What a Wi-Fi survey costs
Almost nobody in this market will tell you. Here is what actually moves the number, so you can work out roughly where your site sits before you speak to anybody — including us.
Why nobody publishes a price
Because a Wi-Fi survey is not one product. Surveying a single-floor office of four hundred square metres and surveying a high-bay distribution centre with narrow-aisle racking, a mezzanine and an external yard are different jobs by an order of magnitude, and quoting one number for both would be misleading.
That is a fair reason not to publish a rate card. It is not a good reason to refuse to discuss cost at all, which is what most of this industry does — leaving buyers to guess whether they are looking at a few hundred pounds or several thousand before they've even had a conversation.
So here is the honest middle ground: the seven things that determine what a survey costs, in the order they matter. Read them against your own site and you'll have a realistic sense of where you sit.
Seven things that move the number
| Driver | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| 1. Floor area and number of floors | The obvious one, and the least important of the seven. Two buildings of identical size can differ by a factor of three in survey effort. |
| 2. Ceiling height and mounting access | A 12-metre high-bay warehouse needs access equipment and an AP-on-a-stick exercise at height. A 2.7-metre office ceiling does not. |
| 3. Racking and stock density | The single biggest variable in a warehouse. Full racking attenuates far more than empty racking, and narrow-aisle layouts need measuring aisle by aisle. |
| 4. Construction and building age | Plasterboard is nearly transparent to radio. Dense blockwork, concrete cores, foil-backed insulation and steel mesh are not. Older and listed buildings take longer and restrict where anything can be fixed. |
| 5. Device fleet and what it does | A laptop-and-phone office is a straightforward design target. Handheld scanners, voice handsets, AGVs and medical or telecare devices need tighter thresholds, designed roaming overlap, and more measurement to prove. |
| 6. Outdoor coverage | Yards, car parks, quaysides, pontoons and open ground are surveyed and designed separately. Weatherproofing, mounting, power and containment to remote positions all change the cost. |
| 7. Validation | A post-installation validation survey is a second visit and a second report. It is also the only thing that proves the design was delivered — we'd always rather you bought it than didn't. |
Roughly where sites sit
What is always included
- The scoping conversation, which is free and sometimes concludes that you don't need a survey at all
- The survey itself, on calibrated survey-grade equipment
- The full eight-section report, including the costed kit list with part numbers
- A walkthrough of the findings with whoever needs to understand or approve them
- Full ownership of the report and the underlying data, whoever ends up doing the installation
What is quoted separately
- Outdoor and external coverage, because the design constraints and equipment differ
- Post-installation validation, which is a second visit and a second report
- Out-of-hours or shutdown-period working where your operation requires it
- Measuring and drawing a building that has no usable floorplans
- The installation itself — priced from the survey, so you can compare it against anybody else's quote
How to make a survey cheaper
Genuinely, not as a sales line:
- Have scaled drawings ready. CAD or a scaled PDF. Measuring a building we could have modelled is the most avoidable cost on the list.
- Know your device fleet. What connects, how many, and what it does. Guesswork forces us to design conservatively, which costs more in hardware later.
- Survey the areas that matter. If the problem is the warehouse, we don't need to survey the offices to prove it.
- Do it once, properly. The most expensive Wi-Fi projects we see are the second attempt.
Common questions
Is the survey cost deducted if you do the installation?
Ask us when we scope it. What we won't do is inflate the survey price on the assumption we'll win the installation, or discount it in a way that makes the report feel like it comes with strings. The report is yours either way.
Is there a free option?
The scoping conversation is free and often more useful than people expect — describe the building and the symptoms and we'll tell you which survey you need, or that you don't need one yet. What we won't do is offer a free 'survey' that is really a sales visit with a phone app. Several firms do; it isn't a survey.
How does survey cost compare to the installation?
On most projects the survey is a small fraction of the total. It is also the part that determines whether the rest of the money is well spent — the expensive mistake is not an over-specified survey, it is a under-specified network that has to be revisited.
Do you charge for a re-survey if the site changes?
It depends on the change. A design revision because the racking layout moved is usually a small piece of work. A new mezzanine or a change of use in a large area may need the affected zone re-surveyed — the affected zone, not the whole site.
Can you work to a fixed price?
Yes. Once the scope is agreed — areas, device types, indoor and outdoor, with or without validation — the survey is quoted as a fixed price. We don't work on day rates that drift. The fastest route to that price is the pre-survey questionnaire: it captures everything we need to scope the work properly.
Tell us about the building and we'll tell you what it takes.
A short scoping conversation costs nothing and usually settles which survey you need — and occasionally settles that you don't need one yet.