How to Switch to Octopus Energy

To switch to Octopus Energy you sign up online, and Octopus does the rest. It tells your current supplier, agrees a switch date, and takes over your supply. Your gas and electricity never go off, the pipes and wires stay the same, your meter stays on the wall and nobody needs to come round.

Octopus's help pages say it usually switches you within 3 days of signing up. Ofgem's rules say suppliers must complete a switch within 5 working days, and you have 14 days to change your mind without paying anything.

The two things worth five minutes of your time before you start: check whether your current tariff is a fix with an exit fee, and make sure you begin from a referral link if you want the £50 credit. We should be upfront that this site is paid the same way: when someone joins through our link, we get £50 too. Our how we make money page explains it, and nothing on this page changes depending on whether you use our link.

Ofgem's own switching checklist asks for the same basics: your postcode, your current supplier, your tariff name, what you pay per kWh and how much energy you use in a year. You don't need all of it to sign up, because Octopus can estimate usage from the size of your home, but the closer your usage figure is to reality, the closer your Direct Debit will be to what you actually spend.

The quickest place to find everything is your current supplier's app or online account, or your most recent annual statement. Annual usage is usually labelled “estimated annual consumption” or similar. If you have a smart meter, your in-home display or app shows it too.

If you're on your supplier's standard variable tariff, the one governed by the price cap, there's no exit fee and you can leave whenever you like. If you're on a fixed tariff, look up its end date and its exit fee. Citizens Advice explains the rule: once you have 49 days or less left on a fixed contract, you can switch without paying an exit fee. With 50 days or more left, a fee may apply, typically per fuel, so a dual-fuel customer can pay it twice.

Some suppliers are more generous than the rule. Our leaving guides cover the details for the biggest ones: British Gas, OVO (which waives its fee in the last 53 days), EDF and Scottish Power.

If you're a few weeks outside the fee-free window, you don't have to wait to sign up. You can sign up now and ask Octopus to start the switch on a later date that falls inside it. If you're well outside, do the sum rather than ruling it out: an exit fee of £50 per fuel can still be worth paying if your new deal saves more than that over the months left on the old one. With the January price cap forecast to rise sharply, that sum has changed for a lot of households this autumn.

Octopus runs a refer-a-friend scheme: when a new customer joins from an existing customer's referral link, both get £50 of account credit. There is no code to type. The referral rides on the link itself, which is the single most common source of confusion, because people look for a code box during sign-up, don't find one and assume something has gone wrong.

Three things decide whether the credit attaches:

• Start from the link and finish in the same browser. If you click a referral link, wander off to octopus.energy and start again, the referral is lost.
• Don't go through a comparison site. Switches made through price comparison websites don't carry a referral.
• It's for new customers. Existing Octopus customers can't claim the joining credit, though they get their own link to share.

The credit lands on your Octopus account after the switch completes and your first Direct Debit has been taken. It reduces your bills rather than arriving as cash. The Octopus referral code guide covers timings and what to do if it doesn't appear, and how it works shows each stage.

That's the part you do. Octopus then contacts your old supplier, agrees the switch date and sets up your account. You don't have to ring anyone, sign anything on paper or book an appointment.

One tip for after you sign up: download the Octopus app or log in online, and check the Direct Debit amount. If it looks high or low for your home, change it. Octopus says it reviews your payment for the first time 90 days after you join, but you don't have to wait for that.

Switching used to take three weeks. It doesn't any more. Ofgem now requires suppliers to switch you within 5 working days, and Octopus's help pages say it usually manages it within 3 days of you signing up. The industry's own monitoring backs that up: under the Energy Switch Guarantee, Octopus completed 99.9% of switches within 5 working days between January and March 2026.

There's one exception. Citizens Advice notes that if you ask for the switch to happen after your cooling-off period, it can take longer, up to 21 days after you agree the contract. That's normal, and it's what you'd choose if you were waiting for your old fix to reach its fee-free window.

For the opening meter reading, Octopus says it emails you around the switch and gives you until five days after the switch date to send one. If you miss it, Octopus agrees an estimate with your old supplier. A smart meter that's sending readings handles this automatically, but take a dated photo of each meter on switch day anyway. If the two suppliers ever disagree, a photo settles it in minutes.

Your old supplier closes your account using the opening reading Octopus passes on. Citizens Advice sets out the deadlines: the old supplier must send your final bill within 6 weeks, and refund any credit within 10 working days of that final bill. If you pay by Direct Debit, there's a good chance you're in credit after the summer, and that money is yours.

Don't cancel the old Direct Debit straight away. Octopus can't cancel it for you, and you don't want to until the final bill arrives. Most suppliers refund credit to the bank account the Direct Debit comes from, and if you owe a little, they collect it from the same place. Once the final bill shows you're square or refunded, cancel it with your bank or through the old supplier's app.

If you get the Warm Home Discount, switching now doesn't lose it. Whichever supplier provided your electricity on the scheme's qualifying date, 23 August 2026, owes this winter's £150. Our Warm Home Discount guide explains how it's paid.

Flexible Octopus is Octopus's standard variable tariff. Its unit rates match the price cap and its standing charges sit slightly below it, which is why it comes out a few pounds under October's £1,723 cap. It has no exit fee, so you can move to a fix or a smart tariff whenever you like. The catch is that it moves with the cap, and the cap is forecast to rise to around £2,180 in January (forecasts range from £1,999 to £2,185).

The 12M and 18M fixes cost more than the cap today but less than January's forecast. The 12M fix is about £225 a year above October's cap but around £230 below the January forecast; the 18M fix is about £290 below it. Whether that's worth it depends on what happens to prices after March, which nobody knows. Our fix or variable guide does the arithmetic properly, and the January 2027 price cap guide tracks the forecasts.

If you have an EV, a heat pump, storage heaters or solar panels, there's probably a smart tariff that beats both: see Intelligent Octopus Go, Cosy Octopus or Snug Octopus. Some of these, including Snug, ask you to be an Octopus customer first, so the usual route is to switch onto Flexible Octopus first and change tariff from your account afterwards. You get the £50 either way.

Smart meters

Your smart meter stays on the wall. SMETS2 meters, the kind fitted in recent years, connect to the national smart meter network and work with any supplier. First-generation SMETS1 meters used to go “dumb” on a switch, but the Data Communications Company says the vast majority have now been moved onto its network. If yours does stop sending readings, it still measures your usage correctly; you just send readings yourself until it's fixed. Our smart meters guide has more.

Prepayment meters

You can switch on a prepayment meter. Citizens Advice notes that you'll need a prepayment tariff, or you can ask to have a smart meter switched to credit mode if you don't owe money. Octopus offers Smart Pay As You Go for smart prepay meters. Our prepayment meters guide covers it in full.

Switching with debt

Ofgem's rules depend on how old the debt is. If you've owed money for less than 28 days, you can switch and it's added to your final bill. If it's more than 28 days old, your supplier can stop the switch until you repay it. On a prepayment meter, you can switch if you owe up to £500; the debt can move to your new supplier if it agrees to take it on, so ask before you sign up.

Economy 7

If you have an Economy 7 meter, Flexible Octopus is available with separate day and night rates. On 28 October 2026 Octopus's published averages were about 32.7p/kWh by day and 14.2p/kWh at night. Pick the Economy 7 option during sign-up so you're billed on both registers. Our Economy 7 guide explains when it pays, and if you heat with storage heaters, Snug Octopus is designed for you.

Moving home

Moving into a new place isn't a switch in the usual sense: you're taking over a supply, not leaving a contract. Octopus has a separate move-in process, and you can choose to join Octopus at your new address straight away. Our moving home guide walks through it, and renters should check our renters guide: Ofgem says that if you pay the bills, you can usually switch.

Switching is one of the most regulated things in the energy market, and the rules work in your favour. Ofgem says you're owed £40 in automatic compensation if a switch isn't completed within 5 working days (unless you asked for a later date), and the same again if you're switched without your permission or a supplier is slow to fix a switching mistake.

Octopus is also a member of the Energy Switch Guarantee, a voluntary industry promise run through Energy UK. Members commit to completing switches within 5 working days, issuing final bills within 6 weeks and refunding credit within 10 working days of the final bill. In the latest published figures (January to March 2026), Octopus met all three: 99.9% of switches in 5 working days, 98.6% of final bills in 6 weeks and 95.8% of refunds in 10 working days.

If you change your mind, you have the 14-day cooling-off period. Tell Octopus within those 14 days and it's as if you never left. After that, Flexible Octopus can be left at any time with no exit fee. Before you decide, our honest look at whether Octopus is any good covers the complaints as well as the praise, and our Octopus vs British Gas and best energy supplier comparisons put the numbers side by side.

For the record: Octopus supplies around 7.3 million households, holds a 4.8/5 Trustpilot rating from over 800,000 reviews and has been a Which? Recommended Provider for 9 years.