social-tariffs
Compare at your address
Drop in your postcode for the live shortlist, speeds, prices, and which providers actually reach your line.
Virgin Media sells the same wire two ways. Pay full price and it is a broadband bill that climbs every April like clockwork. Qualify for a social tariff and the exact same cable under the exact same pavement costs £12.50 a month and stays there. The wire does not know which one you are on. Only the billing system does.
That £12.50 plan is Essential Broadband, and it is one of the cheapest fixed connections you can legally buy in the UK. There is a faster sibling, Essential Plus, at £20. This page covers both, what each speed actually does in a real house, who qualifies, and the part Virgin keeps in the small print.
Virgin's social tariff comes in two flavours.
Essential Broadband is £12.50 a month for an average 15 Mbps. That is the headline cheap one, and the speed is exactly what it looks like. Fifteen megabits is fine for one person checking email, doing a Universal Credit journal, watching standard-definition catch-up and making the odd video call. Put two or three people on it on a wet Sunday, with someone streaming while someone else is on a Teams call, and it starts to feel like rush hour on a single-lane road. It works. It does not race.
Essential Broadband Plus is £20 a month for an average 54 Mbps. That is more than three times the speed for an extra £7.50, and for a household with more than one human in it, that £7.50 is the best-value decision on this page. Fifty-four megabits handles HD streaming on two screens, a video call, and a teenager downloading something enormous, all at once, without the whole house grinding.
Both run on Virgin's cable network, which is its own kit of physical cable rather than the Openreach phone-line setup most providers rent. In coverage areas it is fast and steady. The honest test is simple. If one person uses the connection, Essential at £12.50 is enough. If the household shares it, find the £7.50 for Plus.
Both tiers are a 30-day rolling contract. No 12-month tie-in, no 18-month tie-in, no exit fee. You can leave next month and Virgin cannot charge you for the privilege. That is rare and it is genuinely good, because most broadband contracts treat the exit door like a tollbooth.
Setup is free if you fit the QuickStart kit yourself, which is most people, a box arrives and you plug it in. If you want an engineer to come and do it, that is £30. Usage is unlimited on both tiers, so no data caps and no overage charges. And because these are social tariffs, neither carries a mid-contract price rise. The £12.50 stays £12.50. While the rest of Virgin's customer base opens a letter every spring titled something soothing like "an update to your service," then watches the bill go up, you do not.
The headline number leaves something out. Essential Broadband is broadband and nothing else. If you are an existing Virgin customer with a phone line or a TV package bundled in, moving onto Essential means those go. The social tariffs are not sold as bundles, so the landline and the telly box are not coming with you. For a lot of people that is fine, the phone line was never used and the TV was Freeview through the same box anyway. But if you rely on the home phone, or you actually watch the Virgin channels, work out what replacing them costs before you switch, because the £12.50 is only a saving if you are not quietly buying those things back somewhere else.
Essential Plus gives you a partial way out. You can add Virgin's Flex TV on top if you want some channels, paid separately. It is not free, and it is not the old bundle, but it exists. Essential at £12.50 does not have that option. So the real choice is not just slow-and-cheap versus fast-and-less-cheap, it is also broadband-only versus broadband-with-the-door-open-to-TV.
At £12.50, Essential is at the cheap end of a market that runs from about £10 to £24 a month. Only a handful of tariffs are cheaper or level, so £12.50 buys you a real connection rather than a token gesture. The thing to weigh is not the price, it is the speed behind it. Essential's 15 Mbps is the slowest of the cheap options, so the £12.50 looks better on a price table than it feels in a busy living room.
The cable network is the genuine difference. Most social tariffs ride Openreach copper or fibre, the same wires under the same multi-year rollout that has kept half the country waiting. Virgin runs its own cable, which in a covered street is quick and consistent, and on Essential Plus the 54 Mbps is a fuller-fibre kind of speed at a copper-tier price. The trade is coverage. Openreach reaches almost everywhere eventually. Virgin reaches where Virgin reaches, and not an inch further. So the comparison that matters is not Virgin against the field on paper, it is whether Virgin's cable is even at your door, then which of the two tiers fits your house. If the cable is there and more than one person uses the line, Essential Plus at £20 is one of the better-value social tariffs going.
You can apply for either tier if you receive one of these:
The person getting the benefit has to be the main name on the account. That is an Ofcom rule across every provider, not a Virgin quirk.
One thing worth saying plainly, because a lot of people search for it. Virgin does not accept PIP for its social tariff. Personal Independence Payment is not on the list above, and Virgin's own eligibility page does not include it. If PIP is your qualifying benefit, you are not stuck, you are just at the wrong provider. Vodafone and Hyperoptic both take PIP, and our guide to the social tariffs that accept PIP walks through both. JSA and ESA only count here in their income-based forms, which is the kind of distinction that pays the same money on the same day and then decides whether you get a cheaper bill.
You apply on Virgin Media's social-tariff page. Virgin checks your eligibility against Department for Work and Pensions records, so you share details like your name, date of birth and postcode for that check to run. The whole thing happens in the background, and approval typically lands inside about ten days. Eligibility is re-checked roughly every 12 months, so if your circumstances change you may be asked to confirm you still qualify.
The thing that decides whether you can have it at all is not the paperwork. It is the cable. Virgin's social tariffs are only available where Virgin's own network reaches your address, and that is patchy, it is brilliant in some streets and absent two roads over. Before you do anything else, check whether the cable gets to you. You can also test the speed on an existing Virgin line to see what you are really getting.
You may have read that Ofcom lets you switch to a social tariff mid-contract, fee-free, even from a different provider. That is half right, and the half that is wrong matters. If Virgin is already your provider, you can move onto Essential at any time, free, with no exit fee, Ofcom guarantees that. If you are tied into a contract with a different provider, Ofcom says that provider might let you leave without a penalty, not that they must. So check your current exit fee before you assume the move is free. Switching when you are still in contract is a specific situation worth understanding first.
Virgin Media Essential Broadband is a strong social tariff with one honest weakness and one honest catch. The weakness is that the £12.50 Essential tier is genuinely slow, 15 Mbps is a one-person speed, and a sharing household will feel it. The catch is that moving onto Essential means losing any Virgin phone or TV you currently bundle. If you live alone or use the internet lightly, £12.50 is hard to beat. If the house shares the line, pay the extra £7.50 for Essential Plus and its 54 Mbps, which is the genuinely usable one. Either way, it is 30-day rolling with no exit fee, so you are never trapped, and it never rises mid-contract.
If Virgin's cable does not reach you, or PIP is your benefit, this is not your tariff, and that is fine. The point of a social tariff is that there is more than one, and the right one is the one your address and your benefit both qualify for. We rank these on what they cost at your address, not on who pays us. Here is how we rank, and here is how to check whether you are overpaying right now.
Refused a broadband social tariff? The common reasons, the fix for each, a copy-paste complaint template, and the free appeal route if it comes to that.
