What a Permit to Work System Costs in the UK

Most quotes for a permit-to-work system answer the wrong question. The subscription is the visible number, but for a typical UK contractor it is rarely the largest one. The cost you are actually deciding about is the total of admin time per permit, re-issue effort, retrieval time at audit, setup, and training — and four of those five you are already paying today, on paper.

This guide sets out how to model that properly, so you can compare a quote against your current cost rather than against zero.

This guide covers UK practice and references HSE guidance. Legislation and standards may differ in other jurisdictions.

Why "how much does it cost?" is the wrong first question

Because the paper system you are comparing against is not free — it is unpriced. Nobody invoices you for the twenty minutes an issuer spends rewriting the same fifteen fields, or for the afternoon someone loses finding a permit from March. Those hours are real and they are already in your cost base. They just never appear on a purchase order.

So the comparison that matters is not "software versus nothing." It is "cost of the current system versus cost of the replacement, including the change itself." Run it that way and the answer is often clearer in both directions: some sites discover the case is overwhelming, and some discover they should keep the pad for another year. Both are useful outcomes.

The five cost components

1. Admin time per permit

The dominant recurring cost in almost every model, and the one most sites have never measured.

Time it honestly for a week. From "we need a permit" to "permit is signed and displayed," including walking to find the authoriser. Then multiply by permits per month and by a loaded hourly rate for the people involved — issuers are usually supervisors or managers, not the cheapest hour on site.

The number is almost always higher than the guess. Two permits a day at twenty minutes each is over three hours a week, which is a meaningful fraction of a supervisor's time spent on transcription.

2. Re-issue and duplication effort

Permits expire. HSG250 practice is that a permit covers a specific task for a specific period, so continuing work means a documented extension or a fresh permit, not an open-ended one — HSG250 provides for both, with a signed extension carrying a new expiry time (Figure 1, element 11) and revalidation or re-issue after a stoppage (para 20). Either way the close-out fields get rewritten.

Model this separately from first issue, because it behaves differently: much of it is duplication — less where a signed extension replaces a full re-write — it scales with job duration rather than job count, and it is the component digital systems reduce most reliably. Count what proportion of your permits are re-issues of work already in progress. On maintenance-heavy sites it is frequently a third or more.

3. Retrieval and audit response

HSG250 says permits "should be retained at site by the issuing authority for at least 30 days after completion, and then archived for a specified period to enable an effective monitoring and audit process."

Price the archive, not the storage. The question is how long it takes to produce a named permit from eight months ago. If the honest answer is "half a day and we might not find it," that is a cost with a tail — it lands during audits and investigations, which are exactly the moments when time is expensive and the consequence of not finding it is worst.

Estimate it as: audits or record requests per year × hours per request × rate. It is lumpy rather than monthly, but it is not zero.

4. Setup and configuration

A one-off, and the component most often underestimated because it is mostly your time rather than a vendor's.

It covers deciding which work needs permits, building your permit types, setting the authorisation rules, and importing whatever you keep. If your permit system is already well-defined this is short. If the switch is also the moment you finally write the rules down, most of the effort is the writing, and it would have been owed anyway — our permit to work implementation guide covers that work whether or not software is involved.

Budget it in days of internal effort plus any configuration a supplier charges for. Do not budget it at zero.

5. Training

Also one-off, and genuinely small if the system is well designed — but it is not nil, and HSG250 is specific that it matters. Its list of conditions for electronic permit systems includes that "training is provided to ensure that operators assess the specific job and do not rely on 'cutting and pasting' existing sections from other permits."

That is a training requirement with a purpose: the failure mode of a digital system is not that people cannot use it, it is that they use it too easily. Budget time for issuers and authorisers specifically, not just a general rollout session. Our permit to work training guide covers what each role actually needs to be able to do.

Pricing models you will encounter

Without naming anyone, the market broadly splits three ways, and the model matters more than the headline number:

Per-user, per-month. Cheap at small scale, and it punishes exactly the behaviour you want. If every subcontractor who accepts a permit needs a seat, cost scales with headcount rather than with permits, and the rational response is to share logins — which breaks the audit trail you bought the system for. Ask specifically who needs a licence: issuers only, or everyone who signs.
Flat-rate or banded by site. Predictable, and it does not penalise adding users. Usually the better fit for a contractor with a stable number of sites and a fluctuating workforce.
Enterprise, quoted per deployment. Priced per implementation with configuration and support day rates on top. Capable, and generally aimed well above a small contractor's requirements.

Three questions that change the total more than the sticker price:

Who needs a paid seat? Issuers, or every signatory including visiting contractors?
What is the exit? Can you export completed permits in a readable format without paying to leave? Your permits are records you may need years after you stop paying.
Is configuration included or day-rated? Setup quoted separately can rival the first year's subscription.

Putting numbers on it

Our free permit cost calculator runs the recurring components — permit volume, admin time and site count — using your figures rather than a benchmark, and shows the assumptions on screen so you can argue with them. Re-issue rate and retrieval effort matter too, but the calculator doesn't model them — treat it as a floor on the real cost, not the whole of it.

Two honest caveats about any model of this kind, including ours:

It is a model, not a quote. It estimates what your current system costs you. What a replacement costs depends on what you buy, and prices in this market vary by more than an order of magnitude depending on whether the product is aimed at a ten-person contractor or a refinery.

The savings are in hours, not cash. A system that saves three supervisor-hours a week does not reduce your payroll. It returns time to people who were doing transcription. That is a real benefit and it is worth quantifying, but present it internally as capacity recovered, not as money saved — the second claim will not survive contact with a finance director.

What actually decides it

Cost usually is not the deciding factor, which is worth saying plainly on a page about cost.

In practice the decision turns on oversight. Sites switch when they can no longer answer "how many permits are live right now, and where?" from memory — typically at multiple sites, multiple shifts, or after an audit found gaps. Cost then determines what they buy and when, not whether.

If you are below that threshold, the model will usually tell you to keep the pad, and it will be right. Our comparison of permit to work books versus a digital system covers where paper genuinely wins, and the paper vs digital permits guide weighs the trade-offs in more detail.

A shortlist scorecard

When you do get to comparing options, score each on these rather than on feature counts. The first five come straight from HSG250's conditions for electronic permit systems, so they are HSE's criteria rather than ours:

Prevents unauthorised issue or acceptance (password-protected electronic signatures or equivalent)
Does not allow permits to be issued remotely without a site visit
Prevents issued permits being altered without the change being communicated to everyone concerned
Can produce a paper permit for display at the job site
Discourages cut-and-paste of hazards and precautions between permits
Works offline where your permits are actually issued
Exports your completed permits without charge
Shows live permits and close-out rate without anyone compiling a report

You can score your current system against the same list with our PTW readiness checker before you look at anything new — it is often the cheapest improvement available.

PermitPad is building a permit-to-work system for small and mid-sized UK contractors, priced flat rather than per user so that adding a subcontractor to a permit costs nothing. Join the waitlist to see pricing when it launches.

Key references

HSG250: Guidance on permit-to-work systems — HSE, first edition 2005. Paragraph 51 (conditions for electronic permit systems), paragraph 58 (retention and archiving). Guidance, not law
Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, section 2 — the duty to provide and maintain safe systems of work

Disclaimer

This guide is for general information only, and the cost components described are a modelling framework rather than a quotation. Actual costs depend on your permit volume, site count, sector and the specific system chosen. Always consult a competent H&S professional and the applicable legislation and sector guidance for your circumstances.