How much does it cost to rewire a house in Portugal?

There is no single figure for rewiring, because “rewiring a house” covers everything from replacing a consumer unit and two circuits to stripping an entire installation back to bare walls. What is stable is how the quote is built, and knowing that is what lets you compare two of them.

What a rewire is actually made of

Four items, and they move independently of each other.

• The points. Every socket, switch, light point and dedicated appliance line is a unit of work. Counting them is the first thing an electrician does, because the cable is cheap and the labour per point is not.
• The circuits and the board. How many circuits the house is split into, and whether the consumer unit is replaced with one that has enough ways and proper residual current protection.
• The routes. How the cable gets from the board to each point. This is the variable that separates quotes: existing conduit that new cable pulls through is fast, and chasing new channels into masonry is slow and dusty.
• Making good. Filling, plastering and painting after the chases are closed. It is real work, and it is either in the quote or it is your problem later.

What moves the figure

What changes	Which way it moves the price
Full rewire or partial	A partial job priced per circuit is far less than a whole house
Age of the installation	Older installations may have circuits with no earth, which forces more replacement
Wall construction	Solid masonry chases slower than plasterboard, and both are slower than reusing conduit
Occupied or empty	Working around furniture and around people living there adds time
The board	A new consumer unit with proper protection is a separate line and usually a good one
Extra loads	Air conditioning, an induction hob or a car charger each want their own circuit
Making good	Whether filling, plastering and painting are included, or arranged by you

Why there is no euro figure on this page

Because no single figure describes this work. The rewiring figures that circulate for Portugal are national at best, and many of the ones written in English are for a different country’s market entirely, with different wiring practice and different regulations. Publishing one of them with our name next to it would make this page look more useful and leave you worse informed.

A rewire is priced per circuit, per point and per metre of routing, so the number belongs to your house, not to a page. The useful things are the structure above and a free quote for your own house. For what the work covers and how a request is handled, see electrician services in the Algarve.

What to send so the quote is accurate

1. A photo of the consumer unit with the cover open, if you can do that safely, so the number of circuits and the type of protection are visible.
2. The approximate age of the house, and whether the electrics have been touched since.
3. A rough count of rooms, and any room where you know you want more sockets.
4. What is being added: air conditioning, an induction hob, a car charger, an electric water heater. Each is a load question before it is a cabling one.
5. Whether the house will be empty during the work.

The question worth asking first

Not “how much to rewire”, but “what does this installation actually need”. Plenty of Algarve houses do not need a full rewire: they need a modern board with residual current protection, an earth where there is none, and two or three dedicated circuits for the appliances that did not exist when the house was built. That is a fraction of the work and most of the benefit, and an electrician who starts there rather than with a whole house price is telling you something useful about how they work.