EDF referral code

EDF publishes the mechanism plainly, and it is worth reading before you read any saving figure: "The Simply Tracker tariff is priced in line with the most recent price cap. The price cap is reviewed and updated by Ofgem every three months, in January, April, July and October. We've reduced the standing charge by applying a daily discount of 6.85p (inc VAT) for both electricity and gas. Over a year, that's £25 off the electricity standing charge and £25 off the gas standing charge. A total of £50. The discounted standing charge is the same in all regions and will be applied no matter how much energy you use." (EDF, tracker tariffs (opens in new tab))

My own electricity standing charge is 42.84p a day against the 49.70p Ofgem sets for Region H (Southern) this quarter, a gap of 6.86p, which is EDF's published 6.85p discount plus a hundredth of a penny of rounding. My unit rate is 26.42p, the Region H cap rate to the penny.

Two consequences follow, and both are on this page because they are the ones a quote will not tell you. The saving is worth the same to every customer, because it is per day rather than per kWh. And it cannot beat a tariff priced below the cap unit rate, because it is not competing on the unit rate at all.

The tariff carries a £25 exit fee per fuel, needs a smart meter to be installed if you are on a traditional prepayment meter, and reprices on the same quarterly cycle as the cap. My term runs to September 2027.

Same tariff, three baselines, three different answers:

Only one of those answers is yours, and the one nobody in this corner of the market writes down is that a comparison quotes you against the price cap, not against the fix you are already on. Quoted against the cap, EDF looks like a saving. Quoted against the Octopus Fixed I was actually paying, it is £70.13 a year worse, and I switched anyway because that Fixed was expiring in September 2026 and would have rolled onto a variable rate.

The £70.13 figure is a snapshot of one cap period, not a permanent gap. It moves every time Ofgem reprices, next on 1 October 2026. The £12.97 against Octopus Flexible and the £25.04 against the cap move the same way.

Worth saying out loud, because it is awkward for a page recommending a supplier: £50 of referral credit is worth about four years of the £13 gap against Octopus Flexible, and about eight and a half months of the £70 gap against the Fixed. At these margins the referral is worth more than the supplier choice. That is an argument for taking a referral wherever you switch, not an argument for switching to EDF.

You can run this for your own home. Take the daily standing-charge gap in pence, multiply by 365, and divide by the unit-rate gap in pence per kWh:

365 × standing-charge gap ÷ unit-rate gap = the usage in kWh a year below which the low standing charge wins.

Against the cap the unit-rate gap is zero, so there is nothing for usage to scale against. Against the Octopus 12-month Fixed I left, the standing-charge gap is 0.82p and the unit-rate gap is 3.49p; a UK home burns through the resulting 86 kWh in roughly a fortnight.

Generalise it and you get the durable version of this page's finding, which survives the next cap change and the one after: a tracker priced at the cap unit rate can never beat a fix priced below the cap unit rate. The standing-charge discount is a fixed number of pounds a year. A lower unit rate scales with everything you use. Past a trivially small usage, the second one wins.

One misconception to clear up, because it is the one most readers arrive with. Lower usage does not earn you a bigger saving here. EDF's discount is £25 a year per fuel whether you use 500 kWh or 5,000. What lower usage changes is the share: £25 off a £400 bill is 6%, £25 off a £900 bill is under 3%. The saving is flat; only its proportion moves. Against Octopus Flexible the same holds for a different reason, since the two unit rates match to three decimal places, so the gap is £13.03 a year at 500 kWh and £12.96 at 2,500. Cutting usage does not widen it.

What EDF states on its refer-a-friend page (opens in new tab):

• The credit lands automatically on the EDF account, and it "typically takes around four weeks from when your friend joins"
• Only residential properties can be referred, and the friend must not already be an EDF customer
• It cannot be combined with another new-customer promotion
• If either account closes before the credit is applied, the referral is cancelled
• EDF states no limit on how many people you can refer

The switch itself was the least eventful part. EDF asked for a postcode and bank details, quoted me, and handled the rest with Octopus; I gave no meter reading and did not contact my old supplier. Supply moved in about two weeks with no interruption, and I paid no exit fee because the Fixed term on that fuel was inside its final period. My gas stayed with Octopus throughout, still on Fixed, which is what makes this a split-fuel setup rather than a switch away.

The reward has since paid on both sides. I joined through a friend's link rather than my own, and about a month after my first direct debit went out, £50 in bill credit reached my account and £50 reached theirs. That is the advertised figure on roughly the advertised timetable, and it is the only scheme on this site where I have watched both halves of a referral land.

EDF has since boosted both halves. For switches started between 14 September and 6 October 2026, the joiner gets £75 and the referrer £100, with no membership condition in front of either. That is worth saying plainly, because for four days it was not clear: EDF announced the boost by email and on X on 10 September while its public refer-a-friend page still advertised £50 to each side, and the email read as though the boost belonged to Flextras, the loyalty scheme EDF had launched three days earlier. This page said so. The public page has since caught up and states the boost with no Flextras condition, EDF's refer-a-friend terms name neither an amount nor the scheme, and EDF's own Flextras page describes its referral benefit as the standing £50 each way. So the condition came from the email, not from EDF, and it is gone from this page. Note the asymmetry that remains: it is the first offer on this site where both halves pay cash and the referrer's is the larger.

Flextras is free, and EDF asks only that you are 18 or over, live in England, Scotland or Wales, are a current domestic gas or electricity customer, have an email address on your EDF account and have the EDF app. Business customers are excluded. Joining took me about a minute inside the app, and there is no web route, so every benefit below is redeemed on a phone.

Three things arrive with membership, and they are worth very different amounts.

The 12-month tastecard is the one that lands immediately and unconditionally. Signing up asked for my name and my email address, took no payment method, and does not auto-renew when the 12 months end, which is the pair of traps that usually makes a free membership worthless. It is the full tastecard product: 2 for 1 or 25% off at thousands of restaurants, 25% off at 350 or more cinemas, 25% off barista-made drinks, and 2 for 1 or 50% off delivery at Domino's, Papa Johns and Pizza Hut. EDF attaches no value to it. tastecard's own cheapest advertised membership is £3.99 a month, so 12 months of it is £47.88.

Four free electricity hours arrive as a welcome gift and expire 12 months after they land. Mine become usable on 1 October 2026.

Weekend Saver is a separate opt-in and the largest number EDF publishes: up to 25 free electricity hours a month, redeemed in slots between 12am and 3pm at weekends. It needs a compatible smart meter sending half-hourly readings and a tariff that is not time-of-use (Power Perks covers those instead). Mine starts on 5 October 2026.

The arithmetic is the part the headline hides. My electricity is 2,095 kWh a year at 26.42p per kWh, which is 0.239 kWh in an average hour, so an average hour of my electricity costs 6.3p. Twenty-five of them is £1.58 a month, or £18.96 a year, and that is a ceiling twice over: it assumes you qualify every month, and it assumes your free hours are average hours, when the redeemable slots sit in the quietest stretch of the week.

Qualifying is its own bar. EDF's condition is that you "use less than 9% of your weekday electricity between 4 to 7pm". That window is three hours out of 24, or 15 hours out of 120 across Monday to Friday, so a household using electricity perfectly evenly would put 12.5% of its weekday usage there and would fail the test. Passing means sitting more than a quarter below flat in the hours most homes cook and light the house. That makes Weekend Saver a demand-shifting programme with a reward attached rather than a perk for being a customer.

Set against the referral, the scale settles the question of what Flextras is for: £75 in one switch is roughly four years of Weekend Saver at my usage. The membership is worth having because it is free and the tastecard alone covers it, not because it unlocks anything on the referral. My full write-up, including the comparison against the Octoplus this replaced for me, is in is EDF Flextras worth joining?