Electrical Contractor Singapore

If you arrived here about a flat or a condo unit, you can stop worrying about installation licences entirely. Electrical and supply installations used exclusively for domestic purposes are exempt from the licensing requirement. An HDB flat never needs one. A condo apartment never needs one.

What does not change is the work itself. Electrical installation work in a home is still legally restricted to a Licensed Electrical Worker, and no exemption from premises licensing turns it into a job you can do yourself or hand to an unlicensed handyman.

The part of a residential building that is licensed is the common property: the risers, communal lighting, socket-outlets and protective systems, which sits under the licence held by the MCST or the building owner, and which carries a six-monthly inspection requirement rather than an annual one.

This is the single most common wasted phone call in commercial electrical work: a tenant sets out to get an installation licence for a unit that is already covered by one.

Where a non-domestic building buys its electricity en bloc through the landlord or the MCST, there is only one contestable consumer for the entire building, so only one electrical installation licence is required and it covers your unit too. Tenants who already held their own licence before that arrangement began may keep renewing it, or may arrange to come under the landlord’s licence, which needs the landlord’s consent and lets the landlord’s appointed LEW inspect your installation.

There is also a hard gate on going it alone: EMA will not issue you a separate installation licence for your unit unless you hold your own electricity account with SP Services for it. If you are billed by your landlord rather than by SP, the question is settled before it starts.

One more thing worth extracting from your landlord early in a fit-out: a consent letter from the landlord’s LEW confirming the landlord’s installation can actually support the load your unit needs. It is a required supporting document, and it is far easier to obtain before you have committed to equipment.

A fit-out is where load, landlord and programme collide. The electrical scope is rarely the largest line in a fit-out cost plan, but it is very often the one that decides whether handover happens on the date you promised your staff or your customers.

The work starts with sizing the distribution board against the load your tenancy will actually draw: not the load the previous tenant drew, which is what an existing board reflects. A café replacing a retail unit is the classic case: same floor area, a completely different load profile.

Office electrical installation work then runs to lighting and power circuits, coordination with data and mechanical trades so that nobody chases the same wall twice, and the landlord or managing agent sign-off, which is smoother when the documentation was prepared for it rather than assembled afterwards. Our office and shop fit-outs page goes through the sequence in more detail.

No competitor page tells a commercial buyer what happens on the first visit, so here it is.

The main switchboard and the incoming supply, first, what the installation is actually fed with, and what protective devices sit at the head of it. Then the existing single-line drawing held against reality, because in an older premises those two things diverge more often than not.

Then spare ways and available capacity, which determines whether what you want is a circuit addition or a three-phase and rewiring conversation. And finally the practical constraints: access, working hours, and whether there is a shutdown window at all, because on a trading premises that frequently sets the programme more than the electrical work does.

A three-way spread on the same scope reads like somebody is being dishonest. Usually it means the three quotes are not for the same thing.

The licence class assumed for the load. A quote built around a Licensed Electrician on an installation that needs a Technician prices lower, and is non-compliant.

Whether inspection and certification are included. The testing, the certification and the reporting are real work. Some quotes carry them and some quietly do not.

After-hours and shutdown working. A price assuming free run of the premises at 10am is not comparable to one assuming a Sunday shutdown, and see what a call-out fee normally covers for how the same logic plays out on smaller jobs.

Reinstatement and making good. Chasing walls, ceiling tiles, patching and painting. Frequently excluded, rarely noticed until the end.

The fix is not to chase the lowest number. It is to make all three quote the same four items.

This site is built to rank on being accurate rather than on being loud, so it is worth being explicit about the limits.

We do not claim to be an EMA-licensed contractor, because no such licence exists. Several pages competing for this search imply otherwise, and an earlier version of this page did too until it was checked against EMA’s own handbook.

We do not give a fixed price for commercial work without seeing the switchboard. Every figure quoted on this page is either EMA’s published fee or a published market range from a named third-party Singapore source, and it is labelled as such, none of them is our rate.

We do not vouch for the electrician on your behalf. Ask for the named LEW before work starts and check the licence on ELISE yourself.