Heat Networks: District and Communal Heating

Most energy writing assumes you buy gas or electricity and could buy it from somebody else. A large group of British households does neither. They live on a heat network: hot water piped from one central plant to a block, an estate or a campus, billed as heat rather than as fuel, with no meter of their own to move to a different supplier.

Almost nothing written for energy consumers is about them. The price cap does not apply, comparison sites have nothing to compare, and until recently no regulator was responsible. This page sets out what the official statistics actually say, and — just as importantly — what they cannot be made to say.

What a heat network is

One heat source serves many customers. It might be a large gas boiler in a basement, a heat pump, or waste heat from an industrial process or an energy-from-waste plant. Insulated pipes carry hot water to each home, where a heat interface unit takes the heat off and feeds the radiators and the taps. There is no boiler in the flat and usually no gas supply either.

The register recognises two arrangements and the distinction is not cosmetic. Communal heatingis one building with more than one final customer — the block of flats with a shared boiler room. District heatingis more than one building with at least one final customer — a network crossing a street or an estate. The planning database adds a third, campus, for a hospital or university site, which exists in neither the register nor the Regulations behind it.

What matters to a resident is the same in all three: the heat comes from one operator, the price comes from a contract negotiated by somebody else — usually a landlord, a freeholder or a management company — and there is no switch to make.

What the official register records

Operators supplying heat must notify the Secretary of State under the Heat Network (Metering and Billing) Regulations, and DESNZ publishes what has been notified. The figures below are that register. They cover the United Kingdom including Northern Ireland, which is unusual in this section — most energy data here is Great Britain, because Northern Ireland runs a separate electricity market.

Why the price cap does not apply

Ofgem’s price cap is a limit on the unit rate and standing charge a licensed supplier may charge for domestic gas and electricity. Heat is neither. A heat network customer is buying heat, from an operator who is not a licensed energy supplier, so the capped rates published every quarter have nothing to say about the price of their heating.

This is easy to miss because the operator is buying capped energy upstream: the boiler in the basement burns gas that the operator bought on some commercial contract, and the network’s own pumps run on electricity. Wholesale movements therefore reach heat network bills, often with a long lag set by whatever contract the building is on, and without any of the protections a household would have buying that gas directly.

Two further consequences follow, and neither is obvious from the cap page. There is no supplier to switch to, so the standard consumer remedy is unavailable. And the household usually did not choose the arrangement or the contract — it came with the building.

One thing that is not outside the cap: electricity bought separately for lighting, cooking and appliances. That is an ordinary domestic supply on an ordinary meter, and the capped rates for your region apply to it as they would to anybody else.

Who regulates heat networks now

Until the Energy Act 2023, nobody did. The Act made Ofgem the regulator for heat networks in Great Britain — England, Scotland and Wales, and the new consumer protection rules were launched on 27 January 2026. Networks already operating are treated as authorised rather than having to apply, and operators must register their details with Ofgem by 26 January 2027.

The rules are being introduced in phases and are aimed at fair pricing, transparent billing, reliable supply and decent customer service. Citizens Advice, Consumer Scotland and the Energy Ombudsman now run advice and redress services for heat network customers, which is the practical change most residents will notice first: a complaint has somewhere to go.

What this is not is a price cap. Ofgem can act where prices are unfair, but no capped unit rate or standing charge is published for heat the way it is for gas and electricity, and the contract for your building still sets what you pay.

Note the geography carefully. The regulation is Great Britain. The statistics on this page are the United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland has registered networks that sit inside the figures and outside Ofgem’s regime.

What is being built, and what is only proposed

DESNZ also publishes a planning database, and it is a different kind of thing entirely: a pipeline running from an application nobody has decided yet through to a scheme delivering heat, including applications that were withdrawn, refused or abandoned. Most of what is in it has not been built.

That makes its customer-connection column the single most misreadable figure in this release. Added across every stage it is tens of times larger than the operational total, and what it would be describing is intentions — including intentions that were refused planning permission. Only the operational figure appears below, and it is labelled as such.

What these figures cannot tell you

Whether you are on one.The register is not a lookup and this page does not pretend to be. Its geography locates each network’s energy centre — the plant — and the publisher warns that buildings and customers served may sit in a different local authority altogether. If you are not sure, the answer is in your tenancy or lease and on your heat bill, not in a dataset.

How big the market is. DESNZ states directly that these statistics cover only registered networks, may not represent the market as a whole, and cannot be used to estimate its size. Everything in the register was self-reported by operators notifying under the Regulations, so absence from it is not evidence that a network does not exist.

What is happening now. The register is frozen. It covers 2019 to 2022 and DESNZ has said it will not be updated before Ofgem begins collecting notification data as regulator. The planning database is the half that still moves, and the release it came from is named beside it above.

What you should pay.No figure here is a price. The register carries no tariffs and no bills, and heat charges vary by building and by contract in ways nothing published nationally captures. If your heat costs look wrong, the route is the operator, then the Energy Ombudsman — not a comparison.