Electricity, p/kWh (paid)Gas, p/kWh (context — not in the bill)
Energy · Policy · Living standards
The £3,549
Bill
This analysis covers January 2018 to December 2025. On October 1st 2021, the electricity price cap was reset for the first time in two years of calm. The unit rate began to climb — and within eighteen months it had almost tripled. This is what that did to a National Living Wage pay packet.
Sebastian Szopa · 2018–2025 · 5 min read
At a
glance.
Two prices, two realities. The unit rate that jumped, the cap that followed it — and what a minimum-wage earner kept at the end of the month.
0
Electricity unit rate at the theoretical peak · Jan 2023 · p/kWh
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Unit rate at the October 2021 reset — the anchor of this analysis
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Hours of NLW work to pay one month of electricity · EPG peak
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Share of take-home pay absorbed by electricity at the peak · %
The reset, and the
four years after.
Monthly electricity unit rate (p/kWh) under the Ofgem cap. Toggle before/after the October 2021 reset — the calm, then the climb, then the plateau.
The signal
Before the reset the basket cost £47. After it, £75. At the peak — £91.
£0
Peak monthly electricity bill at the typical basket (EPG period)
A stable cap,
a heavy lift.
Two years after the reset the panic was over — the cap settled into a ~±10% band. But the plateau sat well above the old floor: the same basket of electricity cost about a third more than before. Wages rose too — yet the bill rose faster, so it claimed a bigger slice of take-home.
Electricity bill (left)NLW take-home (right)
Scene 01
· The shock.
Scene 01 · The shockOct 2021 — Jan 2023
The cap was
never meant
to jump.
It was designed to police a lazy market. Instead, from October 2021 it became a delivery mechanism — wholesale gas, priced by geopolitics, moved the electricity rate because British power is priced at the gas margin.
20.8p → 67.5p theoretical · 3.2× in 15 months
The human cost
Nine hours
for the light.
9.29
At the peak, a worker on the National Living Wage had to work more than nine hours for every month of electricity. Before the reset, it was under six. The price of power is paid in time off your own life — worth roughly five hundred and twenty pounds a year at the peak, and still around two hundred and ninety at the end of 2025.
Before resetAfter resetEnd 2025Peak
Three signals
to take home.
What four years of electricity data actually tells us.
1 · The anchor
It wasn't the market — it was the mechanism.
The October 2021 reset was a policy switch, not a price discovery. The cap stopped capping and started transmitting.
2 · The echo
The real culprit was design, not war.
Gas never stayed cheap — it just left the bill. But Britain prices all electricity at the cost of gas, so a gas shock becomes a universal bill. That rule was written in the nineties, when the market was privatised and liberalised — one government started it, the next completed it, both parties supported it. And the cap, built to protect, delivered it.
3 · The weight
Wages outran the shock, the plateau didn't.
The NLW rose fast enough to keep the share near 4%. But an extra £28/month on the fixed basket is still an extra 3.3 hours of work — for exactly the same electricity.
Sources and
method.
Every number here is monthly or period-level data, averaged, dated and sourced. Where an estimate or a standard threshold was used, the method below says so.
Data sources
Ofgem default tariff price cap levels2019–2025
Energy Price Guarantee rates (Oct 2022–Jun 2023)gov.uk · CBP-9491
House of Commons Library, Domestic energy pricesJun 2025
Low Pay Commission / GOV.UK, National Living Wage2016–2026
DESNZ quarterly energy prices (pre-cap, 2018)estimate
Ofgem TDCV — typical electricity use2,700 kWh/yr
Method note
How to read this?
Electricity unit rates are the Ofgem cap levels, resolved to each month; the EPG period (Oct 2022–Jun 2023) uses the rate households actually paid (34.0p/kWh). The Jan 2023 theoretical peak (67.5p/kWh, £4,279) is flagged, not used in the wallet maths.
- Basket fixed at 2,700 kWh/yr — only the price moves.
- Take-home: NLW (21+) × 37.5 h/wk, Income Tax 20% + NI 8% above £12,570, rules held flat for comparability.
- Gas excluded from the bill (geopolitical spike, not a liberalisation effect); shown in the chart for context only.
- Younger NMW bands excluded — that segment typically lives at home; we model a single householder.
- No inflation deflation applied; figures are nominal.
More from
the library.
One series, one method — each analysis turns a policy decision into a number that lands in someone's wallet.
