The Small Print That Costs Engineers Money

Most engineers I speak to have a number in their head. They want to be on fifty grand, or they want another three on top of what they're on now, and fair enough, it's the easiest thing in the world to compare. The trouble is that the number on the advert is about the fifth most important thing in the offer, and the bits that actually decide what lands in your account every month tend to be sat in a contract nobody reads properly until the notice is already in.

I've had this conversation enough times to know which bits catch people out. So here's what I'd be asking, and what the answers actually mean.

Ask about the patch, not the postcode

Mobile roles get advertised with a base, and the base is usually just wherever the office happens to be. That tells you nothing about your week. What you want is the actual site list, how many sites there are and who decides the run order when three things go down at once.

I've seen people take a job advertised as Portsmouth and end up sat on the A34 three days a week. Ask what the furthest site is and how often it comes round on the rota. A decent employer will just tell you, because they already know the answer and they'd rather you knew it too. If you get something vague back, that's still an answer.

Travel time, and the bit nearly everyone gets wrong

This one comes up constantly and it's usually half right, which is worse than being completely wrong.

If you've got no fixed workplace, the leading case on this says the drive from your house to the first job and home again from the last one counts as working time under the Working Time Regulations. That's still how it gets applied as things stand, and it matters, because it feeds into the 48 hour week and your rest breaks.

What it doesn't do is make it paid. Working time and paid time are two different things, and HMRC's own minimum wage guidance is clear that travel between where you live and where you work isn't counted. Travel between jobs during the day is different, that one does count. Just be clear on what counting actually buys you, because the minimum wage rules only bite if your total pay divided by your total hours drops below the minimum, and on an engineer's money it won't.

So the practical version is this. Travel gets paid if your contract says it gets paid, and not otherwise. Plenty of good employers do pay them, or pay from a set time regardless of where you're starting. Plenty don't. Just don't assume the law sorts it out for you, because it doesn't.

Standby is two numbers, not one

When someone tells me the on-call is one week in four with a retainer, I always ask for the other half, because a retainer on its own tells you very little.

You want the weekly retainer, the rate you're on once you're actually called, and whether there's a minimum payment per call-out. To put made up numbers on it, a £50 a week retainer with double time and a four hour minimum is a completely different job to a £75 retainer where you're on your normal hourly rate from the moment you leave the house and get nothing at all for a ten minute reset. Both of those exist and both get described as "on-call with a retainer".

Ask how many calls a normal week gets as well, not the worst week anyone can remember. And ask what happens if you're out at two in the morning, because whether they expect you back in at eight tells you a lot about how the place is run.

Flat rate overtime is a pay cut in disguise

More and more offers I see have overtime at plain time. If you've come from somewhere paying time and a half after eight hours and double on a Sunday, that's a real cut even when the basic has gone up, and it's the most common reason I see people pull out of a job at the eleventh hour.

Work out what you actually did last year. If you put in 200 hours at time and a half, that was 300 hours of pay, and you'd now be doing the same 200 hours for 200. Run that against the rise in basic before you get too excited about the rise in basic. I went through where the ranges sit at the moment in the halfway point pay piece if you want something to measure against.

The van, and the £4,170 nobody mentions

Two separate things get muddled here, so it's worth splitting them.

Driving the van home at the end of the day is fine. HMRC treats that as ordinary commuting and on its own it doesn't create a tax charge. If anyone tells you taking the van home is going to cost you, they've got it wrong.

What costs you is private use. If the van is available for the school run, the weekly shop or a weekend away, that's a benefit in kind, and for 2026/27 it puts £4,170 onto your taxable income, with another £798 on top if the company is covering the fuel you burn privately. For a basic rate taxpayer that's roughly £834 a year, or about £994 with the fuel, and double those if you're into higher rate.

What I'd ask on the second call

First interviews are for them to sell you the job. Second ones are where you get to be specific:

• What's the actual site list, and how far is the furthest one?
• Is first and last travel paid, and if so from what time?
• What's the standby retainer, the call-out rate and the minimum payment per call?
• What's the overtime rate after normal hours, at weekends and on bank holidays?
• Is the van private use or commuting only, and is that in the contract?
• Who pays for tickets and renewals, and is there a clawback if you leave inside two years?

None of this is you being difficult. Every decent employer I work with expects these questions, and most of them are relieved when someone asks, because it means you're weighing the job up properly instead of chasing a headline number. The ones who get funny about it are telling you something useful for free.