How much should broadband cost?

Price tracks the kind of line far more than the brand on the bill, so it helps to think in tiers rather than logos. These are typical new-customer monthly prices across the UK market.

A basic part-copper connection, the old "fibre" running at 30 to 80 Mbps over fibre to the cabinet and copper to your door, costs about £24.00 to £35.00 a month. It is being phased out, but it is still widely sold.

Full fibre in the 150 to 500 Mbps range, the sweet spot for the large majority of homes, sits around £25.00 to £40.00 a month, with the newer networks starting lower. A 150 Mbps full-fibre line from an altnet can be had from about £22.00.

Gigabit and multi-gigabit lines, 1,000 Mbps and beyond, run roughly £40.00 to £60.00, though altnet gigabit can land near £25.00 where it is available. For most homes this tier is more than they will ever use.

The legacy ADSL copper packages still sold at around 10 Mbps for £20.00 or so are the one tier to avoid, because full fibre is usually available for the same money or less and is a different class of connection.

Set against all that, the average UK bill of about £35.00 a month tells you something important: a lot of people are paying full-fibre money. The question is whether they are getting full-fibre speed and service for it, or simply an old line that crept up in price.

The right price is not the average; it is the cheapest line that comfortably covers what your home actually does. Buy for your usage, not for the brochure.

A single person or a couple who stream, browse and take the odd video call are well served by a 100 Mbps full-fibre line, which should cost in the region of £22.00 to £28.00 a month. Paying £40.00 for 500 Mbps here is money lit on fire.

A typical family with several devices, a few 4K screens and someone working from home wants more headroom, and a 100 to 300 Mbps line at roughly £25.00 to £35.00 covers it with room to spare. This is where most households genuinely sit.

A busy, device-heavy home where several people move large files or game and stream at once is the rare case that can justify 500 Mbps or gigabit, at £35.00 to £55.00, because it is one of the few homes that actually loads the line.

The full per-activity maths is in what speed you actually need, but the short version is that most homes need far less speed, and should pay far less, than they have been sold.

A neat test for whether a deal is fair is cost per megabit: divide the monthly price by the speed. A £30.00 deal for 500 Mbps works out at about 6p per Mbps; a £30.00 deal for 60 Mbps is 50p per Mbps, more than eight times worse value for the same money. It is a rough measure, because a faster line you cannot use is not better value in any way that matters, but it is a quick way to flag a deal that is poor on the numbers.

The figure that exposes overpaying most clearly, though, is not cost per Mbps in the abstract; it is the gap between what you pay and the cheapest line at your address that does the same job, and working that gap out takes about thirty seconds: your current price against the cheapest deal at your address that is at least as fast, with the difference shown in pounds and pence.

The single biggest reason people overpay is not choosing the wrong tier; it is staying past their contract. Almost every deal is discounted for 12, 18 or 24 months and then rolls onto the provider's standard rate, and that standard rate is where the worst value lives.

The figures are blunt. Around 40% of UK broadband customers, roughly 8.7 million homes, are out of contract right now, and in 2024 they were paying about a quarter more on average than people on a current deal for the same line, rising to over a third more on standalone broadband. Someone whose £28.00 deal has rolled to £45.00 is handing over £204.00 a year for a line that has not changed in any way.

The fix is the easiest in broadband. Check your contract end date in your provider's app or order confirmation; if it has passed, you owe no exit fee and can switch freely. Since One Touch Switch went live in September 2024 you contact only the new provider, your old line cancels itself and a like-for-like move can happen in a single day with no gap in service.