BT, EE and Plusnet to Raise UK Mid Contract Price Hikes up to £4 UPDATE
BT (inc. Plusnet and EE) is expected to reveal a change to their existing mid-contract pricing policy, which means that new customers who sign-up for a broadband package on or after 31st July 2025 (5th August with Plusnet) will be subject to a +£4 price rise on 31st March 2026 and then +£4 again on 31st March 2027 (up from the previous £3 increase). Mobile plans will also increase, by different amounts.
Just to recap. At the start of 2025 Ofcom began requiring telecoms providers to adopt a new approach to mid-contract price hikes, which did away with the old percentage and inflation-based model – replacing it with one that must now set out such price rises “clearly and up-front, in pounds and pence, when a customer signs up” (here). This made annual price hikes clearer and more transparent, but not necessarily cheaper.
In response, many providers did as BT has since done by setting out a new pricing policy that would increase the price that customers pay by £3 extra per month from March or April each year (this will vary a bit for other providers). The first one hit this year and BT (including Plusnet and EE) had been on course to apply the same level again from 31st March 2026 and onwards.
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However, ISPreview understands that BT and its associated ISPs are due to replace the +£3 policy with a larger rise of +£4, although this will only apply to new customers who sign-up on or after 31st July 2025 (we assume this will also include re-contracting customers after this date too). We’re currently attempting to get a comment from the operator, although the change is likely occurring to help balance the provider’s risk now that inflation has remained higher for longer than expected.
The above comment reflects the fact that Ofcom’s new approach naturally increases the risk for providers that previously adopted the CPI/RPI + 3-4% model for annual hikes, especially those that offer longer contract terms. The provider now has to balance that greater risk through their pricing (i.e. static pricing is harder to set over a longer period of time than one set against a dynamic level of inflation, which may go up or down).
A BT Consumer spokesperson told ISPreview:
“We are very supportive of Ofcom’s requirement to show upfront pounds and pence charges. EE was the first provider to introduce this pricing model, offering EE customers a predictable long-term view of their contract terms. Our pricing approach is designed to be clear for our customers.
We continue to invest in our business, building on 11 years as the best network to better serve our customers with a reliable and quality connection as we roll out the fastest speed technology to 30m homes by the end of the decade. We’re focused on providing value and customer satisfaction, making new technologies available to our customers such as 5G standalone and WiFi 7.”
Historically, when BT leads on pricing policy changes, others tend to follow. Put another way, BT’s decision to tweak their mid-contract rises upwards by an extra £1 per year is likely to be followed by other providers over the next few months.
UPDATE 6:57pm
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We’ve added a comment from BT above, and the provider has also confirmed the price increases for their other products.
- Customers taking services from 31st July 2025, will increase on 31st March each year by the following amounts:
- Mobile
- Flex Pay airtime plan +£2.50
- Sim only +£2.50
- Bundled handset and airtime plans +£4
- Mobile broadband dongles – £1.50
- Connected devices including Laptops, Tablets, Smart Watches +£1.50 per month
- Broadband (including hubs that use a 4G/5G sim) +£4 per month
- Out of bundle services will also increase by 5% on 31st March each year
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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If OfCOM had actually had consumer protection really front and centre of their thought process when they thought about regulating price increases they should have forced the industry to give fixed prices for contracts up to 24 months.
That most ISPs have settled on a typical £3 increase in April and that now seems to be increasing to £4 is hardly competitive. It also disproportionately impacts customers who contract later in the Financial Year.
Anyone with BT/Plusnet/EE when they can have an ALTNET instead is fuelling this greed.
If you have a good ALTNET, send a message to BT and switch when you can to a better deal, maybe with no in-contract price increases.
It’s as I said before, get rid of Plus.net (they’ve started through “simplification of products and offering”, and either BT or EE – less choice for people to switch to new customer offers and you can just have, say, BT. TalkTalk on its way out so another value provider going. Sky won’t care as CityFibre grows as that is where they see better returns from due to lower cost wholesale.
It would work in the ISPs favour to average out the pricing. They would get more up-front and when combined together earn appreciably more interest.
Of course that then makes them look uncompetitive compared with other ISPs, so I don’t see it happening. Which works slightly in the consumers favour.
Many altnets are following this trend as well now.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily make broadband more expensive overall. It just means a lower headline price to catch your eye when you sign up. A few months later you’ll be paying £4 more, and another year later you’ll be paying £8 more.
Your eyes will now be watering, so you’ll be desperate to sign up for a new contract as soon as your current contract ends. Which is exactly what they want.
If you don’t like this – vote with your feet, and choose a quality ISP which doesn’t mug its customers in this way. Those are generally more expensive overall though.
All that’s required to fix this is for ISPs to publish:
– the total price over the contract
and/or
– the average monthly cost over the contract
Utter failure of Ofcom.
It’s just a matter of time until each mid contract price rise is a huge percentage of the advertised headline price.
Another failure by ofcom to properly regulate the market.
How is this good for customers? Scummy.
The whole price increase thing was bull to begin with, man ISP’s have proven it is not needed, they don’t use the extra to reinvest either, just goes straight to the shareholders
If they keep increasing at this rate it’s going to become the fastest rising bill, and a luxury item.
Part of BT’s masterplan to dumb down any requirement for investment in faster speeds and symmetric as majority will only get the most lowest tier due to expense.
It’s how this company operates in my opinion and we have a regulator Ofcom who is as good as a chocolate fire guard.
Remember it was BT that were first with “inflatio + 3.9%” originally.
VM will be next with £4.50 a year increase. Two dinosaur companies that need the heave-ho.
Fossils from OFCOM usless as usually. Was it BT/OR recently reporting -170k broadband lines? There is more to come, then in next 5 years most likely altnets will start dropping the price.
This is amazing news. BT is so wonderful and the service is better than anything else on the planet and customers would just love the small increase for the broadband they worship. /sarcasm
I bet BT Ivor and a few others are rubbing their hands in glee at average revenue per user going up and potentially increasing their shares if customers too lazy to switch.
Makes it easier for the ALTNETS to raise their baseline a bit to help with costs, and still be cheaper.
I’m sure we are all enlightened by your wisdom.
I think you meant probable £4.50 VM increase a month, not a year
@Big Dave,
Second time in a few days you’ve said you’ve been enlightened by me, but might be a bit egotistic when you say “all of us”. I’m so glad and here to help with any addiction problems to BT 🙂
You know it makes sense!
As I’m sure we’re all enlightened by your wisdom even if you say the same thing multiple times to every post involving BT or Openreach.
ditto.
The fixed sum rise effects the entry level products more in percentage terms than the higher products. Thankyou Ofcom.
Ofcom should ensure pricing is not discriminatory to those on entry level products. There are many not on benefits which are finding broadband costs are too high.
I know what BT (and those that follow) are doing, increasing their revenue and overtime the base price of broadband continues to rise.
Looks like despite FTTP, mobile broadband has a new lease of life.
OFCOM needs to overhauled completely, they are not doing anything to support the consumers at all. They seem to be in the pockets of UK ISPs
Ofcom need to go! Useless!
Even with the £3 mid contract price you would be better off with the old 3.9% + CPI rate of inflation, as it stands now. The new £4 is just being greedy. More people destined to ditch BT, EE and Plusnet, i would think.
*price rise.
Now come on Fibre Scriber, you’ll put the BT fan boys on here into therapy 🙂
In their eyes BT is a beholder of beauty, a magical infusion of the soul and technology leaders….There cannot be any deviation for an affair with an ALTNET, no matter how attractive they are. They can only worship their master.
Hold on FANNY, now you’re becoming almost poetic regarding your dislike of anything BT. 🙂
It’s not anything against BT as such; I don’t have any torrid history with them. It’s just they sweated FTTC/Copper for so long and told us FTTC was fast enough which at the time any fool knew it wasn’t as the tech varied so much and adding subscribers just caused cross talk which slowed everything down further, and then there were ECI cabs vs Huawei. ECI being notorious with issues.
Their pick of GPON asymmetric whilst most ALTNETS are XGS-PON or better, and symmetric – again stale technology which will take them years to change as nothing is quick in BT. The ONLY reason they are trying to deploy FTTP is competition and realisation of exchange closure savings and retirement of PSTN which has become a liability in security/integrity terms too. Without that, everything would be even slower pace when BT want to do it over decades.
IF BT had picked symmetric and at least GPON, they would have redeemed themselves. Instead, they have gone for a marketing slicing of the cake, with a tiered tariff approach at some eventual upload increase. This means expensive, basically to try and differentiate tiers. Most of the competition have not taken this approach and offering symmetric right now, what you get down is what you get up.
‘It’s not anything against BT as such; I don’t have any torrid history with them.’
Just trolling then. 7 comments on this article, 4 handing out insults to others. Noted.
Ah, the classic labelling of people rears its head. Famously used by politicians to shut down any perceived negative debate on a subject they wish to control.
FANNY_VERIFY: The UK is a democratic country, although there are signs this is failing.
They all need a bar steward pasporto
I don’t understand this new system I preferred the Apr CPI whatever it was as it used to be £1.90 increases or £2 something now it’s £3 or £4 how can they get away with it
I mean, you don’t have to use them. There’s spuso, Lebara… options are out there, and this will likely make them more tempting.
This makes the OFCOM ruling even more of a complete farce
They should have forced providers to have one price for the duration of the contract.
It’s a complete joke that they were allowed to do the inflation based rises to start with, let alone the now more expensive fixed price increases.
Before OFCOM stepped in to fix this my increase would have been £2.13 but now it is going to be £4 What is the point of them?
Glad to be off openreach and on a cityfibre line get customer service with idnet as well as a fixed price symertical speeds all at 37 pounds a month can’t complain
Ofcom rename to Ofcon.
Makes me glad I dropped Plusnet. Mid-contract prices rises should really be stopped, Ofcom should have some guts and do something about it. Not surprised that BT have done what they have done. It is BT after all, I suppose they got to make the money back they are losing somehow.
The problem is, how long will it take before people say, enough is enough?
Another example of a regulator making things worse for everyone.
I’d say “well meaning” but I’m not sure they are.
Stating the obvious I suppose, but how soon forgotten (by OFCOM) was the principle that a contract works both ways, they fix the price at the start and you commit to the set period in return for that fix.
So glad I left BT & EE after they raised prices by 14.4% a couple of years ago. I’m now paying less for each service on 24 month contracts with no price increases. I definitely will not be going back to the dinosaurs.
Mark – I tried raising this with my local MP in London who contacted the relevant minister. Despite several attempts at trying to clarify the issue, and how Ofcom’s decision was disadvantaging consumers, all I got back was some standard reply which needless to say didn’t seem to understand or address the issue. It needs someone with your clout to say that Ofcom have been taken for fools.
Ivor and pals seem strangely reluctant to comment on this news XD
Plusnet’s 12 month contracts seem to have disappeared as well now. They perhaps didnt give enough opportunity to raise prices mid-contract, so they had to go?
Yep, very strange
When i was looking at dropping Plusnet couple of years ago, just over, they would not even offer me an 18 month contract, wanted to push me to Fibre, while I was happy with FTTC at the time.
They kept pushing 24 month fibre for a pretty steep price compared to what I was paying before, plus the increases.
It was only when I phoned them to cancel that they offered an 18-month contract, for FTTC at a okay price, by that time it was too late, I already had Zzoomm installed.
I hate 24-month contracts, I think 18 is too long. They say they need 24 months to give the lowest prices and then stick the prices up mid-contract.
I have a monthly rolling sim only contract for my mobile phone, a shame I can’t for that with broadband, at a decent price.
My energy company has given me a fixed price for 12 months and I can pull out when I want, no charges. So why can’t that happen with broadband?
As for Plusnet, I was with them for 9 years and they were okay, the couple of problems I had they sorted out or tried to, Openreach seemed to have no idea what the problem was.
I think the main reason I stayed was because they gave me good prices, I was only going to stay for the contract and then find something else, maybe also it was laziness.
I noticed BTIvor have not posted here, strange that .
I dont think this side effect of the new regulation was not considered by Ofgem, they cant be that stupid, instead they were likely lobbied like crazy and decided to come out with this mess sothey could “appear” to be doing something whilst keeping these companies on side.
Regarding a statement from our BT Shareholder “BT Ivor” – he is very busy running spreadsheets to work out average revenue per milked customer so he can work out returns on his shares 🙂
I must admit, we are all missing his supporting statement….
Think you all need to think of the effect of price increase with regard to streaming when Freeview is finally shut down. The BBC licence fee will look positively cheap compared to streaming costs.
Reminds me of a joke. Ofcom and Ofwat.
To be fair £4 pounds isn’t a high amount due to the energy cost running these large centres and minimum wage gone up including national insurance atleast they are providing us a brilliant service happy to pay the extra stop moaning.
Well said, to many tight arses on here…
Go with cheap and cheerful and have a shoddy service.
Nice to hear about zzoomm again.
Gets a bit tiring, Zzoomm this and Zzoomm that, from one particular individual particularly! Never ends! Same old, same old.
I am surprised the government hasn’t done something either, these increases are inflationary as they are well above the current inflation figure!
They should also make these increases happen on the anniversaries of you signing up. You can end up signing up in March and facing an increase in April
Having been employed by one of BT saviour’s aka Michael Boustridge in the services division, I know what they’re like in making bad decisions with top level management.
He left BT after losing around £675,000,000 in July 2011, then joined our company CIBER as CEO with over 8,000 employees that year, within two years he sent the entire company to the wall.
This is how BT price increases work, to pay for all the bad decisions in employing poor management without checking their history, get it back from consumers by increasing their prices.