In the UK, installation and field service roles in EV charging currently advertise between about £38,000 and £45,000. Commissioning engineers advertise higher, between about £40,000 and £60,000, with a mean advertised salary of £61,000.
Those come from live UK adverts that published a band, read on 28 September 2026. They are not modelled, not averaged across a wider job family, and not an estimate.
Where do these figures come from?
From the adverts themselves, which is rarer than it sounds.
We read the live UK market through the same salary intelligence that sits inside TalentPilot, filtering to adverts that actually published a range rather than inferring one. For installation and electrician roles carrying EV charging in the advert text, 25 to 31 adverts published a band, clustering at £38,000 to £45,000. For commissioning engineers, 14 published a band, running £40,000 to £60,000.
The field service sample is thinner, six to eight adverts with a published band, sitting close to the installation range. We would not lean hard on that one figure alone, and say so rather than presenting a small sample as a settled number.
Why do the usual salary sites give a different answer?
Because they cannot segment by sector, and the honest ones admit it.
Search what an EV charging field service engineer earns and you get general field service engineer data: every field service engineer in the country, across medical devices, industrial equipment, IT and the rest. It is a real number for a different job. Charging pulls a specific combination of electrical qualification, high-voltage DC familiarity and willingness to travel, and that combination does not price like the average.
That is a structural limit rather than a quality problem. The aggregators hold enormous volume across all sectors and cannot cut it finely enough. It is also why a figure taken from one of them will not survive contact with a candidate who knows the market.
Why does commissioning pay more than installation?
Because far fewer people have done it, and the gap is widening.
Plenty of qualified electricians can install a charge point. A much smaller group has taken a rapid or ultra-rapid DC unit through commissioning to energisation on a live site. In megawatt charging, the group who have actually done it is measured in dozens across a whole country, because the hardware only began arriving in volume this year.
Commissioning is also the step that decides whether a programme slips. It sits in the gap between the installer, the operator and the network operator, which is why it stays nobody’s job until an energisation date moves. Scarcity plus consequence is what puts twenty thousand pounds between the two bands.
What else moves the number?
Certification. Increasingly the binding constraint rather than experience. There are far more qualified electricians than there are qualified electricians certified for charging.
Travel radius. These roles are dispersed by design. Somebody who covers a region, or works across borders, is worth materially more than somebody tied to one city, and that is usually reflected in the band.
Whether you can read the connection process. Rarely in a field service job description and it should be. In Germany this is a job title in its own right, Netzanschlussmanager, and operators advertise it directly. In the UK the same work sits inside general project roles, which means the people who can do it are under-recognised and often underpaid.
How does the UK compare with the rest of Europe?
Broadly similar at the trade level, with one contrast worth knowing about.
Germany is the outlier, because German employers almost never publish a band at all. That is the opposite of the UK and it changes how a search runs: a candidate cannot benchmark themselves before speaking to an employer, and a band slightly under market stays invisible until it costs an offer at final stage. Any confident German figure you see is somebody’s estimate rather than a published range.
Pay is a local question and it is answered per market rather than averaged across a continent, because an average across markets this different is not a number anyone can act on. The figures for each country sit on that country’s page: EV charging in the Netherlands, where employers do publish bands, and EV charging in Germany, where they do not.
Is this paid well relative to the trade?
That is the right comparison and the one most employers get wrong.
An EV charging installer is not competing with other charging businesses for work. They are competing with solar, heat pumps, construction and the grid, all of which want the same qualified electricians. A package benchmarked against charging alone will look competitive and lose anyway.
For candidates, the same logic works in your favour: your value is set by the whole electrical trade in your area, not by what other charging companies pay.
What should a candidate actually say?
Say what you have energised, not what you have worked on. “Commissioned 150kW DC on live sites” puts you in a different group from “worked on EV charging projects”, and only one of those tells an employer which group you are in. Given the gap between the installation and commissioning bands, that sentence is worth real money.
Say how far you will travel, early. It is a genuine constraint for employers and volunteering it moves you up the list.
Frequently asked questions
Are these figures basic salary or package? Advertised base. Field roles commonly carry a van, tools and travel time in addition, and some carry a bonus, so the total can sit meaningfully above the band.
How current are they? Read on 28 September 2026 from live UK adverts. We refresh them rather than leaving a figure to age, because salary data more than a few months old in this market is misleading.
Why not quote a single average? Because an average across a range this wide hides the thing that matters, which is that commissioning and installation are different jobs on different money.
If you are setting a band and want to know what is actually being advertised against you in your market, book a discovery call. We will tell you what we are seeing whether you work with us or not.
Sources
- Live UK advertised salary data, read 28 September 2026, filtered to adverts publishing a salary band. Installation and electrician roles n=25 to 31 banded adverts; commissioning engineers n=14; field service n=6 to 8
- Net Zero Evolution market intelligence across 13 EV charging markets, reviewed monthly