Automatic compensation: when you're owed

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.

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.