Cost to wire a house in BC: what actually drives the number

Every week somebody asks what it costs to wire a house in British Columbia and gets a dollar-per-square-foot number from a website that has never pulled a permit here. We are not going to publish a figure we cannot source. What we can do is lay out what moves the number in BC — which authority issues your permit, how the fee is calculated, which code edition applies, and where tax and burden land.

What actually drives the number

The cost of wiring a house is decided by counts and conditions, in roughly this order of impact:

• Device and circuit count. Outlets, switches, lighting outlets, smoke and CO devices, dedicated appliance circuits. This is the spine of the estimate — everything downstream is arithmetic on these counts.
• Service size and distribution. A 200 A service with a sub-panel is a different job from 100 A and one panel. Heat pumps, EV charging and induction ranges push the calculated load and sometimes the service.
• Construction type and access. Wood frame walk-up versus concrete, open studs versus fishing a finished renovation. This is the factoring step, and it moves labour more than anything else on the list.
• Fixture and device specification. Builder-grade versus specified trim and controls can double the material line without changing a single count.
• Secondary suite. Separate metering, dedicated circuits, interconnected alarms — a suite is not a rounding error.

If you want the method rather than the list, our guide to estimating electrical work in Canada walks through quantity × labour unit × factors and where markup goes.

The permit: who issues it, and how the fee is set

First question, and people get it wrong constantly: Technical Safety BC is not automatically your authority. Its jurisdiction page lists ten municipalities with delegated authority under the Safety Standards Act. For electrical, that includes the City of Vancouver, City of Burnaby, City of Maple Ridge, City of North Vancouver, District of North Vancouver, City of Surrey, City of Victoria and the District of West Vancouver. Wire a house in Cloverdale and you are dealing with the City of Surrey; wire one in Langley and you are dealing with Technical Safety BC.

Where Technical Safety BC does issue the permit, the fee is banded against the declared value of work. From its electrical fee schedule effective January 1, 2026, contractor installation permits run $115 for work valued at $401–$1,000, $335 for $2,501–$5,000, $515 for $5,001–$10,000, $843 for $10,001–$20,000 and $1,236 for $20,001–$35,000, continuing upward in bands. Above $200,000 the schedule switches to a base fee plus a percentage of job value.

Two details that matter to an estimator. The declared value excludes GST, and it excludes fixtures, heaters, motors, furnaces and heat pumps — so the number you declare is not the number you quote the customer. And the installation permit page states that an FSR must be named on every electrical permit application, and warns that undervalued work may be subject to enforcement action. Declaring low to save a couple of hundred dollars is not a strategy.

Which code edition you are pricing to

The BC Electrical Code 2024 edition took effect on March 4, 2025, adopting the Canadian Electrical Code, Part I, 26th edition (CSA C22.1-24). Technical Safety BC’s bulletin notes that the province adopted it without deviations this cycle, that permits issued after that date must comply with the 2024 edition, and that “mixing select sections between editions is not permitted.”

For a house that is not an abstraction. Code edition decides receptacle placement and protection requirements, which decides device counts, which decides your price. An estimate template built against the 2021 edition has stale counts underneath it.

It also interacts with the load side of the job. Heat pumps and EV charging have moved from optional to common, and both change the calculated load — we cover the arithmetic separately for heat pump loads in BC and for EV charger requirements. If either pushes you past the existing service, you are pricing a service upgrade, and that is the single biggest step change in a residential quote.

Tax and burden live inside your price

Two BC-specific costs that belong in the build-up rather than as a line on the invoice.

PST on materials. As a real property contractor you pay PST on the goods you install and do not charge the customer PST on services to real property. So the tax is a cost inside your material line. Quote as though it is not and you have donated it.

Labour burden. WorkSafeBC set the 2026 average base premium rate at $1.55 per $100 of assessable payroll and held it flat, with your own classification unit rate differing from that average. On top of that sit CPP, EI, vacation pay and whatever your benefit package costs. The wage itself is the smaller half of the story: the Government of Canada’s Job Bank wage report for electricians in BC shows a low of $20.00, a median of $34.00 and a high of $47.49 an hour, from 2023–2024 Labour Force Survey data.

Build the number instead of borrowing one

Material prices move, and so does everything else. Statistics Canada’s building construction price index for the second quarter of 2026 put residential construction costs up 2.3% year over year nationally and 0.5% quarter over quarter, with Vancouver residential down 0.2% on the quarter. A national average is not your job, and last year’s dollar-per-square-foot is not this year’s.

The build-up that survives scrutiny looks like this:

• Count devices, lighting outlets, circuits and home runs off the plan — not off a rule of thumb.
• Price the service, panel and distribution separately, with the panel schedule as its own line.
• Apply labour units, then factor for construction type, access and repetition.
• Add fixtures and devices at real specified prices, or carry an explicit allowance and say so in writing.
• Add the permit fee from the correct authority’s schedule, at the correct declared value.
• Add PST on materials, burden on labour, then overhead recovery, then margin.

What we will not do is hand you a dollar-per-square-foot figure for BC housing, because we have no source for one that would survive a builder asking where it came from. If you want a sanity check after you have built the number, cost per point is the more defensible instrument, and a rewire quote has its own structure again.

Frequently asked

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