How Long Does It Take to Rewire a House? A Realistic Timeline

A full house rewire is one of those projects where the simple answer is wrong.

The simple answer is: a week, maybe two. The electrician strips the old cables, runs new ones through the walls, fits a new consumer unit, and tests it all. On paper, that’s a small job for a tradesperson who has done it hundreds of times.

The real answer is longer, and the extra time isn’t because the electrician is slow. It’s because a rewire is not one job — it’s a sequence of jobs that bleed into each other, and the gaps between them are where timelines go to die. This pattern — a quick trade job stretching into weeks because of the gaps — is the same one you’ll see in a kitchen renovation timeline or a bathroom renovation.

Here’s what the timeline actually looks like, where the days are spent, and what typically makes it run long.

The on-site work: 1 to 3 weeks

For an average-sized home, a full rewire — pulling new cables through the existing walls, installing a new consumer unit, adding or extending circuits for sockets, lighting, and dedicated appliances, and completing all the testing — takes roughly 7 to 15 working days of on-site electrician work.

That’s about 1.5 to 3 weeks, assuming the electrician is working Monday to Friday on one property. Some factors stretch it toward three weeks:

• The number of circuits. A basic rewire might give you a handful of ring mains and a few lighting circuits. If you’re asking for dedicated circuits for an EV charger, a hot tub, a home office run, underfloor heating — each one adds design time and cable runs.
• The property’s layout. A compact rectangular house is straightforward. A sprawling L-shaped property, a property with multiple floors and separate fuse boxes, or a building where the rooms don’t line up vertically means more cable runs and more time in the walls.
• Access. If the electrician has to work around fitted kitchen cabinets, built-in furniture, or fragile historic plaster, every cable pull takes longer.

The electrician will typically work room by room. You lose power in one room at a time. The most disorienting moment is usually the consumer-unit swap — the old board comes out, the new one isn’t yet live, and for a couple of days the entire house is dark. A good electrician will schedule this for a weekend or a week when you don’t need much power.

The hidden weeks: before and after the electrician

The on-site work is only part of the timeline. If you count from the first phone call to the last decorator’s brush, a house rewire usually spans 3 to 6 weeks in total. Here’s where the extra weeks go:

Weeks 1–2: Assessment and planning. You’re getting quotes, the electrician is walking through the house taking notes, you’re deciding what you actually need versus what sounds nice. This is also when you decide whether to upgrade the socket count, add smart switches, plan for future electric vehicle charging, or extend circuits to the garden. Every decision here changes the scope, and the scope determines the timeline.

Weeks 2–4: Permits and approvals. Depending on where you live, a full rewire needs notification or a permit from the local building authority. The electrician usually handles the paperwork, but the waiting is on you. Some authorities turn things around in a few days; others take weeks. This is the delay nobody plans for.

Weeks 4–6: Ordering and inspection. The consumer unit and cables need to arrive. The inspection or certification needs to be scheduled. If the inspector shows up and asks for something to be corrected — a missing RCD on a circuit, an improperly terminated cable, a label that doesn’t match the board — the clock pauses until it’s sorted.

Weeks 4–8: The make-good phase. This is the part people forget. The electrician has run cable and fitted the board, but there are gaps in the plaster, patched plaster that hasn’t dried, and bare walls where old cable covers used to be. You don’t want to decorate or install new skirting boards until the electrician is finished and the walls are closed. And the decorator — who might be booked three weeks out — can’t come in until you’re ready for them. Leave contingency in both your timeline and your budget for this phase, because it always takes longer than you think.

This make-good phase is often longer than the electrician’s actual work, and it’s the single most common reason people say a rewire “went longer than expected.”

What makes a rewire run long

The timeline above is for a straightforward rewire in a property where the walls are reasonably accessible and nothing surprising is found. In practice, three things reliably stretch the schedule:

1. What’s behind the walls. In a home built before the 1960s, you may find knob-and-tube wiring, previous DIY extensions, or cable that’s been stapled to the wrong side of a joist. The electrician has to assess each one and factor in extra time to replace or reroute. In a 1970s to 1990s home, the surprises are usually smaller — a missing earth, a junction box with too many cables in it, a circuit that was extended but never re-protected. Each one adds a day or two.

2. The inspection bottleneck. If your jurisdiction requires a third-party inspection and the inspector is booked out two weeks, your project pauses for two weeks. You can’t really speed this up; it’s entirely at the inspector’s calendar. Some electricians work around this by having the inspection booked the moment the physical work is done, so there’s no gap between completion and certification.

3. The decorator’s calendar. This sounds trivial and it is, until you realise that the decorator is the last person in the sequence and their booking determines when you can actually use the space. If the decorator is two weeks out and you finish the electrical work on a Monday, you don’t have a usable house until three weeks later. This is why so many people keep a note of the rewire in a project log — they know the decorator date matters as much as the electrician’s.

Living through the rewire

You can absolutely live in your house during a rewire. Most people do. But here’s what to plan for:

You will have days when half the house has no power. The electrician works room by room, and when they’re stripping a room they’ll need to isolate it. On the day the consumer unit is swapped — usually mid-project — the whole house goes dark for 24 to 48 hours. Plan for this: charge your devices the day before, keep a torch and some battery lights handy, and know where the neighbour who always offers tea is.

Cooking becomes temporary. If your kitchen loses power for a couple of days, you’ll be using hot plates, a microwave, or eating out. Most people plan for this and don’t think much of it. The people who struggle are the ones who didn’t think about it until the kitchen went dark on a Tuesday.

Dust is everywhere. Chasing cable into walls creates dust — a lot of it, and it gets into places it shouldn’t. If you have children, pets, or anyone with respiratory sensitivities, sealing off the work area and planning for a deep clean afterward is worth the effort.

The noise is concentrated but real. A rewire is nothing like a full renovation — there’s no jackhammering, no demolition. But chasing into walls, drilling through floors, and stripping old cable can be noisy, especially in the first few days when the electrician is opening up the old installation.

Where Home Stories fits in

A house rewire is a project that looks small on paper and large in practice. It involves an electrician, a permit office, an inspector, a decorator, several suppliers, and a lot of waiting. The kind of information that gets lost during a rewire — quotes, decisions about what circuit goes where, the date each room was finished, the model of the consumer unit — is exactly the kind of thing that becomes painful to track once the electrician has left.

If you’re planning a rewire, a simple project note with dates, costs, and photos of the work-in-progress is worth its weight. Home Stories is one way to keep that information attached to the project, and to export it as a clean PDF when someone official asks. But even a notebook and a folder of photos works. The tool doesn’t matter; the habit does.

When a rewire is worth it — and when it isn’t

A full rewire costs real money and takes real time, so it’s worth asking when it makes sense.

It’s definitely worth it if:

• The existing wiring is knob-and-tube or an early ungrounded system
• The consumer unit is an old fusebox or an outdated design
• The home is more than 40 years old and has never been rewired
• You’re doing a renovation anyway and the walls are already open
• The insurance company is asking for documentation or won’t renew without it

It might be worth a partial update if:

• The system is mostly fine but needs additional circuits or socket upgrades
• The consumer unit is old but still functioning
• You just need RCD protection on a couple of circuits

It probably isn’t worth a full rewire if:

• The system was updated within the last 15 to 20 years
• The only issue is that you don’t have enough sockets (that’s a cheaper fix)
• You’re planning to sell the house in the next year or two and the electrical system is legal and safe

The bottom line

A full house rewire takes about 1 to 3 weeks of on-site work and 3 to 6 weeks in total elapsed time from the first quote to the last paint stroke. The on-site work is fast because electricians are skilled and the tasks are well-defined. The elapsed time is long because of the gaps: permits, ordering, inspection, and the decorator who has to come back after the electrician has left.

The things that reliably stretch the timeline are not the electrician’s pace but the things outside their control: permit wait times, inspector availability, decorator calendars, and what the walls turn out to contain once they open them. If you plan for those gaps — book the decorator early, ask the electrician about inspection timelines, and leave room for surprises — the rewire runs smoother than most people expect.

The best time to do a full rewire is when you’re already opening the walls for something else. A kitchen or bathroom renovation is the obvious choice — but any project that involves chasing into walls is a good time to also get the electrics right. You pay for opening walls once; don’t pay twice because you decided the wiring was “probably fine.”

If you’re planning a rewire, the first step is a professional assessment. Most electricians will walk through the house, look at what you’ve got, and tell you whether a full rewire is needed or if a targeted update will do. That assessment takes an hour, costs almost nothing, and saves you from making a decision in the dark — which, in an electrical project, is exactly the kind of dark spot you want to avoid.