What Is the Average Business Energy Price per kWh?

If you’ve ever tried to answer the simple question “are we paying too much for energy?”, you’ll know the frustrating truth: there’s no single price of business energy. The rate on your contract depends on how much you use, when you signed, your meter type, your location and the wholesale market at the time. So how do you know whether your price is good, bad or average?

The best benchmark available is the official government data. Every quarter, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero publishes the average prices paid by non-domestic consumers, broken down by the size of the business. In this guide, we’ll show you the latest figures and explain how to use them.

The Latest Business Energy Prices per kWh

The tables below show the most recent official average prices paid by UK businesses for electricity and gas, by business size. They update automatically each quarter when the government publishes new data, so the figures you’re looking at are always the latest available. These are fully delivered prices, meaning standing charges and other non-VAT costs are included in the per-unit figure, which is one reason they read higher than the headline unit rate on a quote, especially for smaller businesses.

Electricity Prices by Business Size

Gas Prices by Business Size

Trending Business Energy Prices per kWh

A single quarter tells you where prices are; the charts below show where they’ve been. They plot the average price paid by businesses for each fuel, every quarter since 2004. The shape of recent years is hard to miss: prices climbed steeply through 2022, peaked in 2023 and have eased since, but they remain well above where they sat before the energy crisis, at roughly double their pre-2021 levels. That context matters when you weigh up a quote, because what counts as a good deal depends on where the market has come from as much as where it is today.

Average Electricity Price Trend

Average Gas Price Trend

Averages hide as much as they show, though. Break the same data down by business size and a consistent pattern appears: smaller businesses pay substantially more per unit than larger ones, and the gap between the smallest and largest bands has persisted through every market condition since 2004.

Why Do Smaller Businesses Pay More per kWh?

Electricity Price Trend by Business Size

Gas Price Trend by Business Size

The pattern isn’t a conspiracy against small firms; it reflects how energy is supplied.

Volume and Negotiating Power

Large consumers buy enough energy to negotiate bespoke contracts, and suppliers compete hard for them. The largest users often buy close to wholesale prices, with the supplier’s costs and margin spread across an enormous volume. A small office, by contrast, is offered standard tariffs where fixed costs make up a bigger share of every unit.

Fixed Costs Spread Over Fewer Units

Every supply point carries similar overheads for the supplier: metering, billing, customer service and the costs of managing the account. Spread over millions of kilowatt hours those overheads barely register; spread over a small business’s usage, they add measurably to every unit.

Risk and Consumption Shape

Suppliers price in risk. Small business consumption is less predictable per site, and unpredictability costs money to manage. Larger consumers with steady, forecastable usage, especially those on half hourly metering, are cheaper to serve per unit.

Understanding the Size Bands

The government’s size bands are based on annual consumption, shown in the tables above in megawatt hours (MWh); one MWh is 1,000 kWh. Most SMEs sit in the Very Small or Small bands: as a rough guide, a small office uses somewhere in the low tens of MWh a year, while the biggest bands describe factories and campuses with their own energy managers.

Knowing your own annual consumption, which you’ll find on your bill or your energy bill breakdown, tells you which band’s average to compare your rate against. Comparing your unit rate to the wrong band is the most common way businesses misjudge whether their deal is competitive.

What’s Included in These Prices, and What Isn’t

The figures are average prices actually paid, including standing charges expressed per unit, and are shown both including and excluding the Climate Change Levy (CCL), a tax on business energy use that most firms pay unless they qualify for an exemption or reduced rate. The tables above show prices including CCL, which is closer to what appears on most bills.

They exclude VAT, which most businesses can reclaim, and they’re averages across all contract types: businesses on well-timed fixed deals sit below the average, while those on out-of-contract or deemed rates sit well above it.

That last point is worth dwelling on. The averages include everyone who never switched, never renegotiated, and rolled quietly onto default rates. Beating the average is not an achievement; it’s the starting point.

How to Use These Figures

• Find your unit rates and annual consumption on a recent bill.

• Identify your size band from the consumption ranges in the tables.

• Compare your rate to the average for your band and fuel.

• If you’re paying above the average for your band, you are very likely overpaying, and it’s time to compare business energy quotes.

• If you’re below the average, well done, but check when your contract ends, because out-of-contract rates will erase that advantage quickly.

Remember that the averages lag the market by a few months, since they report what businesses actually paid last quarter. When wholesale prices are moving quickly, the quotes you receive today can sit noticeably above or below the published averages; our guide to wholesale energy explains that relationship.

Should You Fix Your Price?

A fixed contract locks your unit rate for its term, which protects you from rises but means you won’t benefit from falls. Whether that trade is right for you depends on your appetite for budget certainty versus market risk; we weigh it up properly in our guide on whether to fix your business energy prices.

Whatever you decide, the worst position is the default one. Businesses that let contracts lapse onto out-of-contract rates pay the highest prices in the market, and the averages above include plenty of them.

Final Thoughts

Average prices won’t tell you what your business should pay, but they tell you something more useful: whether your current deal deserves a closer look. Check the tables above against your latest bill, and if your rate is above the average for your size band, treat that as the market telling you to act. Switching business energy supplier is quicker than most businesses expect, and the saving repeats every unit, every month, for the life of the new deal.

If you want to understand what sits behind the rates you’re quoted, our guides to understanding business electricity prices and understanding business gas prices break down tariffs, contracts and the market in detail.