How Long Does PAT Testing Take? A Realistic Answer for Welsh Businesses

When you ring up to book PAT testing, there's usually a question sitting just behind the one you actually ask. The real question is rarely about certificates or test methods. It's "how much of my day is this going to eat?" You've got a business to run, staff who need their computers, and a kettle that the whole office would defend with their lives. So here's the honest answer, with the numbers we'd normally only share once you'd booked.

The short answer: seconds per item, not minutes

An individual test is quick. For most appliances, the whole thing, the visual inspection, the electrical tests, the label and the record, takes a couple of minutes, and often less. A competent engineer with a modern tester settles into a rhythm, and in a typical office we'd expect to get through somewhere between 150 and 200 items in a working day. A small office with forty or fifty appliances is a morning's work, not a day's. Anyone quoting you a full day for that is either being very cautious or padding the job.

What's actually happening in those couple of minutes

It's worth knowing where the time goes, because the slowest part is also the most important. The Health and Safety Executive is clear that most electrical safety defects can be found by visual examination, the frayed cable, the cracked plug, the lead pulled half out of its grip. So we look properly before we plug anything into the tester. The electrical tests themselves take seconds; it's the looking, the unplugging and the putting back exactly as we found it that takes the time. An engineer racing through forty items an hour isn't impressive, they're skipping the part that catches most of the faults.

The things that genuinely change the timings

Your appliance count matters less than you'd think. What actually stretches a visit is access. Equipment behind locked doors, under desks in occupied offices, or in rooms that can't be interrupted, that's where the hours go. Extension leads daisy-chained behind a bank of desks take longer to trace and test than everything sitting on top of them. And there's always the kettle problem: some appliances are in near-constant use, and prising them away from your staff needs a bit of diplomacy and good timing.

The single best thing you can do to speed a visit up costs nothing: tell us the layout in advance. Which rooms, roughly how many items, anything awkward like server cabinets or machinery. We can then sequence the visit so each area is only disturbed once.

The bit that saves you money: not everything needs testing

Here's an admission you won't hear from every testing company. Brand new equipment doesn't need a formal PAT test at all. The HSE's own guidance says new equipment should be supplied in a safe condition and not require a formal portable appliance inspection or test, just a quick visual check that it hasn't been damaged in transit. So if you've just fitted out a new office, don't let anyone sell you a full test of every box-fresh monitor. Add them to the register, check them over, and test them when their first interval comes round. We'd rather tell you that now and test fewer items than have you feel oversold later.

Do you have to close? Almost never

For most workplaces, testing happens around you. We work desk by desk, swap to another room when a meeting's running, and keep the downtime per person to a few minutes. Where a business genuinely can't be interrupted, a busy kitchen mid-service, a production line, a surgery in clinic hours, we test early, late or on whichever day the premises are quietest. There's more on how we handle workplaces on our PAT testing for offices page, and the fuller picture on our main PAT testing page.

So what should you pencil in?

As a rough planning guide: a small office or shop with under 50 items, half a morning. A mid-sized workplace with 100 to 200 items, a day. Larger sites, multi-room buildings and anywhere with awkward access, we'll walk it first or talk it through and give you a proper estimate rather than a guess. Either way, you'll know before we arrive how long we'll be and in what order we'll work, so the disruption is measured in minutes per person, not hours per office.

Get in touch

Want to know how long your premises would take? Tell us roughly what you've got and we'll give you a straight answer and a quote to match.