Infrastructure & Energy

Three reasons why UK electricity prices are so high

The government has announced it will cut VAT on domestic electricity to zero but Britons still pay more for power than many other European nations.

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July 21, 2026
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Three reasons why UK electricity prices are so high

ByBen Chu, Policy and analysis correspondent and Anthony Reuben, BBC Verify

Published9 minutes ago

While the UK government has announced it will cut VAT on domestic electricity this October from 5% to zero in an attempt to help with the cost of living, British households are still paying more for power than many other European nations.

Comparing UK prices with the EU shows that medium-use households here paid the fourth-highest electricity prices in the second half of last year including taxes and levies, although the government has taken steps to reduce bills since then.

Horizontal bar chart titled “UK electricity among costliest in Europe” showing household electricity prices, in pence per kWh, for medium-sized domestic consumers in selected European countries during July to December 2025. Ireland has the highest price at 35.21p/kWh, followed by Germany (33.7p) and Belgium (30.48p). The UK, highlighted in a lighter blue, ranks fourth at 29.78p/kWh, ahead of Denmark (28.85p) and Austria (28.5p). Prices are lower in Italy (25.84p), Sweden (23.62p), Spain (23.25p), Luxembourg (23.22p), France (22.31p), the Netherlands (22.28p), Portugal (21.2p), Greece (20.72p) and Finland (19.64p), the lowest in the chart. The chart indicates that UK household electricity prices are among the highest in Europe, trailing only Ireland, Germany and Belgium.

Here are three key reasons why British electricity prices are high.

1. The cost of wholesale gas often sets the electricity price

The price energy suppliers pay for electricity is set by a bidding process with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce one unit of electricity.

Once built, the cost of generating power from renewables like wind and solar is relatively low, so these typically come in with the cheapest bid. Nuclear might come next.

Gas generators often have the highest costs because they have to buy fuel to generate electricity as well as paying a “carbon price” – a charge for emissions.

The wholesale cost is set by the last unit of electricity needed to meet demand from consumers.

This means that even if gas only generates 1% of overall electricity at a given time it can often set the overall wholesale price which gets paid to every type of generator.

That raises prices for households – particularly because the wars in Iran and Ukraine have increased the cost of gas.

Northern Ireland operates on a separate system to the rest of the UK, being part of the Single Electricity Market with the Republic of Ireland.

2. Other countries have a different energy mix

Analysts say that one of the reasons why electricity prices are higher in the UK than some other countries is because we generate a relatively high share of our electricity from natural gas.

In 2025 31% of the UK’s electricity was produced from burning natural gas.

This compares with just 3% in France, which generated the majority of its electricity – 69% – from nuclear power.

The US has a higher share of natural gas in its electricity generation mix than the UK – 40% – but American wholesale gas prices are considerably lower thanks to the shale gas production boom of the past 20 years.

3. The UK is building much more electricity grid infrastructure

Higher wholesale gas prices have pushed up UK domestic electricity bills this year.

The wholesale energy costs contribution to a typical household bill in Great Britain rose from £311 in 2024-25 to £320 in 2025-26.

But bills have also been pushed up in recent years by state subsidies to encourage private firms to build wind and solar farms and also national electricity grid network investment costs, which previous governments have added to household electricity bills.

These network costs have been driven by the need to expand and modernise the grid to accommodate new wind and solar farms and transmit their power to homes and businesses.

The network costs contribution to a typical bill rose from £136 in 2019-20 to £250 in 2026, an increase of £113.

“We’ve probably underinvested in the last decade and now we’re trying to catch up so there’s quite a lot of spending,” says Frankie Mayo, an energy analyst from Ember Energy.

The generation subsidies contribution to a typical bill rose from £127 in 2019-20 to £159 in 2026, an increase of £32.

Network costs are projected to increase further by 2030, adding another £48 to a typical bill, according to calculations by energy analyst Ben James.

However the government and some energy groups also argue that reducing our national reliance on volatile international gas prices via the government’s 2030 clean power policy will keep down the UK’s wholesale electricity costs and mean household bills will be lower than they would otherwise have been.

This would be by reducing the amount of time in each year that gas sets the wholesale electricity price.

A great deal though depends on future wholesale gas prices which are impossible to accurately forecast.

Some analysts, including the government’s Climate Change Committee, also say the government should go further to remove policy costs from household electricity bills and meet them through general taxation instead, in order to avoid discouraging people from using electricity rather than gas to heat their homes.

“The way you allocate those costs matters,” says Mayo.

“They may be being put on bills or they may be being paid by consumers in other ways that are less visible, such as taxes.”