pricing-regulation


When a broadband complaint stalls, a free independent adjudicator can settle it. How to escalate to the Communications Ombudsman or CISAS, the six-week rule, and what the decision is worth.

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The broadband dies on a Tuesday morning, ten minutes before the household's first video call of the day. The fault gets reported and an engineer gets promised. The engineer then spends the four-hour appointment window being somewhere else entirely. Most households assume the apology is the compensation. It is not. Since 2019 the UK has had a scheme that pays out in actual pounds, automatically, without a claim form in sight, and most of the country has never heard of it.
Here is the short version. Under Ofcom's automatic compensation scheme, signed-up providers pay £10.34 a day when a total loss of service is not fixed within two full working days of being reported, £32.31 for a missed engineer appointment and £6.46 a day when a new service starts late. Payment is automatic, normally as a bill credit, within 30 days.
The scheme covers three specific failures and nothing else. Not slow speeds, not a connection that wobbles every evening, not wifi that refuses to climb the stairs. Three failures, three fixed rates.

What went wrong | When it pays | Rate from 1 April 2026 |
|---|---|---|
Total loss of service | Still not fixed two full working days after you report it | £10.34 per day until it is fixed |
Missed engineer appointment | No-show or cancelled with less than 24 hours' notice | £32.31 per appointment |
Delayed start of a new service | Your promised activation date comes and goes | £6.46 per day, including the missed start date |
The rates rise every 1 April in line with inflation, and the figures above apply to problems arising from 1 April 2026. If you have seen lower numbers floating around (£8.06 a day did the rounds for years), those are old rates. The difference is not academic. A fortnight offline at £10.34 a day is over £140, which is considerably more than the goodwill gesture you might otherwise have talked the call centre into.
The only thing you have to do is report the fault. The clock starts at the report, not at the moment the connection died, so a household that suffers in silence for a week is quietly donating money to its provider. Report it straight away, even if a quick outage check suggests half the postcode is down with you.
From there it is mechanical. The provider gets two full working days to put things right. Report a dead connection on Monday and, if it is still dead at the end of Wednesday, the first £10.34 is due. Every further full day adds another £10.34, and those are calendar days, so the weekend counts even though the engineers mostly do not.
Delayed starts work the same way, except there is no grace period. Miss the promised activation date and the £6.46 a day starts counting immediately, missed day included, until the service finally goes live. Ten days of delay is £64.60, and you do not have to lift a finger to get it.
Mind you, there is a catch, and the catch is the word "voluntary". Providers choose to join the scheme, and only members have to pay. The current list runs: BT, EE, Hyperoptic, Plusnet, Sky (including NOW Broadband), TalkTalk, Utility Warehouse, Virgin Media, Vodafone and Zen Internet. TalkTalk applies some restrictions for customers not on the Openreach network, so check the detail if that is you.
Between them, the members cover the overwhelming majority of UK homes. But plenty of smaller providers, including a fair few of the newer full-fibre networks, have never signed up. If yours is not on the list, the scheme simply does not apply, and compensation becomes something you negotiate rather than something you are owed. Ofcom keeps the membership list on its website, with the date each provider joined. That is worth checking before you sign a contract, not after the third missed appointment.
One scope note. The scheme covers residential fixed broadband and landline services. If you run your connection through a business contract, you are outside it, and your remedies live in whatever service agreement you signed.

This is the genuinely good bit. For a missed appointment or a delayed start you do not have to do anything at all. No claim form, no phone call, no 40 minutes of hold music. The provider must pay automatically, as a credit on your bill unless you agree otherwise, no later than 30 calendar days after the missed appointment or after the problem is resolved. For a loss of service, the only action required is the original fault report. It is a rare corner of this industry where doing nothing is the correct strategy.
That 30-day deadline is your checkpoint. Look at the next bill, then the one after. If the credit has not appeared, the provider is in breach of its own code, and you can say so in writing.
The exclusions are the ones you would write yourself if you ran the scheme. There is no payout if the fault was caused by your own equipment or your own actions, if you are in breach of contract or if you delayed things yourself by turning down the first appointment offered. If your landline and broadband fail together you get one payment, not two. And once a fault has dragged past 30 days the provider can serve notice and cap the payments, so the meter does not run forever.
The bigger gap is slow broadband. A connection limping along at a fraction of the speed you were sold pays nothing here, because the service has not technically been lost. That battle runs through your minimum guaranteed speed instead, and a line that drops out constantly rather than dying outright is usually a troubleshooting job before it is a compensation one.
Chase it. Put a complaint in writing, name the scheme, list the dates and do the arithmetic for them. Ofcom's position is blunt: customers should not be charged for a service they are not receiving, and a provider that joined the scheme has promised to pay without being asked.
If the complaint stalls for six weeks, or the provider sends you a deadlock letter sooner, you can take the whole file to the ombudsman. It costs you nothing, and if you accept the decision it binds the provider, which is why so many of these cases settle the week the file arrives.
Automatic compensation is one piece of a wider set of pricing and regulation rules that mostly tilt the table back towards you. In practice the delayed-start payment earns its keep most often when a move between providers misfires, and there is a separate playbook for a switch that has gone wrong, along with a calmer account of what switch day should actually look like.
A total loss of service that is not fixed within two full working days of being reported, an engineer appointment that is missed or cancelled with less than 24 hours' notice and a new service that starts later than the promised date. The rates from 1 April 2026 are £10.34 per day, £32.31 per appointment and £6.46 per day respectively.
For missed appointments and delayed starts the provider must pay you without being asked. For a total loss of service you report the fault, and payments begin if it is not fixed within two full working days. The money arrives as a credit on your bill, unless you agree otherwise, within 30 calendar days.
No. Ofcom designed the scheme, but the money comes from your provider as a credit on your bill. Ofcom does not handle individual claims or complaints either, so if a payment never lands, the route is a written complaint to the provider and then the ombudsman.
Not under this scheme, which only pays out when the service is lost entirely. If your speed falls below the minimum your provider guaranteed at sign-up, the provider gets 30 days to fix it, and if it cannot you can leave penalty-free, bundled services included.
Yes. The scheme covers residential fixed broadband and landline services. If both fail at the same time you receive one payment rather than two, but a missed engineer appointment counts whichever service the engineer was coming out for.
The pounds-and-pence rule for contracts from 17 January 2025, what it changed, what it left alone, and when a mid-contract price rise lets you walk away without a fee.