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Context. Absorption or emission lines of Fe ii are observed in many astrophysical spectra and accurate atomic data are required to interpret these lines. The calculation of electron-impact excitation rates for transitions among even the lowest lying levels of Fe ii is a formidable task for theoreticians.Aims. In this paper, we present collision strengths and effective collision strengths for electron-impact excitation of Fe ii for low-lying forbidden transitions among the lowest 16 fine-structure levels arising from the four LS states 3d 6 4s 6 D e , 3d 7 4 F e , 3d 6 4s 4 D e , and 3d 7 4 P e . The effective collision strengths are calculated for a wide range of electron temperatures of astrophysical importance from 30-100 000 K. Methods. The parallel suite of Breit-Pauli codes are utilised to compute the collision cross sections for electron-impact excitation of Fe ii and relativistic terms are included explicitly in both the target and the scattering approximation. 100 LS or 262-jj levels formed from the basis configurations 3d 6 4s, 3d 7 , and 3d 6 4p were included in the wavefunction representation of the target, including all doublet, quartet, and sextet terms. Collision strengths for a total of 34 191 individual transitions were computed. Results. A detailed comparison is made with previous theoretical works and significant differences were found to occur in the effective collision strengths, particularly at low temperatures.