🔒What Octopus Fixed Actually Is
Octopus 12M Fixed is the simplest product Octopus sells. Your electricity and gas unit rates and your daily standing charges are set on the day you join and don't move for twelve months. Ofgem's quarterly price cap announcements stop applying to you the moment it starts.
It sits at the opposite end of the range from the tariffs Octopus is better known for. Agile reprices every half hour and Tracker reprices daily; Fixed doesn't reprice at all. There's no cleverness to engage with, no window to shift your washing into, and nothing to check in the app. For a lot of households that's the point.
Existing Octopus customers see the same product under a different name — Loyal Octopus — which you can move onto from your online account without going through a supply switch.
Fixed rates, not a fixed bill
Worth being blunt about, because it causes more complaints than anything else in energy: a fixed tariff fixes the price per unit, not the total. Your January bill will still be far bigger than your July one, because you'll use far more energy. What you've bought is protection from the price changing — not from winter.
💷The Rates — and How They Compare to the Cap
Fixed rates are repriced by Octopus regularly off the forward wholesale market and vary by region. The table below shows the national average of the fourteen regional rates for the 12M Fixed on sale on 2 October 2026 (from Octopus's own product data, checked 2 October), next to the October cap. Electricity is shown at the 0% VAT that has applied since 1 October, so both columns compare like for like.
Run those rates against Ofgem's typical household — 2,500 kWh of electricity and 9,500 kWh of gas a year — and you land near £1,819 a year against the October cap's £1,723, about £96 more. Depending on region the fix ranges from roughly £1,757 to £1,921. Fixed prices sat below the cap for most of 2026, so it's worth understanding why that has flipped: the October cap was set from a wholesale window that closed on 18 August, while a fix is priced off today's forward market. Wholesale gas has jumped since then with the conflict in the Middle East, so fixes have moved up and the cap hasn't caught up yet.
It will catch up in January. Supplier forecasts put the January–March 2027 cap at around £2,000–£2,115, roughly 20% above October, and Martin Lewis expects somewhere between 15% and 30% (our news report). Against about £2,060, today's fix is around £240 a year cheaper. That is the real trade: pay a little more than the cap for October to December in return for protection from January onwards.
Notice too where the difference sits: both standing charges are slightly below the cap while both unit rates are above it. That favours lighter users; heavy gas users feel the higher unit rate most. Check both against your own annual kWh rather than trusting the headline. Octopus also sells an 18M Fixed, currently cheaper at around £1,727 a year for a typical household. That is within about £4 of October's cap and around £330 below January's forecast, in return for a longer lock-in and a £75 per fuel exit fee.
🚪The Exit Fee — What It Costs to Change Your Mind
The risk in fixing has never really been paying slightly over the odds. It's being stuck paying over the odds while the market moves without you. Exit fees are the mechanism that does that — typically £25 to £150 per fuel, so up to around £300 to leave a dual-fuel fix early.
Octopus's 12M Fixed charges £50 per fuel — £100 for dual fuel. Its fixes used to have no exit fees, but every 12M Fixed sold since April 2026 has carried this one; the 18M Fixed charges £75 per fuel. Three practical consequences:
- The fix is a ceiling with a £100 door. If prices fall well below your fixed rate, leaving can still pay — but only once the saving over the rest of the term is bigger than the fee.
- No fee in the last 49 days. Ofgem rules stop any supplier charging an exit fee once you're within 49 days of the end of a fix, so you can line up your next tariff without penalty.
- You can decide in stages. Switch now onto Flexible Octopus, which has no exit fee, take the £50 credit, and choose whether to fix once you can see your own quote. The exit fee only starts to apply when you fix.
Compare the exit fee alongside the unit rate
A fix half a penny cheaper per kWh with £150-per-fuel exit fees can be a worse product than a slightly dearer one at £50 per fuel — unless you are certain you won't want to move for a year. On 2,500 kWh of electricity, half a penny is about £12.50 a year. The difference in exit fees on a dual-fuel fix is £200.
⚖️Fixed vs Flexible Octopus
Flexible Octopus is the standard variable tariff — the one you land on by default and the one you roll back onto when a fix ends. It tracks the Ofgem price cap and Octopus prices it slightly below the cap rather than at it, which is worth knowing if you've been told that all variable tariffs are the same.
The choice between them comes down to three questions:
- Would a winter surprise hurt? If a jump in the January cap would mean something else goes unpaid, Fixed buys real peace of mind and you don't need a view on wholesale gas to justify it.
- Do you want to benefit if prices fall? Flexible passes cap reductions on at the next quarterly review. Fixed doesn't pass anything on — that's the trade.
- Do you want to think about it again? Flexible needs no decisions and no end date. Fixed needs you to remember when it expires so you don't roll over without looking.
Flexible carries no exit fee; Fixed carries £50 per fuel. The numbers this winter are unusually lopsided: for a typical home, Flexible costs £1,723 a year at October's cap but around £2,060 if January lands as forecast, while today's fix is about £1,819 throughout. Our guide to whether to fix works through the arithmetic in full.
🧠Fixed vs the Smart Tariffs
If you can move when you use energy, a fixed tariff is almost certainly not your cheapest option — and the gap is usually far larger than the fixed-versus-variable question is worth arguing about:
Against a cap electricity rate of 26.32p, charging an EV overnight on a fixed tariff instead of a smart one is one of the more expensive mistakes available in domestic energy. If you drive electric, this is the comparison to run before anything else.
Discounted rate windows sized to how heat pumps actually run, typically saving around £219/year versus a gas boiler. With electricity VAT at 0% from October while gas stays at 5%, the case for electrified heating improves further.
The direct opposite of fixing. Your rate moves with the market each day, so falls reach you immediately rather than a quarter later — with built-in ceilings of 100p/kWh electricity and 30p/kWh gas to stop the downside being unlimited.
If you have solar panels and a battery, a flat fixed rate ignores the thing that makes your setup valuable — the difference between cheap import windows and high-value export ones. Flux is built around exactly that.
The honest framing: Fixed is the right answer when you can't or don't want to shift usage, and certainty is what you're buying. It is the wrong answer if you have flexible load and simply haven't got round to using it.
👥Who Octopus Fixed Is For
Good fit if you:
- Need a predictable rate — a fixed income, a tight monthly budget, or no headroom for a winter surprise
- Have no smart meter, or one that stopped talking after a previous switch, which rules out Tracker, Agile and the Go tariffs
- Use energy at conventional times and can't realistically shift consumption overnight
- Are a landlord or letting agent budgeting for a property over a fixed period
- Want to stop thinking about energy — a legitimate goal, and one Fixed serves better than anything else Octopus sells
Look elsewhere if you:
- Drive an EV — Intelligent Octopus Go will beat a fix comfortably
- Have a heat pump — Cosy Octopus is shaped around how they run
- Have solar or a battery — a flat rate wastes the asset; see export tariffs
- Can genuinely shift usage and are willing to engage with a variable rate
- Believe prices are about to fall sharply — though if that were knowable, fixed deals would already be priced for it
🚀How to Get Octopus Fixed
One timing point: fixed prices follow the wholesale market, so if forecasts for January keep rising, so will the price of new fixes. October is confirmed at £1,723 and January is forecast around £2,060; Ofgem confirms it in late November. Martin Lewis's advice is to compare the whole market for the cheapest fix rather than defaulting to any one supplier. See how switching works for the full process.
✅Verdict — Dearer Than the Cap Today, Cheaper Than January's Forecast
Verdict: Worth considering now if a January jump would hurt — just go in knowing the exit fee.
Octopus 12M Fixed locks your unit rates and standing charges for a year. Today it costs about £96 a year more than October's cap for a typical household, and about £240 less than January's forecast. Leaving early costs £50 per fuel, which is at the low end of the market but not nothing. If you have an EV, a heat pump or solar, a smart tariff will still beat it. If you don't, and a winter price jump would hurt, it is a reasonable way to buy certainty — compare it against the rest of the market first.
Octopus Energy supplies 7.3 million UK households, has been Which? Recommended for 9 consecutive years and holds a 4.8/5 Trustpilot rating from 800,000+ reviews. Switch via our referral link and £50 free credit lands in your account regardless of which tariff you end up on. Still weighing it up? Read should you fix your energy tariff or compare every Octopus tariff.
Run the comparison for your own usage in the savings calculator, which uses the current national-average Fixed rates on October's 0% electricity VAT footing so they compare fairly with the cap. Already an Octopus customer? The equivalent offer is Loyal Octopus, and our guide to it covers the switch-then-fix route for everyone else. Solar owners can pair either fix with Outgoing Octopus for export.
Sources: Ofgem — energy price cap · Octopus Energy product data — 12M Fixed October 2026 · MoneySavingExpert — January forecast round-up. Figures last checked September 2026.