Gas safety certificate vs EICR: what does a landlord need?

Ask a letting agent for “the gas and electric safety certificate” and you will get two pieces of paper, from two different trades, under two different sets of law, on two different clocks. The table below puts the gas safety check and the EICR side by side on the eight things a landlord actually has to get right: what each covers, who can sign it, how often it is due, what the tenant gets and when, what a fail forces you to do, what it costs to ignore, how long to keep it, and which regulation says so.

What does a letting agent mean by a gas and electric safety certificate?

Two separate documents, because no combined certificate exists. The gas half is the Landlord Gas Safety Record, widely called the CP12 or the LGSR, produced by a Gas Safe registered engineer after the annual check. The electrical half is the Electrical Installation Condition Report, the EICR, produced by a person competent to inspect and test to BS 7671. They come from different regulations, they renew on different cycles, and no form, portal or provider merges them into one. If someone offers you a single certificate covering both, what they are really selling is two visits on one invoice, which is a perfectly good thing to buy as long as you know you should end up holding two documents.

What is the difference between a gas safety certificate and an EICR?

The gas record is an annual pass or fail on every gas appliance and flue you provide; the EICR is a five-yearly condition report on the property's fixed wiring. Everything else follows from that difference. The gas check is short, frequent and appliance-by-appliance. The EICR is longer, rarer, and its price and duration scale with the number of circuits in the property rather than the number of things plugged into them.

The third column is the one that surprises people. England's 2020 Regulations stop at the fixed installation, and GOV.UK is explicit that tenants are responsible for the safety of their own equipment, so there is no PAT duty on a private landlord in England. Cross the border and that changes: Scotland's Repairing Standard folds in-service inspection and testing of landlord-supplied appliances into the same five-yearly electrical safety inspection, so a Scottish landlord who provides a washing machine carries a duty an English one does not.

Which nations require an EICR, and how often?

All four, at intervals of no more than five years, but with genuinely different deadlines for getting the report to the tenant. Wales gives 14 days where England and Northern Ireland give 28, and Scotland wants the most recent report handed over before the tenancy starts rather than counted from the inspection.

The gas side is far more uniform. The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 cover England, Wales and Scotland, and Northern Ireland runs its own Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2004 to the same effect: an annual safety check by a Gas Safe registered engineer, a copy to existing tenants within 28 days and to a new tenant before they move in, enforced there by HSENI rather than HSE. The working rule of thumb is that the gas duty travels with you across the UK and the electrical one does not.

What do the codes on each report mean?

The EICR uses C1, C2, C3 and FI, the gas side uses ID, AR and NCS, and only some of them force you to do anything. The difference in tempo is worth noticing: an EICR code starts a 28-day clock that runs from the date of the inspection, whereas a gas classification is acted on at the appliance, there and then, before the engineer leaves.

One asymmetry catches landlords out. An unsatisfactory EICR is your problem to solve on a deadline, and the 28 days run from the inspection, not from the day the report lands in your inbox, so a report emailed a week later has already eaten a quarter of the clock. Our guide to gas warning notices goes further into what ID and AR mean on the day.

How do you book the gas check and the EICR in one go?

Start from the two due dates, book the electrical inspection first, and use the gas check's early window to pull the two visits into the same fortnight. The order matters more than the day.

What do the two certificates cost together?

Budget roughly £160 to £340 for the pair in a straightforward property, and expect the electrical half to be the bigger and more variable number. A single-appliance gas safety certificate typically runs about £60 to £90, with the UK average near £80, and our gas safety certificate cost guide breaks that down by region and appliance count. On the electrical side, Checkatrade's cost guide puts most electrical safety checks at £100 to £250 with an average of £200, from around £100 for a flat and £250 upwards for a house, because an EICR scales with the number of circuits rather than the number of appliances. Neither figure includes remedial work, which is quoted separately once the inspection has found something. Booking the two visits close together does not merge them into one fee, since they are different trades, but it does cut the number of times somebody has to get into the property.

Which documents does a new tenant or a buyer need?

A new tenant needs both before they move in; a buyer needs neither by law, but will ask for both anyway. Re-letting is where the deadlines bite hardest, because the most recent gas record and the most recent EICR both have to exist and be handed over before the tenancy starts, not produced afterwards, and in Wales the electrical report carries its own 14-day rule from the occupation date. Selling is a different matter. Nothing in either set of regulations makes a safety certificate a condition of a sale, and both duties run to tenants and the local authority rather than to a buyer. A buyer's solicitor will still ask what safety paperwork exists, so keep the last gas record and the last EICR with the property file even after the tenancy ends.

How do landlords keep two different cycles straight?

By tracking a next-due date per document per property rather than trying to hold two rhythms in your head at once. An annual cycle and a five-yearly one across even a handful of properties produce a scatter of dates, and the certificate that lapses is always the one nobody was watching. Manifold handles the gas side of that: every property carries a next-due date, and reminder emails escalate at 60, 30 and 7 days before it and again once it is overdue, so the annual cycle runs without anyone having to start it. The EICR is not something Manifold tracks, so keep that date with the electrical paperwork and set your own reminder for it.