Replacement or upgrade? Start here.

Almost every cost figure you will find for this work is unreliable for the same reason: it quotes two different jobs as though they were one. Swapping a panel while the service size stays where it is costs one thing. Raising the size of the service coming into the house costs another, and the difference is not a trim level. It is a different scope of work involving your power company. Before anything else, work out which of these two you are actually asking about.

Here is how to tell which one is in front of you. Find the main breaker at the top of the panel and read the number stamped on its handle, or read the label inside the door. That number is the size of your service. If it already says 200 and the trouble is a panel that is full, corroded, discontinued or written up on an inspection report, you are looking at a replacement, and the range above applies. If it says 100 or 150 and you are adding load the house was never built for, you are looking at an upgrade, and the honest answer on price is that it depends on what the power company requires at your address and what condition the service equipment is in.

Load is the deciding question far more often than age. A 1970s panel running a gas furnace, a gas range and one air conditioner may be sitting at half its capacity and have years left in it. The same panel in a house that has since gained a heat pump, an induction range, a finished basement and a car charger is a different situation, and adding a charger in particular is a capacity calculation before it is anything else. If that is what brought you here, our EV charger installation page covers how the load calculation is done and when the panel actually has to change.

One more distinction worth having early. Replacing a panel does not rewire the house. The wiring in your walls stays exactly as it is; a panel job changes where those wires terminate and what protects them, not the wires themselves. A house that needs rewiring needs rewiring whether or not the panel is new, and that is a separate conversation with a separate price.

Estimates are free. If the problem needs diagnosing first, we tell you what that costs before we begin.

Federal Pacific and Zinsco panels — why an inspector flags them

If a home inspector has written “Federal Pacific Stab-Lok” or “Zinsco” on your report, that is not a note about age or appearance. Both makes have a measured problem with the breakers themselves: they can fail to do the one job they exist to do.

A circuit breaker is a safety device. When a circuit draws more current than the wire behind the wall can carry, the breaker is supposed to open and cut the power before the wire heats up. What the defect actually is: the breaker can fail to open when the circuit is overloaded. CPSC testing in the early 1980s ran 122 Stab-Lok breakers at 135 percent of their rated current and recorded two-pole failure-to-trip rates between 25 and 51 percent. A later field sample, published by Dr Jess Aronstein in 2004, tested units pulled from 17 occupied homes and found 14 percent of 215 single-pole breakers and 48 percent of 31 two-pole breakers failing the same test. The CPSC closed its investigation in 1983 without a recall, saying it was “unable at this time to link these failures to the development of a hazardous situation”, and citing the cost of continuing. So: measured failure rates, no federal recall, and a defect that is internal and gives no warning. Zinsco panels carry a related failure, plus a second one: the breakers connect to an aluminum bus bar that corrodes and can weld the breaker to the bus, so it cannot trip and, in some cases, cannot be switched off by hand either.

The honest position is this. A great many of these panels have run for decades without incident, and nobody can tell you that yours will fail tomorrow. What nobody can tell you either is that yours will trip when it needs to, because the failure is internal and there is no test you can run on a live panel in your house that proves the breakers are sound. That is why inspectors flag them and why insurers increasingly ask. Replacing the panel is the only fix that resolves it — we do not consider individual replacement breakers for these makes a remedy we would stand behind, and a panel that old is usually undersized for a modern house anyway.

When the breaker keeps tripping, is it the panel?

Usually, no. When a breaker keeps tripping the panel is the least likely culprit on the list, and replacing it is an expensive way to find that out. A breaker that trips is a breaker that is working. It has interrupted a circuit because something on that circuit asked for more current than the wire behind the wall is rated to carry, or because the breaker itself can no longer tell the difference. The job is to establish which, and the panel only enters the picture at the end of that process, not the start.

The one response to avoid, always, is a bigger breaker. Fitting a 20-amp breaker to stop a 15-amp circuit tripping does not give the circuit more capacity. It raises the point at which the wire in the wall is disconnected from the supply, and that wire did not get any thicker. The breaker protects the cable, not the appliance, and over-fusing removes that protection while leaving everything looking perfectly normal from the front.

Does a 200-amp service add value?

It helps, and we are not going to pretend anyone can put a figure on it. No electrician can promise you a dollar-for-dollar return on this work, and treat any who does with suspicion. What we can describe is where it actually shows up, because the effect is real but it is mostly defensive rather than additive.

At resale, it removes an objection rather than creating a premium. A 100-amp service in a house otherwise presented as move-in ready is a line item a buyer’s agent will use, and the number that gets negotiated off the price is rarely the true cost of the work. It tends to be whatever the buyer fears the work might cost. A finished, permitted, inspected 200-amp service takes that whole conversation off the table before it starts.

At the buyer’s inspection, it is one of the first things written up. Home inspectors photograph the panel on every job. An obsolete make, a full panel with double-tapped breakers, or a service that plainly cannot support what the listing advertises will appear in the report, and once it is in writing it has to be answered. Answering it under a contract deadline is the most expensive moment to do this work, because the timeline is somebody else’s.

Insurance and refinancing are where it turns into a hard stop. Carriers increasingly ask what make and what size the service is before they will write or renew a policy on an older house, and some will decline outright over the answer. Lenders order an appraisal, and an appraiser noting deficient or obsolete service equipment can put a condition on the file that has to be cleared before closing. In both cases the panel stops being a preference and becomes a gate.

On appraisal, be realistic. An appraiser will not usually add a line for a modern panel the way they add one for a bathroom. Where it matters is in the condition rating and in the absence of an adjustment against you. That is a quieter benefit than a renovation, but it is the honest description of what the work does.

The clearest case is the practical one. If you intend to add a heat pump, an induction range, a car charger, a hot tub or a finished basement, the capacity has to exist first, and doing that work once as a planned electrical panel upgrade costs less than doing it in pieces under pressure.

How a panel day runs

The look at the job. Ahmad reads the main breaker and the label, opens the cover, and checks what is actually in the panel against what the house is being asked to run. He looks at the meter base, the service cable and the grounding, because on this kind of work those decide the scope more often than the panel does. You get a written estimate itemized by panel, breakers, labor and permit fee, and you get it with no obligation. No trip fee, free estimates. If what you have is a fault to be traced rather than equipment to be replaced, that is diagnostic work, and the cost of it is agreed with you before any of it starts.

The permit. Service work in Fairfax County requires a permit and an inspection. We pull it in our name as the licensed contractor and we meet the inspector at the property. You are not filing anything, and you are not waiting at home for an inspector nobody has briefed.

The utility disconnect. The panel cannot be worked on live, and the conductors feeding it belong to the power company up to the meter. So the disconnect and reconnect are scheduled with them, and that scheduling, rather than the electrical work, is usually what sets the date. On an upgrade it is also where the power company tells us whether anything on their side has to change.

The outage. Plan for a day with the power off in it. A straight replacement is typically most of one working day, with the supply down for the middle of it. Move anything in the freezer that matters, charge what you need charged, and expect to be without heating, cooling and internet while the panel is out. Homes on a well have no water during the outage, which catches people out more than anything else on this list.

The sign-off. The circuits go back with proper labels, not pencil marks from 1978. The inspector signs the work off and the permit closes, which is the piece of paper that matters later when you sell, refinance or renew insurance.

Why choose EV Electric for panel upgrades

• Master Electrician handles the full job — assessment, permit, install, inspection coordination.
• Written estimate with itemized line items. Panel, breakers, labor, permit fee — each piece visible.
• Federal Pacific and Zinsco panel replacements are a specialty. Ahmad knows the failure modes.
• Utility coordination handled for you. We schedule the disconnect and reconnect with your power company — Dominion for most Northern Virginia addresses, NOVEC in parts of Centreville and Clifton, Pepco in DC and Montgomery County.
• 5.0-star average across 113 Google reviews.

Where we do panel work