Are you overpaying? Broadband price and contract checker

Why one in four households is quietly overpaying

Because broadband is one of the few bills that goes up simply because you did nothing. Almost every deal is sold at an introductory price for a fixed minimum term. When that term ends, the discount does not roll over. You move onto the standard price, which is higher, and nobody phones to tell you.

Ofcom's Pricing and Consumer Engagement Report, published on 26 February 2026, put a number on it: 28% of UK broadband customers are out of contract, and in-contract customers spend between £7 and £9 a month less than out-of-contract ones (Ofcom, 2026a). That gap narrowed over the year, which is progress, but it is still £84 to £108 a year for doing nothing wrong.

The market got cheaper. Your bill probably did not.

Both of those things are true at once, and the gap between them is where the money goes. Ofcom found average broadband prices in the market fell 6% in real terms over the year, with the sharpest falls on the fastest tiers. Only the slowest tier, under 30 Mbps, failed to fall at all.

Meanwhile individual bills went up, because most contracts now carry a fixed annual increase. So the market moved down while the person who stayed put moved up. That is the whole argument for checking once a year, and it is why the date your contract ends matters more than almost anything else about your deal.

What the annual rise actually adds

Since Ofcom's January 2025 rules, providers must state mid-contract rises in pounds and pence rather than as a percentage tied to inflation. That is a genuine improvement in clarity, though it has not made anything cheaper. For April 2026 the headline figures were £4 a month at BT, EE, Plusnet, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, £3 at Sky, and £3.50 at Vodafone.

A £4 monthly rise is £48 over a year. On a 24-month contract you meet it twice, so the price you signed up at is not the price you finish on. There are two things worth knowing. First, contracts signed before the rule change may still sit on the older inflation-linked formula, so check your start date. Second, a handful of providers, Zen and brsk among them, make no mid-contract rises a selling point. Our guide to in-contract price rises in 2026 has the provider-by-provider detail.

How the price check works, and what it cannot do

The typical ranges come from our own published analysis of the UK market, and they describe what households usually pay for each speed, not the cheapest deal that exists. That distinction matters. Being inside the range means you are paying about what most people pay. It does not mean you could not do better.

What the checker genuinely cannot do is tell you the price you would be offered. Broadband pricing is address-specific, and two houses on the same street can see different options depending on which networks have been built past them. That is not a limitation we can engineer around, and any tool claiming otherwise is guessing. A postcode check is the only honest answer, and it takes about ten seconds.

What to do about it

If you are out of contract, you have the strongest position you will ever have, because you can leave today at no cost. Use it. The two routes are haggling with your existing provider and switching to a new one, and they work best together: find out what is available at your address first, then ring your provider with a number in your hand.

Retention teams have prices that never appear on the website, and they are measured on keeping you. Our guide to negotiating a broadband renewal covers what to say. If you would rather move, One Touch Switch means you arrange everything with the new provider and they handle the rest, including ending the old service.

If you are still in contract, the single most valuable thing you can do takes thirty seconds: put a reminder in your phone for a month before it ends. Almost everybody who ends up overpaying does so because the date passed without them noticing.

One route people miss entirely

If anyone in your household receives Universal Credit, Pension Credit, Employment and Support Allowance, Jobseeker's Allowance or Income Support, you may qualify for a social tariff. These are cheaper packages, typically well below the standard price, and asking about one has no effect on your benefits.

Take-up is the problem. Ofcom found 532,000 households were on a social tariff in June 2025, which is under 9% of those eligible, and that 70% of eligible households had never heard of them (Ofcom, 2026a). That is not a pricing failure, it is an awareness failure, and it is the single largest pot of unclaimed savings in UK broadband. Our social tariffs guide lists who qualifies and what is available.

Frequently asked questions