What Do NICEIC and NAPIT Actually Require? A Plain Guide to UK Electrical Certification (2026)

What is a competent person scheme, and why does it matter?

A competent person scheme lets a registered installer sign off their own work as compliant with the Building Regulations, instead of a local authority building control officer inspecting it separately. GOV.UK’s own guidance puts it simply: “You can join a ‘competent person scheme’ to self-certify certain types of building work if you work in the building trade as an installer.” Five schemes currently cover electrical work in England and Wales: BESCA, Blue Flame Certification, Certsure (trading as NICEIC), NAPIT, and OFTEC.

Joining a scheme is not the same thing as buying software. A scheme assesses a business, its Qualified Supervisor, its insurance, its test equipment and a sample of its actual completed work. A certificate app produces a document once that assessment has already happened. Confusing the two is the single most common mistake in how this subject gets discussed online, and it is worth separating clearly before looking at either scheme in detail.

What does NICEIC actually require of an Approved Contractor?

NICEIC describes an Approved Contractor plainly: “Approved Contractors are electrical contractors who have been assessed as competent to carry out electrical work against the requirements of BS 7671.” To reach that standard, NICEIC’s own published requirements ask a business to show:

• Electrical work carried out in the previous 12 months, under the business’s current trading title, that complies with BS 7671 and represents the work it typically undertakes.
• The current edition of BS 7671 and other relevant technical documents held on file.
• A written safe isolation and re-energisation procedure.
• An appointed Principal Duty Holder and at least one nominated Qualified Supervisor, who must themselves have at least two years’ responsibility for electrical work.
• Test instruments suitable for the work undertaken, with records showing their ongoing accuracy.
• A written Health and Safety Policy Statement, risk assessments, a complaints record, and records kept for a minimum of six years.

Insurance has a hard floor: at least £2 million Public Liability Insurance, plus £250,000 Professional Indemnity Insurance for any Approved Contractor who carries out periodic inspection work, the category that covers EICRs.

Assessment itself is two parts. NICEIC states it directly: “The NICEIC assessment consists of a review of your management systems (often referred to as the office audit) and assessment of electrical work on site which the business is responsible for.” The assessor meets both the Qualified Supervisor and the Principal Duty Holder, and checks the business’s paperwork against what it actually built.

Joining has a published cost. NICEIC’s own fee table lists a £95 (£114 including VAT) non refundable application fee, plus £1,190 (£1,428 including VAT) for the first 12 months of certification, which covers the assessment of one Qualified Supervisor. NICEIC totals the combined first year figure itself at £1,285 excluding VAT, or £1,542 including it, with an option to spread the certification fee over three interest free monthly payments. Registering specifically to handle Part P notifications sits inside the Approved Contractor and Domestic Installer Scheme, which NICEIC states exists to enable a business “to register completed installation work in accordance with Part P,” rather than the standalone Approved Contractor Scheme on its own.

What does NAPIT actually require of a registered installer?

NAPIT runs its own version of the same idea under its Competent Person Scheme, described on its own terms as authorisation “in support of self certification against the Building Regulations in England and Wales.” NAPIT is careful to correct a common shorthand here, and it is worth passing that correction on directly: electrical work must comply with more than Part P alone, including other parts of the Building Regulations covering structure, fire safety and ventilation, so a NAPIT registered contractor is not accurately described as simply “Part P Approved.”

NAPIT’s own published requirements for the scheme are:

• Minimum £2 million public liability insurance.
• Demonstrated competence through an initial assessment and regular reassessment.
• Calibrated test instruments sufficient for the scope of work carried out, with an in-date calibration certificate.
• Suitable installation work made available for inspection, alongside a paperwork review covering risk assessments, insurance and quoting practice.
• Work warranted for a minimum of six years, with any non-compliant work rectified within that period.

Notification has a specific deadline that does not appear on the general scheme overview page, only on NAPIT’s own scheme information sheet: self-certification has to happen within 21 days of completing an installation for NAPIT to issue a Building Regulations Compliance Certificate and notify the relevant local authority. Once registered, NAPIT states members “are able to certificate their own work, saving consumers the time and money that would otherwise be involved in using Building Control.” NAPIT even puts a figure on that saving from its own published material: an average of £241 in Building Control fees per piece of notifiable work, sourced by NAPIT to a 2012 government impact assessment on Part P. That figure is more than a decade old and is offered here as NAPIT’s own stated average, not as a current universal cost.

NAPIT does not publish a registration fee for the Competent Person Scheme on the pages checked for this article; its membership pages route an applicant to a phone call for a quote instead, so no figure is stated here.

How do NICEIC and NAPIT actually compare?

Both schemes require broadly the same things: real completed work to assess, a minimum £2 million liability cover, calibrated equipment, and a paper trail a stranger could follow. Where they differ in what is published is notification timing and price transparency, not in whether the underlying obligation is real.

What is Part P, and does it apply everywhere in the UK?

Part P is a Building Regulation covering electrical safety in dwellings, and GOV.UK’s own page for it is scoped specifically to England. Wales has its own version of the same self-certification mechanism, published as its own Approved Document P rather than sharing England’s document, so a job that is notifiable in England is not automatically identical in Wales.

Scotland does not use Part P at all. Electrical work there sits under the Building (Scotland) Act 2003 and the Scottish Technical Handbooks, with its own Certificate of Construction route through an Approved Certifier of Construction, a different mechanism from the NICEIC or NAPIT Part P schemes.

Where Part P does apply, only some electrical work is notifiable. A new circuit, a consumer unit replacement, and work in a bathroom’s specified zones are the kinds of job that typically require notification, either through a scheme member’s self certification or by paying a local building control body directly. A like-for-like repair or an addition to an existing circuit elsewhere in the home is usually non-notifiable, though it still has to meet BS 7671. A homeowner or landlord is legally responsible for being able to show that electrical work on their property meets Part P, so getting this distinction right matters to the customer, not only to the electrician.

Does any software carry NICEIC or NAPIT approval?

The one place software and scheme membership genuinely intersect is that each scheme also sells its own certification tool. NICEIC bundles access to its Online Certification System into membership, with separate fees for issuing notifications, reports and certificates through it. NAPIT sells FastTest, described on its own site as multi platform certification software for electrical installation, inspection and testing, fire, gas and ventilation certificates. Using either tool is a choice, not a scheme requirement: a NICEIC or NAPIT registered electrician can use FastTest, NOCS, or a general job management app to produce the same certificate types, and using a scheme’s own software does not itself grant or renew that scheme’s registration.

Which certificates does Checker produce?

Checker’s own electrical feature pages list the Electrical Installation Certificate, the Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR), and the Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificate among the documents it produces, alongside PAT testing reports, emergency lighting inspection and test reports, and smoke alarm design and commissioning reports. Checker is not NICEIC or NAPIT approved, and does not claim to be. What it does is give a registered electrician a way to fill in, sign and send those certificate formats from the job, alongside the invoicing and reminder features covered in more detail in our comparison of EICR and electrician software and our look at all-in-one apps for certificates and invoicing. For the mechanics of building and sending a certificate from a real job, see our guide to creating and sending electrical reports and certificates.

The registration itself, NICEIC or NAPIT, still has to come from the scheme directly. No app can skip that step, and any reader choosing software should judge it on how well it produces the certificate types their scheme actually requires, covered in more depth on our electrical software page, not on any claim of scheme approval, because that claim would not be true of any certificate app on the market today.

Frequently asked questions about NICEIC and NAPIT

This guide sets out what the schemes publish. If you are unsure whether a particular job is notifiable, which scheme fits the work you do, or how the rules apply where you trade, ask your scheme provider or your local building control body rather than relying on a general summary.