Energy Supplier Complaints: The Official Ofgem Figures

Every three months Ofgem publishes how many complaints each energy supplier received, how many customer accounts it holds, and how quickly it sorted those complaints out. It is the closest thing Britain has to an official scoreboard for energy customer service, and anyone can read it.

It is also easy to misread. The regulator counts small suppliers on a scale ten times finer than large ones, so the raw numbers sit side by side looking comparable when they are not. This page shows the figures with that scale attached, and explains what they can and cannot tell you about the company that sends your bill.

What Ofgem actually measures

Ofgem asks every supplier for three things each quarter, and publishes all three:

• How many complaints they received, set against the number of customer accounts they hold rather than given as a raw count. A supplier with five million customers will always receive more complaints than one with fifty thousand. The rate is what makes them comparable at all.
• How many were resolved by the end of the next working day. This is the fast-fix measure — a wrong bill corrected, a meter reading accepted, a payment put back where it belongs.
• How many were resolved within eight weeks. Eight weeks is the point at which an unresolved complaint can go to the Energy Ombudsman, so this is the measure that counts when something has gone properly wrong.

A complaint here means one the supplier has formally logged, not every unhappy phone call. Ofgem also reports Feed-in Tariff complaints separately, because those concern payments to households generating their own electricity rather than the supply of energy — a different service, with a different set of things to go wrong.

Why the numbers are not comparable

This is the part that catches people out, and it is worth being precise about.

Ofgem reports large and medium suppliers as complaints per 100,000 customer accounts. It reports a selection of small suppliers as complaints per 10,000 accounts — a scale ten times finer. And it reports Feed-in Tariff complaints per 1,000 FiT accounts.

The arithmetic is the point, and it does not depend on any particular quarter: a figure of 100 per 10,000 accounts and a figure of 1,000 per 100,000 accounts describe exactly the same rate of complaints. So a small supplier and a large one can print numbers ten times apart and be performing identically. Comparing the printed figures across groups gives you the wrong answer, and it gives it confidently.

Every table below states its own scale in the column heading, and we do not rank one group against another anywhere on this page.

The latest figures

These are Ofgem’s published figures for Q1 2026, with the market as a whole lower than the same quarter a year earlier. Where we have reviewed a supplier, its name links through to the full review.

How to read a complaint rate

A complaint rate measures how often something goes wrong badly enough to be written down. It is not a satisfaction score, and it is not a prediction of what will happen to you.

The awkward part is that the measure quietly rewards suppliers who make complaining difficult. A company with a clear complaints form, a phone line that gets answered and a habit of logging problems properly will record more complaints than one where raising an issue is a chore — even if the second is worse to be a customer of. Ofgem does not adjust for that, and neither can we.

What the rate is genuinely good for:

• Following one supplier over time. A rate that doubles in two quarters is telling you something real, whatever the absolute level.
• Comparing within a size group — two large suppliers, same quarter, same scale, same definition.
• Reading next to the resolution figures, which is where the more useful signal usually sits.

Resolution matters more than volume

If you only look at one column, make it resolution. Complaints happen to every supplier. What separates them is what happens next.

The next-working-day figure varies enormously between companies, and that is where operational quality shows up most clearly: fixing something the same day means the person who answered had both the authority and the information to sort it out without passing it on. The eight-week figure clusters higher across the board, because eight weeks is the Ombudsman threshold and suppliers work hard to close cases before reaching it.

A supplier with a middling complaint rate and a strong next-day resolution rate is often the better bet over one with a low complaint rate and slow resolution. The first is finding problems and fixing them. The second may simply not be hearing about them.

Why there are two sets of figures

Most large suppliers publish their own complaints performance on their own websites, and we track that separately — you will find it in each supplier review. Those numbers rarely match Ofgem’s, and nobody is being dishonest.

They differ because they are collected differently. Suppliers publish on their own timetable, sometimes months apart from one another, against their own definitions. Ofgem collects on one timetable with one definition for everybody. We keep the two apart everywhere on this site and never add them together or average them into a single number.

Where the two disagree sharply for the same supplier and the same period, that gap is worth noticing in itself.

If you need to complain

Nothing here is advice about your own account, but the process is worth knowing, because it favours you more than most people realise.

1. Complain to your supplier first, in writing if you can, and note the date. Every supplier must have a complaints procedure and must tell you what it is.
2. Wait eight weeks, or for a deadlock letter. A deadlock letter means the supplier considers the matter closed. It is your ticket to the next stage and can arrive sooner than eight weeks.
3. Take it to the Energy Ombudsman. It costs nothing, and the decision binds the supplier but not you — if you dislike the outcome, your other options remain open.

If your complaint is about a switch that went wrong, our guide to compensation for energy switch problems covers the automatic payments you may be owed without having to ask for them. If you are behind on payments, read switching suppliers while in debt first — the rules are not what most people assume.

And if you are wondering who Ofgem are and what they can actually make a supplier do, we have a plain-English guide to Ofgem.