Customers that are using BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, EE, Plusnet, Vodafone, Hyperoptic, Utility Warehouse along with Zen Internet were notified about a major change. The amount of payment provided to the subscribers under the Ofcom automatic compensation program have gone up as a result of the new rules, which officialy implemented in April of 2026.
If a service outage occurs and is not resolved within two working days, those affected will be eligible for compensation. Outages which are caused by circumstances beyond the control of provider, which includes bad weather, are still considered permissible even if the service must be completely offline. Only one payment is issued if both landlines and broadband are unsuccessful.
According to amended Ofcom regulations, customers of ten major UK broadband providers will now receive higher automatic compensation if their service goes down. Subscribers will be able to get £6.46 each day for delayed repairs (up from £5), £32.31 for missed or last-minute cancelled engineer appointments (up from £25), as well as £10.34 each day for late repairs (up from £8). On a yearly basis, these rates will go up in terms of proportion to inflation in the Consumer Price Index.
BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, EE, Plusnet, Vodafone, Hyperoptic, Utility Warehouse, as well as Zen Internet are all covered by said the program. However, it might not include smaller suppliers. The program excludes customers of smaller broadband providers including Gigaclear, Giffgaff, and Community Fibre.
Despite this, it is always recommended to look over all the details on the website of your provider and consult customer service if you have any questions. Most of the time, people only have to inform your provider of the loss of service promptly because they have mechanisms in place that cause the compensation payments to be made automatically.
If the issue fails to be fixed in the specified time frame, customers should be refunded within 30 days for each of the major issues . After the given time frame, they can escalate your complaint to Ofcom for free if you still have not received the compensation. Unless the provider specifies otherwise, the compensation should appear as a credit on your statement.
When something went wrong with a landline of the customer or broadband, automatic compensation mechanism of the Ofcom paid out about £63 million in 2024 (down from £67 million in 2023). This indicates a collective total of about 1 million individual payouts per year(down from 1.2 million in 2023).
Delays in the launch of new services accounted for the biggest amount of automatic compensation given in 2023 and 2024 (£41.6 million in 2024 and £38.8 million in 2023). Overall, there have been 13.2% fewer missed appointments and delayed provision events per year.
