You came here for a number. We are not going to give you one, and this page explains why that is in your interest rather than ours.
Why we do not publish a rate
A per-item rate is only meaningful if items are interchangeable units of work. They are not.
Three hundred desktop PCs in one open-plan floor is a morning. Three hundred items spread across nine tenancies in a building where you need a key, an escort and a different induction for each is three days. Same item count. Nothing else the same.
Then there is the state of your records. If you have a current register with locations, we are testing. If you have a folder of PDFs from a provider who left in 2021, we are doing a stocktake first, and the stocktake is usually where the actual value is.
So a headline rate does one of two things. It is set high enough to cover the worst case, in which case the well-organised client subsidises the chaotic one. Or it is set low to win the job and gets renegotiated once someone sees the site.
Neither is a good basis for a relationship you want to run for years.
The one thing we will commit to before seeing a site: whatever we quote after the assessment is the number. A fixed price you can put in a budget, not a rate multiplied by a count nobody has verified.
What actually drives the cost
Roughly in order of impact.
Item density. How many items per hour can physically be tested. This is about layout and access far more than count. Equipment under desks, behind machinery, in ceiling spaces or in occupied hotel rooms is slow.
Site access and disruption. Anything requiring after-hours work, escorts, permits, inductions or coordination with tenants costs more. A school can be done in the holidays; a 24-hour operation cannot be done at all without planning.
The state of your records. No register means a stocktake. That is a one-off cost and the single best thing most sites can spend money on, because everything afterwards is cheaper and faster.
The intervals you genuinely need. This is the big one over a five-year horizon and the one nobody talks about. A site on a blanket twelve-month interval and the same site on properly assessed intervals per zone can differ substantially in annual cost — sometimes upward for the workshop, usually downward overall.
Number of sites and travel. Obvious, but worth planning around. Clustering visits geographically saves real money.
What you want at the end. Tags and a spreadsheet is one price. A maintained register, per-item history, fault reports with photographs, and documentation formatted for an insurer or prequalification system is another. Both are legitimate. They are not the same product and should not be compared as though they were.
The problem with per-item pricing
Most of the industry quotes per item, and it is worth understanding what that does.
Under per-item pricing, the provider's revenue is a direct function of how many items are tested and how often. Which means:
- Nobody is ever going to tell you that forty desktop PCs could move to a longer interval on a documented risk assessment.
- Nobody is ever going to suggest that the four extension leads in the store room should be thrown out rather than tested annually forever.
- There is a quiet incentive to tag anything with a plug on it, including things that were never in scope.
- There is no incentive at all to maintain the register, because the register is not the billable unit.
We are not suggesting providers are dishonest. Most are not. But incentives shape behaviour without anyone deciding to be dishonest, and a pricing model that pays more for more testing will not, over five years, produce the leanest defensible programme.
The alternative is a fixed price for a defined scope, reviewed annually. It costs the provider some upside in the years when your item count grows. It also means when we tell you that your server room gear can go to a five-year cycle with a risk assessment, you can believe us.
The first year costs more than the rest
Worth knowing before you compare a first-year quote against a renewal.
The first round on a new site includes work that never repeats:
- Building the asset register from nothing
- Identifying and labelling every item
- Finding the equipment nobody knew about — and there is always equipment nobody knew about
- Setting and documenting intervals per zone
- Clearing the backlog of things that should have been condemned years ago
That last one can be a shock. A site that has not been properly assessed in five years will produce a batch of failures in the first round that will not recur at that rate. It is not a sign the programme is expensive. It is the accumulated debt being paid off once.
Year two onwards is materially cheaper for the same site, and should be quoted that way. If a provider's renewal quote is identical to their establishment quote, ask what changed.
How to compare quotes that look different
If you have three quotes and they are not comparable, these are the questions that make them comparable.
- What exactly is in scope? Item categories, areas, tenancies. Vague scope is where variations come from.
- What is the deliverable? Tags only, a summary report, or a per-item register you own and can take with you.
- Who owns the data? If your records live in a provider's proprietary system, ask what happens when you leave. The answer should be that you get an export in a usable format, unconditionally.
- How are intervals set? If everything is twelve months, no assessment has been done. See how often you should test and tag.
- What happens to failures? Who repairs, on what timeframe, at whose cost, and how is the re-test recorded. See what happens when an appliance fails.
- What is the renewal price? Get it in writing at the start.
- Which edition of the standard, and when was the tester last calibrated? Both should be answered without hesitation.
A quote that is a third cheaper and answers question two with "tags" is not cheaper. It is a different, smaller product.
Where you can legitimately spend less
Since we are being honest about cost, here is where the real savings are — including the ones that cost us revenue.
Set intervals properly. AS/NZS 3760:2022 allows extended intervals of up to five years for genuinely low-risk stationary equipment with a documented risk assessment behind it. For an office with a lot of fixed IT, this is the single biggest lever available. It requires the assessment to be written down and kept current; without that, it is not a saving, it is an exposure.
Stop testing things you should throw away. Every site has a drawer of old extension leads being tested annually in perpetuity. Replacing them once costs less than testing them forever.
Fix what is eating your leads. If the register shows the same failure in the same area repeatedly, the answer is a cable tray or a different route, not more testing.
Do the visual checks yourself. Damaged cords and plugs cause far more incidents than internal appliance faults, and anyone can be taught to spot them in ten minutes. That costs nothing and is where a real share of the safety benefit sits.
Consolidate suppliers. If appliances, emergency lighting and RCDs are three different visits from three different companies with three different records, you are paying three lots of travel and holding no single view of the building.
If you want an actual number for your site, the assessment takes about half an hour and costs nothing. You get our recommendation and the reasoning whether or not you go ahead with us — including, occasionally, the recommendation to keep the provider you have.
Request a site assessment, or work through the testing frequency checker first to see roughly where your intervals should land.