EV boom sending British homeowners underground
Key Points
- Household searches on LSBUD's free digging check rose 77.9% to 62,753 in 2025
- Searches for installing services rose 397% and driveway works rose 36%
- LSBUD links the rise to 473,348 EV registrations and the Electric Car Grant
- Electricity sector searches rose 63.8% as grid upgrades and data centres ramped up
- HSE recorded 3,025 underground cable strikes in 2025, up 17%
Free digging check service LinesearchbeforeUdig (LSBUD) recorded 62,753 searches from UK households in 2025, a 77.9% rise it links to the electric car boom.
The figures come from LSBUD’s Digging Up Britain 2026 report, which analyses the 4,094,214 searches made through its portal last year to check for buried pipes and cables before work starts. The service passed four million searches for the first time on 18 December 2025, a 6% increase on 2024.
Domestic works were the fastest-growing category on the platform by some distance. Searches for installing services rose 397% year on year, while driveway works rose 36%, and both spiked in May to June and again in November to December.
LSBUD said the rise in demand for electric vehicles potentially explains both increases. Most home EV chargers mount on a wall and need no digging, but a charger placed on a post in a driveway or in a detached garage requires a cable trench.
New electric car registrations in the UK reached around 473,348 in 2025 according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, up almost 24% on the year before. Electric cars took 23.4% of all new registrations, with more sold in 2025 than in 2021 and 2022 combined.
Sales of pure battery electric vehicles grew by almost a third to 72,779 in September 2025. In December 2025 they secured their highest ever monthly share of new car registrations at 32.2%.
The report tied the November to December spike in household searches to the Government’s Electric Car Grant, which launched in July 2025. Eligibility for the grant took time to confirm, and several manufacturers added their own incentives in the final quarter of the year.
Google Trends data cited in the report shows searches for “how to install an EV charger at home” climbing throughout 2025 and reaching their highest point in early 2026. LSBUD said the timing matches homeowners preparing driveways ahead of a new car arriving.
Searches on behalf of the electricity industry rose 63.8% over the same period to 374,114, taking the sector’s share of all searches from 4.2% in 2023 to 9%. LSBUD said EV charging infrastructure, the national grid upgrade and 29 data centre projects with planning permission drove that increase.
The Health and Safety Executive recorded 3,025 incidents of damage to underground electrical cables in 2025, a 17% rise on the previous year. Of those, 36 resulted in injuries, up 24% on 2024.
“It’s fantastic that so many farmers, landowners and agricultural contractors use LSBUD to check what’s underground before they work, especially as there’s such an increase in excavation activity,” said Murray Peat, Manager at Linewatch, which monitors high-pressure pipelines for operators including Shell and Esso.
Anyone in the UK can run a search on the LSBUD portal for free before digging. The service holds asset records for more than 170 network operators covering over 2.5 million kilometres of pipes and cables.
