Your Copper Broadband Price Cap Now Has an End Date: 1 April 2029

This is the decision that eventually makes copper broadband more expensive than fibre on purpose, and Ofcom has now told everyone when it starts. It is not the landline switch-off, though it will be confused with it constantly over the next few years. It is about the price your provider pays for the wire, the cap that has held that price down, and the date the cap is allowed to come off. Here is what Ofcom decided, what it turned down, the protection that survives, and the one group of people who should read this most carefully: the millions who already moved once and think they are done.

What has Ofcom actually decided?

Direct answer: that from 1 April 2029, Openreach may leave 10% of the premises in an exchange area out of the coverage test that lifts the price cap on copper broadband. In practice that means the cap can come off when an exchange reaches 90% ultrafast coverage rather than 100%, and only at premises where full fibre is actually available.

Ofcom published the decision on 9 September 2026, in a 72-page statement concluding a consultation that ran from March. Its own summary is admirably plain: it has decided that, subject to other criteria also being met, Openreach can begin to alter the wholesale prices of copper connections from 1 April 2029, and that this will apply only at premises where full fibre is available, in exchange areas where ultrafast broadband is available to 90% of premises.

Two words in that sentence are doing heavy lifting. Wholesale means the price Openreach charges your provider for the line, not the price on your bill. Ultrafast is defined in the regulations as a retail service offering at least 300 Mbit/s download, which in practice means full fibre. So the decision is about a price cap between two companies, and it reaches you only if your provider chooses to pass it on.

Why does a price cap on copper exist at all?

Direct answer: because Openreach has significant market power, so Ofcom controls what it can charge for the services rivals depend on. The copper cap has kept the price of an old-fashioned broadband line down while fibre was being built. Lifting it is deliberate: it is the mechanism by which copper is allowed to become the expensive option.

Ofcom is candid about this. It says pricing flexibility forms an important part of the phased transition from copper to full-fibre services and helps support migration and facilitate the eventual retirement of the copper network. In other words, the point of removing the cap is to make staying on copper less attractive than moving to fibre, so that Openreach can eventually turn the copper network off and stop paying to run two networks side by side. Our guide to how UK wholesale broadband works explains the layers underneath that, and why the price your provider pays is not the price you pay.

It sits inside a three-stage plan that Ofcom has run since 2021 and confirmed again in March 2026. Each stage is measured exchange by exchange.

Will my bill go up on 1 April 2029?

Direct answer: not automatically, and not on that date. What changes is that Openreach becomes free to raise the wholesale price in qualifying areas. Whether any of that reaches your bill is your provider's commercial decision, and Ofcom notes it will depend on retail competition.

The chain has three links and you sit at the end of it. Openreach raises the wholesale price of a copper line. Your provider decides whether to absorb it or pass it on. If it passes it on, you see it at a price rise or a renewal. Ofcom's own framing is that ISPs may react by increasing retail prices for customers taking these services, or by taking other active migration efforts ahead of or at the time of those pricing changes. That second option is the more likely one for most large providers: rather than raise your copper price, they will offer you fibre.

It is also worth being clear that 1 April 2029 is the earliest possible date, not a national switch. An exchange has to have passed the first threshold at least two years earlier, reach 90% ultrafast coverage, and Openreach has to give 12 months' notice. Openreach can issue those notices from 1 April 2028, but the exclusions and any resulting price rises cannot take effect before 1 April 2029.

What protection do I keep?

Direct answer: more than the headlines suggest, and this is the paragraph to remember. If full fibre is not available at your address, the cap on your copper service stays. If it is available and the copper cap comes off, a cap applies to the fibre service instead. On the Openreach network you are never left with no cap at all.

Ofcom puts the first point beyond doubt. Responding to providers who asked it to confirm the position, it says that at premises where Openreach FTTP services are not yet available, the charge control on copper-based services will remain in place even after the second threshold has been met. That is the single most important sentence in the document for a household, and it means the deregulation works address by address rather than area by area. An exchange can pass the threshold while your particular house, still without fibre, keeps its cap.

The second point is Ofcom's own wording in its news release: consumers on the Openreach network always remain protected by a charge control, and where the charge control on copper-based services is disapplied, a charge control applies to FTTP services. The specific safeguard is a cap on the FTTP 80/20 product, which acts as an anchor for the rest of the range. So the protection moves from one product to the other rather than vanishing.

I moved to SOGEA already. Does that protect me?

Direct answer: no, and this is the part of the decision nobody has reported. SOGEA is a copper broadband product and it is in scope. Three providers asked Ofcom to shield SOGEA customers from these price rises, specifically to avoid making people move twice. Ofcom declined.

This matters because of how many people it touches. Over the past two years, households have been moved off the old analogue phone line in their millions, and for a great many of them the destination was SOGEA, a service that keeps the copper line into the house but drops the traditional phone service from it. Our SOGEA explainer covers what it is. People who made that move reasonably believe they have done their bit.

VodafoneThree, UKCTA and PXC all told Ofcom that SOGEA customers should be excluded from the price increases, arguing that SOGEA is a useful transition product and that disruptive repeat migrations should be avoided. VodafoneThree said this was a particular risk for disengaged and vulnerable customers. Ofcom's answer was direct: it recognises SOGEA is an important transition product, but says all SOGEA customers will ultimately need to be migrated to FTTP, and that consumers will ultimately benefit from this migration rather than staying on a transition product for an extended period. It added that risks of consumer disengagement from multiple migrations can be managed by ISPs, and that the 1 April 2029 date gives them over two years' notice.

Strip out the regulatory language and the position is this. If you moved from ADSL to SOGEA for the phone switch-off, the regulator expects you to move again, to fibre, and has declined to protect you from the price pressure designed to make you do it. That is not unreasonable as policy, since a copper line is a copper line whatever service runs over it. It is, though, the opposite of what most people in that position assume, and it is worth knowing now rather than in 2029.

Can anyone force me onto fibre?

Direct answer: no, not during this review period, and Ofcom said so while turning down a request from Openreach. Its view for 2026 to 2031 is that an FTTP installation should require end customer consent.

Openreach had asked for copper regulation to be removed in exchanges where copper customers experience high fault rates and have access to fibre, rather than waiting for the exchange-level thresholds. The commercial logic is obvious: those are the lines that cost most to maintain. Ofcom refused, saying it did not consider it appropriate or necessary to build any additional allowance into the second threshold for this, because it would effectively force customers to take an FTTP connection in certain circumstances.

So the mechanism is price, not compulsion. You cannot be made to accept an engineer or a new box on your wall. What can happen is that the copper option becomes progressively less attractive until moving is the sensible choice. If and when you do decide to move, where the fibre box goes is more negotiable than most people assume.

How many people does this affect, and where?

Direct answer: Ofcom estimates that between 30% and 50% of exchange areas could have passed 90% ultrafast coverage by April 2029, and expects that to keep growing. The precise premises numbers in the statement are redacted as commercially confidential.

The context is a network that has been built at speed. Openreach's fibre reached 23.4 million premises by June 2026, adding 514,000 in that quarter alone, with a target of 25 million by December 2026 and an ambition of up to 30 million by 2030. Ofcom's own coverage data puts full fibre at 82% of UK homes and gigabit-capable services at 89%.

The number that explains the whole policy, though, is take-up. Ofcom records that around 47% of all premises with access to full fibre are now taking it up. So more than half the homes that could already have fibre have not moved to it. That gap, between what has been built and what is being used, is precisely what the price mechanism is designed to close. Our coverage report sets out where the build has and has not reached, and our explainer on altnet economics covers why take-up matters so much to the companies doing the building.

Is my exchange already over the line?

Direct answer: if your exchange was one of the early ones to stop selling copper, almost certainly yes. Ofcom published Openreach's coverage for the first eleven stop-sell tranches as at June 2026. Ten of the eleven already average 90% or more. For those exchanges the coverage test is effectively passed, and the only thing left is the calendar.

This is the part of the statement that turns an abstract rule change into something you can locate on a map. The table below is Ofcom's, reproduced from the decision, and it covers 501 exchanges that stopped selling copper between December 2020 and August 2023. Read the right-hand column against the 90% requirement.

Source: Ofcom, Statement: Approach to the copper retirement second threshold calculation, 9 September 2026, Table 1. These are averages for each tranche, so individual exchanges within a tranche will sit above and below the figure shown.

Two things follow, and the second is the one to hold on to. Ten of the eleven tranches, covering 455 of those 501 exchanges, already average at or above the 90% coverage the new rule requires. So this is not a distant prospect that depends on years more building. For a large number of exchanges the coverage requirement is effectively met today, and what stands between them and the removal of the copper price cap is the 1 April 2029 date, the twelve months' notice Openreach must give, and the requirement that at least two years have passed since stop sell.

The second thing is what the table says about time. Salisbury stopped selling copper in December 2020 and, five and a half years later, is at 97% rather than 100%. That last stretch is genuinely hard, which is the entire reason Ofcom has agreed to the 10% exclusion. If you want to know whether your own exchange has already gone stop-sell, our stop-sell explainer covers how to find out and what it means.

What about people who cannot easily move?

Direct answer: Ofcom acknowledged the risk in terms, and declined to add new protections beyond those already in place. It accepted that many customers still on copper by April 2029 are likely to be vulnerable, and that those who cannot migrate quickly may face higher prices for an extended period.

The responses to the consultation put this squarely. Frontier Economics highlighted that Ofcom's own equality impact assessment recognised that many of the customers remaining on copper in April 2029 were likely to be vulnerable. The Advisory Committee for Northern Ireland pointed to a significant rural and dispersed population, a higher proportion of customers who may be vulnerable through age, disability, lower incomes or reliance on a legacy landline, and greater migration challenges in hard-to-reach areas. PXC and INCA warned the proposals could widen the digital divide. Which? asked Ofcom to require Openreach to certify that no known vulnerable customer is left without access to a viable service before issuing a second threshold notice.

Ofcom said no to the Which? proposal, on the basis that existing measures are sufficient, and pointed to four things: the 1 April 2029 date giving industry time to prepare, the voluntary charters providers have signed with government on protecting vulnerable customers during migration, social tariffs for those who find broadband hard to afford, and, most importantly, the fact that vulnerable consumers who do not have fibre at their premises continue to be protected by the copper cap. If you or someone you help is in that position, the Priority Services Register is worth being on, and our care alarm guide covers the equipment side.

Is this the same as the landline switch-off?

Direct answer: no, and the two will be confused constantly over the next three years. Different subject, different mechanism, different date.

The overlap is the awkward part, and it is where the double migration bites. Moving off the analogue phone service by January 2027 does not move you off copper broadband. For a lot of households the phone switch-off produced a SOGEA line, which is exactly the product this decision puts in scope. Two deadlines, two moves, and only one of them has been explained to the public.

What happens after 2029?

Direct answer: the third threshold, which is the end of copper regulation altogether, and Ofcom has deliberately not set its criteria yet. Its current thinking is that full deregulation of copper services could start to take effect from 2031.

The exclusions mechanism decided this week runs for two years, from 1 April 2029 to the end of the current review period on 31 March 2031. Ofcom will revisit the second threshold in the next market review, which begins work well before 2031, and says it plans to start engaging with stakeholders ahead of consulting so their views can inform its proposals. It has said it remains of the view that the regulatory transition will ultimately conclude with the removal of all regulation on copper-based services, and that the conditions for full deregulation, including for FTTC and SOGEA, will be critical to enabling the timely and safe withdrawal of legacy copper networks.

Read that last phrase carefully, because it is the clearest signal in the document about where this ends. The withdrawal of the copper network is not a question of whether but of when, and the answer for most people will fall in the 2030s.

What should you do now?

Direct answer: nothing urgent, because the date is more than two and a half years away. But there are four things worth knowing about your own line, and they take about ten minutes.

Where does this leave you?

Direct answer: with a date in the diary rather than a bill in the post, and with the protection that matters most still in place. If fibre has not reached you, your cap stays. If it has, you have two and a half years to move on your own terms.

There is a version of this story that reads as a regulator letting a dominant company raise prices on the people least able to move, and the consultation responses show serious organisations making versions of that argument. There is another version in which the alternative, running two national networks in parallel for a decade because a minority will not move off the older one, is a cost everyone ends up paying. Ofcom has landed between them and shown its working over 72 pages.

What is not in dispute is the practical position for a household, which is unusually comfortable: a long lead time, a protection that follows you, and a free choice about when to move. The only genuinely bad outcome is not knowing, and finding out in 2029 that the line you moved to in 2026 was never the destination.

Frequently asked questions

What has Ofcom actually decided about copper broadband prices?

On 9 September 2026 Ofcom decided that from 1 April 2029, Openreach can begin raising the wholesale price of copper broadband in exchange areas where ultrafast broadband reaches 90% of premises, instead of the 100% required today. It does this by letting Openreach exclude a fixed 10% of premises from the coverage test. The change applies only at premises where full fibre is actually available.

Will my broadband bill go up in April 2029?

Not automatically, and not on that date. What changes is that Openreach becomes free to raise the wholesale price it charges your provider for a copper line in qualifying exchange areas. Whether and how much of that reaches your bill is your provider's decision and depends on retail competition. The date is when the cap comes off, not when a price rise arrives.

Is this the same as the landline switch-off?

No, and the two are constantly confused. The landline switch-off is the retirement of the old analogue phone network, which ends on 31 January 2027 and is about how your phone works. This decision is about the price cap on copper broadband, it takes effect from 1 April 2029, and it is about what your provider pays for the line. They are separate processes with separate deadlines.

What happens if full fibre is not available at my address?

The price cap on your copper service stays. Ofcom states that at premises where Openreach FTTP services are not yet available, the charge control on copper-based services will remain in place even after the second threshold has been met. The deregulation applies premises by premises, not exchange by exchange, so you are only exposed if fibre has actually reached your door.

Am I ever left with no price protection at all?

No, not on the Openreach network. Ofcom's decision says consumers on the Openreach network always remain protected by a charge control. Where the cap on copper is lifted, a cap applies to full fibre services instead, and where fibre is not available the copper cap remains. The protection moves from one product to the other rather than disappearing.

I moved to SOGEA for the phone switch-off, so am I protected?

No. SOGEA is a copper broadband product and it is in scope of this decision. VodafoneThree, UKCTA and PXC all asked Ofcom to exclude SOGEA customers from the price rises to avoid what they called disruptive repeat migrations. Ofcom declined, saying all SOGEA customers will ultimately need to be migrated to FTTP and that consumers will ultimately benefit from that rather than staying on a transition product.

Can my provider force me onto fibre?

Not for this review period. Openreach asked Ofcom to allow faster deregulation where copper fault rates are high. Ofcom refused, saying it would effectively force customers to take an FTTP connection in certain circumstances, and confirming that its view for the 2026 to 2031 period is that an FTTP installation should require end customer consent. Higher prices are the lever, not compulsion.

How many people will this affect, and when?

Ofcom estimates that between 30% and 50% of exchange areas could have passed 90% ultrafast coverage by April 2029, and expects that number to keep growing through the rest of the review period. The precise premises figures in the statement are redacted as commercially confidential. Only premises within those exchanges that also have Openreach fibre available would be affected.

Is my exchange already close to the threshold?

Quite possibly, if it stopped selling copper early. Ofcom published Openreach's coverage for the first eleven stop-sell tranches as at June 2026, covering 501 exchanges. Ten of those eleven tranches average 90% coverage or more, and the earliest, Salisbury, is at 97%. So for a large number of exchanges the coverage requirement is effectively already met, and the only thing standing between them and deregulation is the 1 April 2029 date and the notice periods.

What is the second threshold, in plain English?

It is the middle stage of a three-stage plan for retiring copper. At the first threshold, 75% ultrafast coverage, Openreach can stop selling new copper lines in an exchange. At the second, the price cap on copper comes off where fibre is available. At the third, all copper regulation ends, and Ofcom has not yet set the criteria for that, though it expects them to take effect from 2031.

Did Ofcom water anything down after the consultation?

No. It implemented its proposals unchanged: 10% exclusions from 1 April 2029. It rejected Sky's request for a minimum protected period after fibre arrives at a premises, VodafoneThree's request for a gradual price glidepath, the request to exclude SOGEA, and Which?'s request that Openreach certify no vulnerable customer is left without a viable service before a notice is issued.

What should I do now?

Nothing urgent, because the date is more than two years away. Find out which technology you are on, since many people on SOGEA think they have already made the change. Check whether full fibre is available at your address. If it is and your contract is ending, moving to fibre at renewal costs nothing extra and takes you out of this entirely. If fibre is not available, your cap stays and you can wait.

What about vulnerable customers?

Ofcom acknowledged that many customers still on copper by April 2029 are likely to be vulnerable, and that they may face higher prices for an extended period if they cannot migrate quickly. It declined to add new protections, pointing to the 1 April 2029 date giving industry time to prepare, the government charters signed by providers, social tariffs, and the fact that vulnerable consumers without fibre at their premises keep the copper cap.

References

• Bratby, R. (2026, September 9). Copper retirement second threshold and the 2031 gap. Bratby Law. Retrieved 10 September 2026, from https://bratby.law/copper-retirement-second-threshold-2031/
• Jackson, M. (2026, September 9). Ofcom change Openreach's UK full fibre threshold for copper retirement. ISPreview UK. Retrieved 10 September 2026, from https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/09/ofcom-change-openreachs-uk-full-fibre-threshold-for-copper-retirement.html
• Ofcom. (2026, March 17). Consultation: Approach to the copper retirement second threshold calculation, Telecoms Access Review 2026-31. Retrieved 10 September 2026, from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infrastructure/approach-to-the-copper-retirement-second-threshold-calculation-tar-review-2026-31
• Ofcom. (2026, March 17). Statement: Promoting competition and investment in fibre networks, Telecoms Access Review 2026-31. Retrieved 10 September 2026, from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infrastructure/statement-promoting-competition-and-investment-in-fibre-networks-telecoms-access-review-2026-31
• Ofcom. (2026, May 13). Connected Nations update: Spring 2026. Retrieved 10 September 2026, from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/coverage-and-speeds/connected-nations-update-spring-2026
• Ofcom. (2026, September 9). Statement: Approach to the copper retirement second threshold calculation, Telecoms Access Review 2026-31. Retrieved 10 September 2026, from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infrastructure/approach-to-the-copper-retirement-second-threshold-calculation-tar-review-2026-31
• thinkbroadband. (2026, September 9). Copper deregulation rules announced for Openreach by Ofcom. Retrieved 10 September 2026, from https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/copper-deregulation-rules-announced-for-openreach-by-ofcom

Written by Adrian James, Broadband Editor at BroadbandSwitch.uk (LinkedIn). Reviewed by Dr Alex J. Martin-Smith (LinkedIn). Published 10 September 2026, last verified 10 September 2026. Quotations are from Ofcom's statement of 9 September 2026, read in full. Some premises figures in that document are redacted as commercially confidential and are described here as ranges where Ofcom published them. This guide is information, not advice. Whether any wholesale price change reaches a retail bill is a commercial decision for each provider.