A major change has been announced for customers who get broadband from BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, EE, Plusnet, Vodafone, Hyperoptic, Utility Warehouse and Zen Internet. The new rules have come in from April 2026 and mean that payment amounts that are issued to consumers under the Ofcom automatic compensation system have gone up.
Anyone who is hit by outages will be eligible to get cash if their service stops working and is not fixed within two working days. The service must be completely down, but outages caused by factors outside the provider’s control, such as extreme weather, still qualify. If both broadband and landline fail, only one payment is made.
Customers of 10 major UK broadband providers will now receive higher automatic compensation if their service goes down under updated Ofcom rules. Customers now receive £10.34 a day for delayed repairs (up from £8), £32.31 for missed or last-minute cancelled engineer appointments (up from £25) and £6.46 a day for delayed service starts (up from £5). These rates rise annually in line with Consumer Price Index inflation.
The scheme covers BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, EE, Plusnet, Vodafone, Hyperoptic, Utility Warehouse and Zen Internet. Smaller providers may not be included.
Customers of smaller broadband companies such as Community Fibre, Giffgaff and Gigaclear are not included in the scheme.
However, it is always worth checking the full criteria on your provider’s website and reaching out to customer support for more information if you’re unsure. In most cases, all people need to do is report the loss of service to your provider straight away – they have systems in place that trigger the automatic compensation payments.
For each of the main issues, customers should receive compensation within 30 days if the issue isn’t resolved within the specified timeframe. If you still haven’t received the compensation after this time they can escalate the complaint to Ofcom for free.
The compensation should be paid as a credit on your bill, unless stated otherwise by the provider.
In 2024 Ofcom’s automatic compensation scheme paid out a total of over £63m to customers when things went wrong with their broadband and/or landline (down from £67m in 2023), which reflects an overall total of approximately 1 million individual payments (down from 1.2 million in 2023).
The largest proportion of automatic compensation paid in both 2023 and 2024 was for delays to the start of new services (£41.6m in 2024 and £38.8m in 2023). The overall number of missed appointments and delayed provision incidents have reduced considerably year-on-year (both by 13.2%).