Guidance prices, not quotes: how Stay In Date pricing works

Every price you'll find on this site carries the same label: guidance only, not a quote. That's not legal boilerplate we hope you'll skim — it's the pricing model, stated honestly, and it's worth two minutes to understand.

Certificate work prices on specifics no listing page can know: how many gas appliances the engineer will test, how many circuits the electrician will inspect, how far the assessor travels, what the property turns out to need once someone competent is standing in it. A site that shows you '£45 gas certificates!' for your town is quoting a number it cannot honour for a property it has never seen — and the doorstep re-price is where that business model actually lives.

So we publish national guidance ranges instead: honest low-to-high bands per certificate type, labelled as guidance everywhere they appear, with the factors that move the number spelled out on every page. A one-appliance flat and a four-appliance house sit at different ends of the same range, and our pages say so rather than pretending the range is a price. The ranges themselves are reviewed against the national market, not conjured for conversion — and where a certificate genuinely varies too much to band usefully, the page says that instead.

When a district goes bookable, the model sharpens rather than changes: bookable prices come from provider manifests — real prices published by named, verified providers for defined jobs — and those you can book against. The difference between a manifest price and a guidance range is exactly the difference between a commitment and an estimate, and the page will always tell you which you're looking at.

The same honesty applies to what we won't do with prices. No teaser rates that assume the minimum and rebuild the invoice on site. No 'free' extras funded by inflated failure rates — the free service that somehow always finds a defect. No urgency pricing built on renewals that don't legally exist; if you've read our water-hygiene pages you know the annual legionella certificate is a myth, and myths don't get price tags here.

Guidance ranges are less exciting than a big cheap number. They're also the only pricing a compliance site can publish without lying to you, and lying about money is a strange way to start a relationship that ends with documents you'll show a council. The label stays — on every page, next to every number, for as long as this site publishes prices.

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