The UK EV charger and heat pump installer market
There were 119,080 public EV chargers in the UK on 1 April 2026. Every one of them was installed by somebody. The trades behind that number are young, growing and mostly invisible to the people who sell to them.
Watch: Hiding inside an old code
On 1 April 2026 there were 119,080 public EV chargers in the UK, of which 27,372 were rated rapid or above.
Every one of those was specified, installed, wired and commissioned by a business. Those businesses are a market, and it is a young one, which makes it unusually easy to get wrong.
The number, and what it does not include
119,080 is the public network. It excludes home chargers on driveways and the units inside workplace car parks, which together are a much larger installed base.
So treat the public figure as a direction indicator rather than the size of the work. It tells you the market exists and is being built out. It does not tell you how many installations happened, and it certainly does not tell you how many firms are doing them.
Why these firms are hard to find
There is no SIC code for "EV charger installer". That is the whole problem.
The businesses doing this work file under the trade they already were:
- 43210, electrical installation. Where most charger work sits.
- 43220, plumbing, heat and air conditioning installation. Where most heat pump work sits.
- 43290 and other specialist installation codes for the rest.
Those codes contain enormous numbers of firms doing entirely conventional work. Search 43210 across the UK and you get every electrician in the country, the overwhelming majority of whom have never fitted a charger.
This is a general lesson about new trades: the code system lags the market by years. A trade has to become large and settled before it gets its own classification, so the fastest-growing work is always hiding inside an older code.
New trade, new firms. Here is the list.
Tell us the kind of company you sell to. We find them on the public record, check the website and the email, and hand you the list. It takes about two minutes instead of an afternoon.
How to isolate them anyway
Since the trade code cannot do it on its own, you need a second filter. Three that work:
The website. A firm that installs chargers says so on its site, usually on the front page, because it is their newest and best-margin service. Filtering an electrical-contractor list by what the site actually says is the single most effective cut.
Company age. A meaningful share of these firms incorporated recently, specifically to do this work. Filtering 43210 to companies formed in the last few years gets you a very different list from the code as a whole.
Accreditation language. Installers advertise their schemes and approvals prominently. Those words appear on the site even when the trade code does not change.
Combining a trade code with what the website says is a completely different search from either on its own, and it is the practical answer for any emerging trade.
What the wider data says about these trades
Both parent trades sit inside construction, which had a birth rate of 10.6% and a death rate of 8.8% in 2024, across about 423,000 active businesses.
That is a healthy shape: clearly more firms arriving than leaving, and a very large population to work from. It is also a *lower* churn rate than the UK average death rate of 9.8%, which makes construction a steadier market to sell into than its reputation suggests.
What to expect commercially
Three honest observations.
Most are small. These are typically firms with a handful of staff, often the owner plus a couple of engineers. Price and pitch accordingly; see how many small businesses are there in the UK for what the size bands actually look like.
The work is grant-shaped. Both charger and heat pump installation are influenced by public funding schemes, which change. A market whose demand curve is partly set by policy can move faster in both directions than a normal trade.
New entrants are the opportunity. A firm that has just added this capability is buying tooling, training, software and marketing. A firm that has done it for five years already has suppliers. Timing matters, and the incorporation date is public.
Where these figures come from
Charger counts are from the Department for Transport's public electric vehicle charging infrastructure statistics for 1 April 2026. Note the series changed on 1 January 2026. It now counts chargers rather than charging devices, so figures either side of that date do not compare. Business birth, death and population figures are from ONS *Business demography, UK: 2024*, published 20 November 2025.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Build the list
Pick the installation trade codes, add your region, and filter on what the website actually says. Leadistry reads the live UK public record and checks each firm's site. So you get installers, not every electrician in Britain. Each one comes with a verified business email.
Counting is free. Start free with 25 leads.
Common questions
How many EV chargers are there in the UK?
There were 119,080 public EV chargers in the UK on 1 April 2026, of which 27,372 were rated rapid or above at 50kW and up. That is the public network only and excludes home and workplace units.
What SIC code do EV charger installers use?
Most sit under electrical installation, SIC 43210, because that is what the work is. There is no dedicated EV charging code, which is exactly why searching by trade code alone will not isolate them.
Is the heat pump installer market growing?
The installer base is young and expanding, and most firms doing the work are small electrical or plumbing and heating contractors that added the capability rather than new specialist companies.