Energy Price Cap Rates by Region

The energy price cap is the number that decides what most British households pay for gas and electricity: it governs every standard variable tariff, which is where a household ends up by default when a fix expires and nothing is done. It changes every three months.

It is also widely misunderstood — including by people who follow it closely. This page shows the official Ofgem rates for your region and payment method, and explains what the cap does, what it emphatically does not do, and what makes up the price underneath it.

What the price cap actually caps

The cap limits two things: the unit rate you pay for each kWh of gas and electricity, and the daily standing charge you pay whether you use anything or not.

It does not cap your bill. Your bill is those two prices multiplied by how much energy you get through, and there is no ceiling on that. A large, poorly insulated house on a capped tariff can pay several times what a small flat pays on exactly the same rates.

This matters because the headline figure Ofgem announces each quarter is expressed as an annual amount for a household using a typical amount of energy. Press coverage reports it as “the price cap”, and it lands as though it were a limit on what anyone can be charged. It is not. It is an illustration.

The rates where you live

Pick your region and how you pay. Every price shown includes VAT at 5%.

Why your region changes the price

Ofgem sets a different cap for each of fourteen regions, and the gap between the cheapest and dearest is normally worth tens of pounds a year rather than hundreds — but it is real, and it is not arbitrary.

The bulk of the difference is network costs: what it costs to move electricity and gas across the local distribution network and maintain the pipes and wires. A region with customers spread thinly over difficult terrain costs more to serve per household than a dense urban one. Northern Scotland and North Wales and Mersey typically sit at the higher end for electricity; London and the East Midlands lower.

You cannot change your region, and no supplier can undercut the network charges in it. It is worth knowing mainly so that comparisons against a national average make sense — if you are in a dearer region, the national figure will always look optimistic to you.

What the network actually charges

That is the usual explanation, and it is normally where the subject stops, because the numbers behind it are buried in regulatory documents. They do not have to be. One of the six distribution network operators publishes its charges as open data, and those are the figures below.

One thing to be clear about before reading them: these are not rates anyone bills a household. A Use of System charge is levied on your electricity supplier, which pays the network operator and recovers the cost inside its tariff. By the time it reaches your bill it has been folded in with wholesale energy, transmission charges, policy costs, VAT and the supplier’s margin. There is no line on a domestic bill that matches any figure here, and the daily fixed charge below is a component of your standing charge rather than the whole of it.

And what the national grid charges above it

Distribution is the second half of the journey. Before electricity reaches a local network at all it crosses the national transmission system — the pylons and the high-voltage cables — and that has its own charge, set by the National Energy System Operator rather than by any of the six distribution operators.

The same warning applies, for the same reason: nobody bills a household a transmission charge either. One figure below needs saying twice, though. The transmission demand residual is quoted per site per day and one of its bands is called “domestic”, which makes it look exactly like a slice of your standing charge that you could look up and check. It is not. It is what a supplier pays for each home it serves, before margin and before everything else a tariff has to cover, and it is not a number that appears on anybody’s bill.

Unlike the distribution figures above, these cover the whole of Great Britain.

Why how you pay changes the price

Ofgem caps each payment method separately, because they genuinely cost suppliers different amounts to serve.

• Direct Debit is the cheapest. The supplier gets paid on a predictable date, administration is automated, and bad debt is lower.
• Standard credit — paying each bill when it arrives — carries a higher cap. The supplier waits longer for its money and a larger share of it is never paid at all.
• Prepayment used to be the most expensive of the three. Since the Government levelised it against Direct Debit it generally sits close to, and sometimes below, the Direct Debit rate.

If you are on standard credit and could pay by Direct Debit, that is one of the few changes that reduces your unit rate without changing supplier or tariff. The trade is that you give up control over the payment date and need to keep an eye on whether the direct debit amount matches your actual use — see energy debt and credit balances for how large those balances get across the market.

What you are actually paying for

Ofgem publishes the cap broken into the allowances that build it up, and the breakdown is more interesting than the headline. Wholesale energy is the line that moves most, but it has never been the whole bill — and the current split is shown below rather than described here, because it changes every quarter.

Network costs, policy costs, the supplier’s operating allowance, an allowance for bad debt and a permitted profit margin make up the rest, with VAT on top. When wholesale prices fall, these other lines do not fall with them, which is why bills never drop as far or as fast as headlines about gas prices suggest they should.

Each line below carries a plain-English explanation of what it pays for, because Ofgem’s own names are accurate and nearly opaque — “headroom allowance”, “EBIT” and “levelisation” mean very little on a bill.

One thing to hold onto while reading them: every line is an allowance in a regulatory model, not a record of what your supplier actually spent. Ofgem is deciding what an efficient supplier ought to be able to recover, not auditing anyone’s invoices. Two suppliers charging the cap have the same allowances and may have very different real costs.

A few are worth knowing about before you look:

• Debt-related costs are other customers not paying. Ofgem lets suppliers recover a share of unrecoverable debt across everybody, so households falling behind genuinely does appear on your bill — see energy debt and arrears for the scale of it.
• Headroom is a deliberate margin of error. The cap is fixed in advance for a whole quarter, so there is a buffer in case costs move faster than the model assumed.
• Levelisation is the transfer that stops prepayment customers paying more for costing more to serve. The difference is spread across everybody instead.
• EBIT is the profit margin Ofgem permits — a permitted return, not a measure of what any supplier actually made.

How the price cap has changed

The chart below is Ofgem’s own headline illustration for each cap period, using its typical-consumption basis for the Direct Debit payment method. It is useful for seeing the benchmark move over time, but it is a Great Britain comparison figure rather than a bill for your region or household.

A price cap can change even where wholesale energy costs do not move much, because it also includes network, policy and other allowances. The current-period breakdown above explains those cost lines; this history shows what the complete cap illustration did in each period.

What households were actually charged, since 2010

Everything above is a ceiling. What people were billed is a different number, and DESNZ publishes it: the average unit price and average fixed cost across each calendar year, by the same fourteen regions the cap uses, back to 2010 — nine years before the cap existed.

Two things are worth knowing before reading the table. These are averages of what suppliers charged, so they sit below a cap rather than at it, and in the years before 2019 there was no cap to sit below at all. And the early figures are not regional: until 2013 for electricity and until 2018 for gas, each figure is the price in one selected town in the region rather than the region as a whole. The table names the town, because the two fuels stop being town figures five years apart and a chart drawn straight through that gap would compare unlike things without looking like it.

Who the cap does not cover at all

Everything on this page is about buying gas or electricity from a licensed supplier. A large group of British households does not do that. They live on a heat network— hot water piped from one central plant to a block of flats, an estate or a campus — and what they buy is heat.

Heat is neither gas nor electricity, and the operator is not a licensed energy supplier, so none of the capped rates above applies to it. There is also no supplier to switch to: the pipes serve the building, and the contract that sets the price was signed by a landlord, a freeholder or a management company rather than by the household. Electricity bought separately for lighting and appliances is an ordinary domestic supply and is capped as normal.

This has been changing. Until the Energy Act 2023 heat networks had no energy regulator at all; the Act made Ofgem their regulator in Great Britain, and consumer protection rules launched on 27 January 2026 covering fair pricing, transparent billing and reliable supply. Citizens Advice, Consumer Scotland and the Energy Ombudsman now run advice and redress services for heat network customers. None of that is a price cap, and no capped unit rate or standing charge is published for heat.

Those are registered networks in the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland included; Ofgem’s regulation is Great Britain only. For what the register counts, how the three figures differ and what is being built, see heat networks: district and communal heating.

The “typical bill” is not your bill

The annual figure in the headlines assumes a household using a specific amount of gas and electricity — Ofgem’s medium consumption values. If you use less, you pay less. If you use more, you pay more, and the cap does nothing to stop that.

Two households in the same street on the same tariff can differ by a factor of three. Floor area, insulation, how many people are home during the day, whether you heat with gas or electricity, and whether anyone is in all winter matter far more than which supplier’s logo is on the bill. Our typical household energy use page shows what low, medium and high actually mean in kWh, and the energy bill calculator will put your own numbers against the rates above.

Can you beat the cap?

Often, yes — but it depends on when you look, and the answer changes every quarter.

Because Ofgem announces each new cap about six weeks before it starts, you generally know which way prices are heading before you have to decide anything. A fixed tariff priced below the announced next cap is worth serious consideration. One priced above it is a bet that the cap after that will rise further.

Tracker and time-of-use tariffs work differently again: they follow wholesale prices rather than the cap, which can be markedly cheaper when demand is low and wind is strong, and markedly more expensive on a cold, still evening. Our weather and demand page explains why those two things move together, and we review the Octopus Tracker and Octopus Agile tariffs in detail.

You need not take our word for whether one of them would beat the cap for you. The tariff pages carry the live published rates for every tariff both suppliers sell, region by region and set against the cap rates above, and the smart meter replay costs your own half-hourly readings against each of them in your browser. That distinction matters most for exactly the tariffs this section is about: a time-of-use rate is cheap or expensive according to when you use electricity, which no headline figure can tell you and an assumed household actively obscures.

Whatever you choose, check the exit fee before you fix, and check how each supplier actually treats its customers — the cheapest unit rate is poor value if getting a mistake corrected takes three months. Our supplier reviews and the official complaints figures both speak to that.