Significant amount of effort has been devoted in the development of water electrolysis technology as the prime technology for green hydrogen production. In this paper, we investigate nickel–iron-based electrocatalytic coatings on stainless-steel substrates for commercial alkaline water electrolysers. Stainless steel electrodes for water electrolysis have received attention lately, showing that they can be a low-cost substrate for water electrolysis. Coating stainless steel with low-cost electrocatalysts can prove beneficial to lower overpotential for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), thereby reducing the overall energy consumption of water electrolysis at an affordable cost. We show that NiFe-deposited substrates have an overpotential of 514 mV at 10 mA cm−2 current. The substrates also exhibited excellent stability in strong alkaline condition for 60 h under continuous 1.2 V working potential vs SCE. The results in full-cell electrolysers demonstrate that the electrolyser with the NiFe-coated anode could generate nearly six times as much current density compared with the bare stainless-steel substrate. Graphical abstract