Electrical work is priced based on a mix of labor time, permit requirements, and the complexity of accessing your home's existing wiring. The ranges below reflect typical U.S. pricing and are a starting point for budgeting, not a quote for your specific home.
Small jobs — installing a new outlet, replacing a light fixture, adding a dedicated circuit for an appliance — typically run $100 to $300 per item, plus a service call fee in many markets. Electricians often bundle several small jobs into one visit to spread that fixed cost across more work, so it's worth asking what else could reasonably be done in the same trip.
Panel upgrades, which increase your home's electrical capacity, generally cost $1,500 to $4,000. Older homes with 60 or 100-amp panels being upgraded to 200 amps sit at the higher end of that range, especially if the utility company needs to coordinate a temporary power shutoff or upgrade the service line coming into the house.
Whole-house rewiring is the largest electrical project most homeowners face, typically $8,000 to $20,000 or more depending on square footage, the number of stories, and whether walls need to be opened and repatched. Homes built before the 1960s with knob-and-tube or aluminum wiring often require full rewiring for both safety and insurability, and this is one job where price alone shouldn't drive the decision — the safety stakes are real.
EV charger installation has become one of the most commonly requested electrical jobs and typically runs $500 to $2,500, with the range driven mostly by how far the charger location is from the electrical panel and whether a panel upgrade is needed to support the additional load.
The clearest way to sanity-check any electrical quote is to ask whether it includes the permit and inspection fee, and whether the price is based on materials plus hourly labor or a flat rate for the full scope. Electrical work is one of the few trades where cutting corners has genuine safety consequences, so the cheapest quote isn't automatically the best value — checking that the electrician's license is active and exam-backed, not just a general registration, matters more here than for almost any other trade.