Articles · 10 August 2026 · 3 min read

PAT testing records: what you actually have to keep

There is no legal requirement to PAT test annually, and no requirement to keep a register. There is a requirement to maintain equipment. Here is the difference.

Ask ten people about PAT testing and eight will tell you it is an annual legal requirement. It is not. The confusion costs organisations real money, and worse, it distracts from the thing that is actually required.

This is a practical summary, not legal advice. If something serious is riding on it, ask an electrician or your insurer.

What the law says

The Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 require that electrical equipment be maintained in a condition that prevents danger. That is the duty. It says nothing about testing intervals, nothing about labels, and nothing about a register.

The HSE has been unusually blunt about this. Their guidance is that the level of inspection and testing should be proportionate to the risk, and that over-testing low-risk equipment is a waste of money. A desk lamp in an office is not a 110V site tool.

So annual testing of everything is a convention, sometimes a contractual requirement from a landlord or an insurer, but rarely a legal one.

What that means in practice

The useful question is not "when was this last tested?" but "how do we know this is still safe?" For most organisations the answer has three parts:

• User checks. Someone looks at the lead and the plug before using it. Free, and catches most faults.
• Formal visual inspection. A trained person, no meter required, at intervals set by risk.
• Combined inspection and test. The bit with the meter, for equipment where a visual check is not enough.

A church PA system used monthly and a hire company's 110V transformer used daily do not belong on the same schedule.

Where records come in

There is no statutory duty to keep a register. There is a very good reason to anyway: if something goes wrong, the question you will be asked is what system you had. "We test annually and here is the log" is an answer. "We think somebody did it" is not.

A record worth having contains, per item:

That last row is the one people leave out, and it is the one that turns a filing cabinet into something that prevents an accident.

The failure mode nobody plans for

The realistic risk is not that you fail to test. It is that an item goes out of date, nobody notices, and it gets used for another eight months. A spreadsheet does not stop that happening, because nothing reads the spreadsheet.

What stops it is refusing the booking. If the system that lends the equipment knows the test date has passed, and simply will not let it leave the building, the failure becomes impossible rather than unlikely. Someone has to go and deal with it before the kit moves.

That is a deliberate design choice in KitDesk: an item past its test or service date is blocked, not flagged. Warnings get ignored. A refusal does not.

A reasonable starting point

If you are setting this up from nothing:

• Give every powered item a reference and a label.
• Record the last test date and the next due date against it. If you do not know, book a test.
• Set the interval by risk, and write down why you chose it. That note is your defence.
• Make sure something checks the dates without a human remembering to.

The goal is not a perfect register. It is being able to show, on any given day, that you knew the condition of the equipment you handed to someone.