British Gas Business Dual Fuel

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British Gas Business publishes the most a microbusiness can be charged, and at 23 September 2026 that ceiling is 82.46p per kWh for single-rate electricity and 14.71p per kWh for gas on a one-year fixed plan. Both figures are maximum prices rather than quotes, and the distinction is worth holding on to: Ofgem obliges a supplier to publish the ceiling, and the deal a business is actually offered sits somewhere below it.

British Gas supplies energy to more than 350,000 businesses and dates the brand to 1815, which it describes as over 200 years of trading. The contracts are written by British Gas Trading Limited, company 03078711, incorporated on 6 July 1995 and registered at Millstream, Maidenhead Road, Windsor SL4 5GD. Every fixed-price and fixed-term British Gas Business electricity plan is sold as zero carbon, on a supply the company gives as 72% renewable and 28% nuclear.

One thing to settle before comparing anything. There is no British Gas Business dual fuel product and no dual-fuel discount: the price plans page sets out eight arrangements, none of them a both-fuels plan, and says nothing at all about taking gas and electricity together. A business buying two fuels signs two contracts and pays two standing charges. On the published ceiling those are 400.00p a day for electricity and 1,749.81p a day for gas — £7,846.81 a year between them, before a single unit is used.

The one price British Gas Business puts in public, and what it comes to

Business energy is quoted, not listed. What a supplier has to publish instead is the maximum it will charge a microbusiness, and British Gas Business prints that on a single page under the headers Fixed Rate Term, Standing Charge p/day, Unit Rate p/kWh and Estimated Contract £. The page says the figures "are the most microbusinesses will pay when entering a new contract or renewing with us", and that they are "current as of 23 September 2026 and can change at any time". New-customer and renewing-customer prices are identical, which is itself worth knowing.

On single-rate electricity the ceiling runs 82.46p, 96.66p, 104.37p and 111.78p per kWh across one, two, three and four year terms, with the standing charge pinned at 400.00p a day on all four. Gas runs the other way round: 14.71p, 12.92p, 11.89p and 11.72p per kWh, 20.3% cheaper per unit over four years than over one, while the gas standing charge climbs from 1,749.81p a day to 2,002.70p, up 14.5%. Longer electricity commitments cost 35.6% more per unit and nothing more per day; longer gas commitments cost less per unit and more per day. There are also two-rate and three-rate electricity ceilings — day and night at 84.22p and 75.16p on a one-year fix, evening and weekend against weekday day at 77.75p and 87.68p, and a three-rate set at 87.68p, 79.13p and 75.44p.

The page's own estimates make the units unambiguous, which matters because 1,749.81p a day is a startling number to read. British Gas assumes 21,000 kWh of electricity and 30,000 kWh of gas a year and prints £18,777 and £10,800. Work those back and the one-year electricity ceiling is £1,460.00 of standing charge plus £17,316.60 of electricity, which is £18,776.60; gas is £6,386.81 of standing charge plus £4,413.00 of gas, which is £10,799.81. Both land on the published estimate to the pound, so the standing charges really are per day. Taken together that is £29,576.41 a year before tax, of which £7,846.81 — 26.5% — is charged whether the premises uses any energy or not. That sum is ours, from British Gas's own rates and its own assumed usage.

Two standing charges, and on gas the fixed part is the bigger half

Electricity behaves the way most people expect. At British Gas's assumed 21,000 kWh, the £1,460.00 standing charge is 7.8% of the ceiling bill and the units are the other 92%. Use less and you pay a lot less.

Gas does not. At 30,000 kWh the gas itself costs £4,413.00 on the one-year ceiling and the standing charge is £6,386.81 — 1.45 times the cost of the commodity. A premises that burns a third as much gas, 10,000 kWh, still pays the same £6,386.81 and its gas bill falls only to £7,857.81. Two thirds less gas buys 27.2% off the bill. For a shop or a small office with a boiler that runs a few hours a day and little else, the fixed charge is most of what the gas supply costs, and no amount of efficiency touches it.

That is the part "business dual fuel" gets wrong as a phrase. The eight arrangements on the price plans page are a Fixed Price Energy Plan, Renewable Business Energy, British Gas Lite, deemed rates, the Lite Variable Price Plan, Standard Variable Rates, Flex Advantage for users above 500 MWh, and commercial landlord energy. Not one of them is a both-fuels plan and not one carries a discount for taking the pair. Two fuels means two contracts, two standing charges and two renewal dates, and the only thing they share is the envelope.

What the cap does for a house, and does not do for a shop

From 1 October to 31 December 2026 Ofgem's default tariff cap puts a direct debit household in England, Scotland and Wales at an average 26.32p per kWh of electricity with a 54.83p daily standing charge, and 7.97p per kWh of gas with a 29.68p daily standing charge. Set those beside the business ceiling and the electricity unit price is 3.13 times higher, gas units are 1.85 times higher, the electricity standing charge is 7.3 times higher and the gas standing charge is 59 times higher.

Those multiples are not what a business pays, and saying so matters more than the arithmetic. One number is a regulated cap on what a household is actually charged; the other is a published maximum on what a microbusiness can be charged, and the gap between that maximum and a real British Gas Business quote is not published anywhere. What the comparison does show is the distance between a priced market and an unpriced one.

Ofgem's retail market highlights of 27 January 2026 put some context round it. There are 65 active suppliers in the business market against 22 in domestic, so a business has more doors to knock on and less help choosing between them. Using DESNZ data for the second half of 2024, the report puts UK electricity prices for medium-sized businesses 92% above the European median, the highest in Europe, against 44% for households, and notes that very small firms pay the highest prices of all. On survey data for 2025 it found 70% of businesses keeping up with bills without difficulty, 19% keeping up but struggling from time to time and 6% constantly struggling. Smart or advanced meters cover 2 million non-household sites, 64% of the total.

Tax is where a business bill parts company with a household one

HMRC's guidance, updated 10 July 2026, is blunt: "Fuel for business use is usually standard-rated". So the £29,576.41 ceiling above carries 20% VAT, not the 5% a home pays. There are two ways out of it. A charity's non-business use qualifies for the domestic treatment, and so does low usage under the de minimis limits in VAT Notice 701/19: electricity at "not more than an average rate of 33 kilowatt hours per day, 1,000 kilowatt hours per month" and piped gas at "not more than an average rate of 5 therms or 145 kilowatt hours per day", 4,397 kWh a month.

Which produces an oddity on a dual fuel supply this winter. Great Britain has a temporary zero rate on qualifying electricity, and HMRC's brief of 8 September 2026 says it "applies from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027"; Northern Ireland stays at 5%. A small business under both de minimis limits is therefore paying 0% VAT on its electricity and 5% on its gas, from one supplier, for the same six months. On 1 April 2027 the electricity goes back to 5%. A business over either limit pays 20% throughout and the change passes it by entirely.

Then there is the levy a household never sees. Climate Change Levy is charged on business energy at £0.00801 per kWh from 1 April 2026 — the same rate on natural gas as on electricity, up from £0.00775 on both from 1 April 2024. On British Gas's assumed 51,000 kWh across the two fuels that is £408.51 a year. Holders of a climate change agreement pay 8% of the main rate on electricity and 11% on gas, which is the single largest discount available on a business energy bill and is not available to most of the firms reading this. Stack it up and the published ceiling becomes £29,576.41 of energy, £408.51 of levy and £5,996.98 of VAT: £35,981.90. That total is our arithmetic on British Gas's published rates, not a figure British Gas prints.

Which definition you fall inside decides what you are owed

British Gas Business sets out Ofgem's two definitions on its own help pages, and they are worth reading before a renewal rather than after one. A microbusiness uses no more than 100,000 kWh of electricity or 293,000 kWh of gas a year, or employs fewer than 10 people full-time equivalent with turnover or a balance sheet no greater than £2 million. A small business uses no more than 200,000 kWh of electricity or 500,000 kWh of gas, or employs fewer than 50 with turnover at most £6.5 million or a balance sheet of £5 million. British Gas adds the line that decides most arguments: "The consumption threshold applies to each fuel being supplied". On a dual fuel supply that can make one business a microbusiness for its gas and not for its electricity, with different protections on each bill.

The protections themselves arrived on dates worth quoting. Ofgem's microbusiness decision required principal terms to be put in front of a customer before a contract is agreed, and brokerage costs to be disclosed "as a total cost in pounds/pence covering the duration of the contract", from 1 October 2022; suppliers were barred from working with brokers outside a qualifying redress scheme from 1 December 2022. The Standards of Conduct were widened to businesses of any size on 1 July 2024, broker fees had to appear in the principal terms for every non-domestic customer from 1 October 2024, and from December 2024 complaints standards and Energy Ombudsman signposting were extended to small businesses. Ofgem's own framing of the problem it was solving: 5.3 million microbusinesses, 95% of all UK businesses, spending £4.2bn in 2021 across roughly 1.4 million electricity and 0.4 million gas meter points held by the largest suppliers.

Two limits are worth noting. The maximum price page states that the ceiling does not cover "businesses with a half hourly meter", and a half-hourly meter is compulsory once maximum demand reaches 100kW in any half-hour period, so a growing business can lose the published ceiling without changing anything about its ownership or headcount. And the Ombudsman route is real but lightly used: it opens at 8 weeks or on a deadlock letter, on 0330 440 1624, and in the year after its remit widened in December 2024 just over 400 small businesses used it against more than 13,000 microbusiness disputes. Across the whole energy sector it accepted 46,532 cases between January and June 2026 against 40,068 in the same half of 2025, 27,006 of them about billing, with supplier signposting improving from 48% to 53%.

Where the paperwork runs out

The default prices are the ones a business is most likely to end up on, and they are the ones hardest to read. The out-of-contract page describes the Variable Price Plan and the Standard Variable Rate, promises "at least 30 days' notice" of a change and says a standard variable rate is applied "only ... in exceptional circumstances" — and prints the rates themselves solely inside images. The equivalent PDFs on britishgas.co.uk refused a fetch on 16 October 2026. That is a different failure from a page being down, and it means the price a business is moved onto at the end of a fixed term is not published in text anywhere on the site.

The terms and conditions page, last updated October 2026, names fourteen documents — small business general terms, the fixed plan, the 30-day flexible plan, the Variable Price Plan, the multi-site plan, the deemed contract, metering and connections, enterprise and corporate terms, and two Lite versions split either side of 23 September 2026, the same date the maximum prices carry. It prints none of their contents. Security deposits, late payment charges and early termination charges are all in there somewhere, and none of them can be compared against another supplier without opening fourteen files.

Against that, credit where it is due on complaints. The page gives separate routes for British Gas Lite and British Gas business, acknowledges a complaint within 24 hours, aims to respond within 5 working days, publishes a customer service director mailbox, signposts Citizens Advice and the Energy Ombudsman for micro and small businesses, and tells a customer what to do about a broker as well as about British Gas. Ofgem has required microbusiness signposting since 1 July 2024 and it is there.

What no one publishes is how well any of it works. Ofgem's complaints guidance OFG1164, which applies from 4 November 2025, covers suppliers' domestic customers and records that microbusiness complaints data has moved into the non-domestic market monitoring return, which is not broken out by supplier. Smart Money People carries British Gas boiler repairs at 3.71 out of 5 from 42 reviews and home insurance at 4.00 from 34, and no business energy listing at all. Centrica's accounts give the commercial picture and nothing else: business energy supply made £58m of adjusted operating profit in the year to 31 December 2025 against £28m in 2024, on adjusted EBITDA of £60m against £31m, published on 19 February 2026. Neither the preliminary nor the interim results page gives a customer count, a meter-point count or a revenue figure for the business arm, so "largest business energy supplier" has 350,000 businesses behind it and nothing else.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 16 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.