meeting that duty.
No fixed law names "PAT testing" specifically. The legal duty is to maintain portable electrical equipment in a safe condition under the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989. PAT testing is simply the recognised, HSE-referenced method most businesses use to evidence they're meeting that duty.
Most standard offices work to a five-year interval, though your own report will state a recommended re-inspection date based on the condition and use of your specific installation. Higher-risk premises, kitchens, workshops, industrial units, are typically inspected more frequently, often every three years or less.
Not having current records won't automatically trigger prosecution, but it puts you in a weak position if an incident occurs: insurers can challenge claims where you can't evidence a maintained, risk-assessed testing regime, and enforcement bodies can act where a failure to maintain electrical safety has led to danger.
EICR and PAT testing aren't interchangeable, and for a commercial property, treating either as optional paperwork misses the point of both. An EICR protects the building; PAT testing protects everything plugged into it; and the documentation from both is what actually stands behind you if an insurer, a landlord, or an inspector ever asks you to prove you took electrical safety seriously.
If you manage a commercial premises and aren't sure where you currently stand on either, that's exactly the kind of thing worth getting checked before it becomes a claims conversation rather than a compliance one: get your free no-obligation quote for EICR and PAT testing.
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