How to switch when your contract is up

Your contract end date lives in your online account, in the provider's app or on a recent bill. Find it before you do anything else. While you're in there, note two more things: what you pay each month and the speed you're paying for. You'll want all three shortly.

If the end date has passed, you're free. You can leave today, with no fee and no notice. You're also almost certainly paying the out-of-contract rate, which is the polite industry term for the price they charge people who haven't been watching. Every month you stay on it is a small donation to a company that did nothing to earn it.

There's a third possibility, which is that you have no idea when your contract ends because the email announcing it looked like every other email the provider sends. The app knows. Two minutes on webchat will also get it, and while you're there it costs nothing to ask what they'd charge you to leave today. If you're out of contract, the answer is nothing.

You don't have to wait for the end date before acting either. Sign up a little ahead and ask for a switch date that lands once the minimum term has finished. Done right, you skip the early termination charge and the overpriced limbo months in one move.

If you're still inside the minimum term, switching is still possible, it just comes with maths attached. The exit fee calculation, a worked example and the legal get-outs are all in switching while you're still in contract.

Until September 2024, switching broadband meant ringing your old provider to give notice, sitting through the retention team's four-act performance about how valued you were, then timing the cancellation against the new activation date so you weren't paying two bills at once or sitting in the dark between them. Plenty of households looked at all that and decided the loyalty penalty was cheaper than the afternoon.

One Touch Switch ended that on 12 September 2024. Ofcom's rules made the process gaining-provider-led, which is regulator language for "the company winning your custom does all the work". You contact the new provider. They notify the old one through an industry system. More than 300 providers are signed up, and the process works regardless of which network either side uses, so it covers moves to and from Virgin Media and the full-fibre altnets as well as the familiar Openreach-to-Openreach hop.

Three protections come bundled in. Your old provider can't bill notice-period charges beyond the switch date, so no more paying for a service after you've left it. Providers must compensate you if the switch goes wrong or you're left without service for more than one working day. And before anything is final, your old provider has to send you the relevant facts about leaving, automatically and in writing. More on that pack in step three, because it's the most useful document in the whole process.

The fastest way to buy the wrong broadband is to buy the same speed again without asking whether it was ever the right one. Run a speed test on a normal evening, ideally while the household is doing whatever it does to the connection at 8pm. If you're paying for 500 Mbps and the household never strains 70, that's money. If the Monday video call keeps freezing on a package that looked fine on paper, that's the opposite problem and a case for going up a tier.

Then put your current price next to the market. A quick check of what you're paying against what new customers pay usually settles whether the switch is worth the half hour. Out-of-contract pricing has a way of making that comparison brief.

What you need ready before signing up is almost insultingly little: your address, the name of your current provider and a payment method. No account numbers, no router serial numbers, no letter of resignation.

Compare deals on the total cost of the contract, not the headline monthly price. A £26.00 a month deal with a £30.00 setup fee works out at £654.00 over 24 months; a £27.00 deal with nothing upfront is £648.00. The "cheaper" deal is £6.00 dearer, and the industry is counting on nobody doing that sum.

Check the price-rise terms while you're there. Since 17 January 2025, providers can't sign you up to a contract with rises linked to inflation or written as percentages. Any mid-contract increase must be set out in pounds and pence, with the date it lands, before you sign. The pounds-and-pence rule is one of the quieter wins of recent regulation, so use it: two deals with the same starting price can finish their contracts a fair distance apart.

Watch for switching offers as well. Providers periodically dangle bill credits, gift cards or a contribution towards your old provider's exit fee. Treat them as tiebreakers, not reasons. A £50.00 gift card stapled to a dear contract is still a dear contract.

Think about contract length too. A 24-month term usually buys a lower price, and also 24 months of whatever you've chosen. If your street is halfway through a full-fibre build, a 12-month term keeps your options open for the faster line.

Finally, mind the network. If the new provider uses the same Openreach line as the old one, the switch is usually the gentle kind: often no engineer and no new wiring. Moving to or from Virgin Media, or onto an altnet like CityFibre or Hyperoptic, still runs through One Touch Switch, but there may be an installation visit at the new end. The same-network versus cross-network differences are worth five minutes if you're crossing over.

This is the step people still get wrong out of habit, so to be clear: you do not call your old provider. Not to give notice, not to warn them, not out of politeness. Under One Touch Switch they find out through the system, and any notice period they'd usually demand can't bill past the switch date anyway.

You sign up with the new provider online or by phone and tell them who currently supplies you. Their system matches your address to your existing service. Then the useful bit happens: your current provider automatically sends you switching information. It must set out any early termination charge you'd face and what the switch means for other services on the account, such as a landline or a TV package riding on the same bill. If you have a bundle, read that section twice. TV elements can behave differently from the broadband, and this pack is your official notice of exactly what happens to each one.

Read the pack, then confirm the switch with the new provider. That confirmation is the only trigger. If the pack surprises you (an exit fee you didn't expect, a TV contract with eight months left on it) you can simply not confirm, and nothing happens. Nobody gets switched by accident under this system, which is rather the point of it.

The process works the same by phone as online, so nothing about One Touch Switch requires you to be a website person. The sequence is identical: details, switching information, your confirmation.

One forecast: your old provider may ring shortly afterwards, suddenly full of remorse and discounts. Take the call or don't, but note that the good price existed all along and only surfaced once you'd packed.

You agree the activation date with the new provider when you sign up. Where it's technically possible the switch can happen in as little as one day, though in practice most people pick a date a week or two out, which gives the new router time to arrive in the post and everyone's diaries time to align.

Keep the old router plugged in until the day. Your old service should run until the new one starts, and any break in service shouldn't exceed one working day. On the day itself the old connection drops, the new one comes up and your job is to plug in the new router and consign the old one to the drawer of cables you have been meaning to sort out since 2019. The hour-by-hour version, including what to keep handy and the realistic failure points, is in what happens on switch day.

One piece of housekeeping people forget: an email address that ends in your old provider's name. Policies differ. Some providers close the mailbox when you leave, others keep it running for a fee, so check yours before switch day and move anything important to an address you own. The bank's password reset email does not care whose fault it was.

If you have a landline with your broadband, it moves as part of the same switch. Mobile is a separate process with its own texted code, and standalone pay-TV sits outside One Touch Switch entirely.

The switch itself is free. There's no switching fee, no admin charge and no notice-period billing past the switch date. The costs that can appear all sit at the edges:

• Setup or activation fees on the new deal. Many deals charge nothing upfront, some charge a one-off fee and it's always in the deal summary if you look.
• An early termination charge, but only if you jump before the minimum term ends. Out of contract, this is £0.00.
• The old router. Some providers want their kit back and charge for kit that never arrives. Check your old provider's returns rules, send it how they ask and keep the proof of postage.

Your final bill from the old provider should stop at the switch date, with anything you've paid for days beyond it refunded. "Should" is doing some work in that sentence. The post-switch bill is the most common place for this tidy process to turn untidy, so check it against refunds, credits and final-bill shocks before filing it away.

There are two, and the time to read them is now, while nothing is wrong.

First, cooling-off. Sign up online or over the phone and you get a 14-day cancellation window under the Consumer Contracts Regulations, counted from the day after you enter the contract. Change your mind in that window and you can cancel. If you asked for the service to start during the 14 days, you pay a proportionate amount for what you used and nothing more.

Second, compensation. If the new service starts late, providers signed up to Ofcom's automatic compensation scheme owe you £6.46 for each day of delay, including the missed start date itself. A total loss of service that isn't fixed within two full working days of being reported pays £10.34 a day until it is. A missed or short-notice-cancelled engineer appointment pays £32.31. These land as bill credits without forms or phone queues; delayed starts and missed appointments need no action from you at all, and a loss of service just needs reporting when it happens. The full scheme, who's signed up and the exclusions are in automatic compensation, and the playbook for a switch that has actually gone sideways, complaint wording included, is in if your switch went wrong.

That's the whole process: check your date, pick well, sign up once and let the system do the lifting. There's more detail on every stage in the switching hub, and if your real question is whether you can leave at all, the full menu of penalty-free exits is in when you can leave without a fee.