October 2026 price cap: what actually changes on your bill

Ofgem announced the 1 October to 31 December 2026 price cap on 26 August 2026: £1,723 a year for a typical dual-fuel household paying by Direct Debit, up £60 on the £1,663 that has applied since 1 July. That is £5 a month, and it is the number every headline will run.

It is also not your bill, and it is not a cap on your bill. Both of those are worth taking apart before deciding the announcement means you should do something.

What Ofgem actually capped

The cap sets a maximum unit rate (the price per kWh of gas or electricity you use) and a maximum standing charge (the fixed daily fee you pay before using anything at all). It does not cap the total. Use twice the energy and you pay roughly twice as much, capped rates or not.

The £1,723 figure is what those capped rates come to for one specific household: Ofgem's Typical Domestic Consumption Values, currently 2,500 kWh of electricity and 9,500 kWh of gas a year. Ofgem last revised those bands on 1 July 2026. If your usage is not 2,500 and 9,500, the headline is not about you, and nobody's is exactly.

The second thing the headline hides is that there is no single cap. Ofgem sets one per region, fourteen of them, and they are not close together.

The rise is not uniform either: it ranges from £52.63 in North Scotland to £63.69 in London.

Same tariff, same usage, £132.66 apart: East Midlands at £1,672.04 against Merseyside and North Wales at £1,804.70. Nothing you can do about it either, because the difference is network costs, not supplier margin.

The whole of the rise is gas

Split the £60 by fuel and it stops looking like a general increase. Across the fourteen regions the electricity half of a typical bill falls slightly, between £10.55 less and £1.96 more, averaging £3.31 less a year. The gas half rises between £61.24 and £66.06, averaging £63.22, which is about 8%.

The reason is that the government has taken VAT off electricity bills for this cap period and the next, 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027, worth roughly £45 a year. That cancels out an electricity rise that would otherwise have shown up here. Gas keeps its 5% VAT and takes the increase undiluted.

So if you heat with electricity this announcement is close to nothing, and if you heat with gas it is more than the headline says. Two caveats. Every figure on this page is the single-rate meter cap, and Ofgem puts electricity-mainly households including Economy 7 at around a 1% rise rather than a fall. And the VAT holiday has an end date, so the electricity side of it reverses on 1 April 2027 unless it is extended.

So should you switch supplier because the cap changed?

On its own, no, and the arithmetic is the reason.

Every large supplier prices its standard variable tariff at the cap, because the cap is the maximum and the market has been competing on almost nothing else since 2022. I checked all fourteen of E.ON Next's regional Next Flex rates against Ofgem's published levels on 14 August 2026 and every unit rate and standing charge landed on the cap, none of them more than 0.0013p away. British Gas, EDF and ScottishPower sit in the same place. Moving between two of them moves your bill by pounds a year, not hundreds.

What does move it, in rough order of size:

• Your usage. A 10% cut in consumption is worth more than any supplier switch on a variable tariff, at any cap level.
• Your tariff type, not your supplier. I locked an Octopus fixed tariff in September 2021, weeks before wholesale prices exploded, and that one decision was worth several hundred pounds over the four years that followed. Fixed deals, trackers and time-of-use tariffs all sit outside the cap.
• Your payment method. The cap is higher for standard credit (paying on receipt of a bill) and different again for prepayment. Every figure on this page is Direct Debit.

Switching supplier is at the bottom of that list. It is worth doing when you are moving to a different kind of tariff, or when there is money attached to the move itself.

Does switching to Octopus change any of this?

Not yet, and there is no October figure to give you. Octopus has not repriced: its published Flexible Octopus rates valid from 1 October are still this quarter’s, so anyone quoting an October Octopus saving today is quoting a guess. What can be said is the gap as it stands on the 1 July to 30 September cap, which is that a typical dual-fuel household pays between £12 and £13 a year less on Flexible Octopus than at their regional cap rates. Whether that survives the reset is not knowable until Octopus publishes.

Where Octopus differs from suppliers that sit exactly on the cap is the standing charge, not the unit rate. Its unit rates are at the cap to a fraction of a penny. Its daily standing charges are below it, which is why the gap exists at all and why it is a modest gap rather than a dramatic one.

The part of a switch that does not depend on the cap at all is the referral credit: £50 for you and £50 for the person whose link you use, applied after your first Direct Debit payment, on any tariff. Octopus has paid £50 each side since at least 2019, through caps rising and falling. It is worth four times the £12.38 a year that separated Octopus from E.ON Next on this quarter's cap, which is the size of gap a supplier switch on a variable tariff actually buys you. That is the honest case for switching in cap week: not that Octopus is transformed by an Ofgem announcement, but that if you are going to move anyway, the move itself is worth a fixed £50.

The switch takes 2 to 3 weeks with no interruption to supply, and the credit follows your first Direct Debit rather than the switch completing, so the two dates sit a few weeks apart. There is no limit on how many people you refer. Full scheme terms are on the Octopus Energy referral code page.

What I am doing about it

Nothing, and that is the answer for most people.

I have been an Octopus customer without a break since September 2019. My gas is still with Octopus; my electricity moved to EDF in July 2026 when the Octopus fixed tariff on that fuel expired and EDF's offer beat what was available to me at the time. Both of those are decisions about tariffs, taken when a tariff ended, not decisions taken in a cap week.

One consequence of that split worth knowing if you are weighing Octopus on its extras rather than its rates: Octoplus, the free loyalty scheme, needs electricity supplied by Octopus on a smart meter sending half-hourly readings. Gas-only accounts are out, which is where mine landed. Saving Sessions and free-electricity hours went with it. The referral credit did not, because that is not tied to which fuels you take.

Where these numbers came from

• Ofgem's 26 August 2026 announcement (opens in new tab), its regional unit rates and standing charges (opens in new tab), and its cap levels for charge restriction period 17a (opens in new tab). Direct Debit, single-rate meters, as billed: 5% VAT on gas and 0% on electricity for this period. Ofgem's period document publishes annual totals excluding VAT, and the two reconcile to within rounding across all fourteen regions.
• Annual costs are usage times unit rate, plus 365 days of standing charge, per fuel, on Ofgem's typical consumption values. Same basis Ofgem uses, so the totals reconcile with its published figures to within rounding.
• Octopus Flexible rates come from Octopus's public tariff API. The savings calculator refetches them daily and will show you your own region and usage against this quarter's cap.
• The E.ON Next comparison is from Octopus Energy vs E.ON Next, checked 14 August 2026.
• Referral terms: Octopus Energy referral code, last tested 17 August 2026.