BT Business Mobiles: Plans, Prices and the Ten-Employee Line

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BT Business sells mobile on four named plans, and the cheapest business SIM is £5 a month excluding VAT on a 24-month term. That one is a voice and text SIM with no data at all; 10GB is £15, 50GB £17, 100GB £19 and unlimited £25, with eight tiers in the 24-month table and nothing to pay up front. The headline tiers carry unlimited UK and Republic of Ireland calls and texts, BT Business says every plan roams in its Europe Zone at no extra cost, and 5G+ is included on every new plan sold since 13 May 2026. Prices read on 16 October 2026.

They were read from EE's own document, not BT's, and that is worth knowing before you click. BT Business publishes no price for any of its four mobile plans on its own site: the SIM-only page carries a button reading “Go to EE for SIM-only plans” and the plan page says “Our business mobile plans are powered by EE”. The four names on BT's menu — Business Essential, Business All Rounder, Business Full Works and Business Full Works with Apple One — are the same four priced in the EE Price Guide for Small Business, whose current revision is dated 3 September 2026. So the figures above are the provider's own, in the provider's own regulated price list; they are simply published by the other half of the group.

Both halves are substantial and both sit at the same address. BT Limited, the company named on BT Business's mobile terms, is company 02216369, incorporated on 2 February 1988; EE Limited, which contracts the new plans, is company 02382161; both are registered at 1 Braham Street, London E1 8EE. BT Group's Business division booked adjusted revenue of £1,293m in the three months to 30 June 2026 on £302m of adjusted EBITDA, reported on 23 July 2026, and it signed new connectivity contracts with Scottish Water and Royal Mail in the quarter. The network underneath is EE's, which Ofcom's own Q1 2026 complaints table puts at one complaint per 100,000 pay-monthly customers against an industry average of two.

Eight prices, three terms, and what a year of commitment is actually worth

The 24-month Business Essential SIM table runs £5, £6, £7, £13, £15, £17, £19 and £25 against 0GB, 250MB, 500MB, 1GB, 10GB, 50GB, 100GB and unlimited data. The jump worth noticing is in the middle: £13 buys 1GB and £15 buys 10GB, so nine extra gigabytes cost £2. Below that the pricing stops making sense for anyone who uses a phone for data at all — 250MB for £6 is a month of email and little else.

The same plan is sold on three terms, and because EE prints all three the price of committing can be worked out exactly. On a rolling month the four data tiers are £21, £23, £25 and £31; on 12 months they are £17, £19, £21 and £27; on 24 months £15, £17, £19 and £25. The gaps are identical on every tier: a rolling month costs exactly £6 a month more than the two-year price, and a 12-month term exactly £2 more. So EE has put a number on lock-in rather than leaving the reader to guess at one. On 10GB, two years at £15 is £360 of payments against £504 on a rolling month over the same period — £144 for the right to walk away each month, and the same £144 on unlimited (£600 against £744). Twelve months is the awkward middle: £24 more than the two-year price across its own twelve months, and £48 less than a rolling month over the same twelve, for half the commitment either way.

Moving up the range costs a flat £5. Business All Rounder is £20, £22, £24 and £30 against Business Essential's £15, £17, £19 and £25, and what the £5 buys is one Inclusive Extra — EE's term for an add-on such as a streaming or productivity subscription. On the 10GB tier that is a third on top of the price of the airtime, which is worth checking against what the extra would cost bought directly. Business Full Works carries three Inclusive Extras, and the Apple One version swaps them for Apple TV+, Apple Music and 50GB of iCloud+; the SIM-only tables that could be read in the small business price guide cover Business Essential and Business All Rounder only, so no SIM-only price for either Full Works plan was found during this check.

Two brands in one group, two increase schedules, one day apart

Every mobile contract here carries an annual increase, and which kind you get depends on the date you signed rather than on anything you can choose today. A business that bought from BT Business on or before 1 December 2024 is still on the old inflation-linked formula: the December CPI rate “published by the Office for National Statistics on 21 January 2026 which was 3.4%”, plus a further 3.9%, giving 7.3% from 1 April 2026. BT Business states that where CPI is negative it will “take the CPI percentage (%) inflation rate to be 0%”, so the floor is 3.9% whatever happens to prices.

EE Business runs the identical 7.3% for 2026 and the identical 3.4% plus 3.9% derivation — but its cut-off is 1 September 2024, three months earlier than BT Business's, and its increase lands on 31 March rather than 1 April. Two brands inside one group, one regulatory change, two cut-off dates and two dates in the calendar a day apart. Nothing about that is improper and neither page mentions the other; it does mean a company with some lines bought through BT Business and some through EE Business can be on two schedules at once.

Contracts signed after those dates get a fixed amount instead of a percentage, and EE publishes the amounts: £3.00 a month for plans bought between 2 September and 18 November 2024, then from 19 November 2024 £3.00 on handset plans and £1.50 on SIM only, mobile broadband, connected device, router and watch plans, all excluding VAT. Selected add-ons and out-of-bundle charges rise by 5% instead.

Here is the part nobody states, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. A fixed step is only cheaper than a percentage above a certain monthly price. At 7.3%, £1.50 is the same as the percentage on a plan of £20.55 a month: above that the fixed step is the better deal, and below it the fixed step costs more. On the £15 10GB plan, £1.50 is a 10% increase against the 7.3% an older contract pays — £16.50 rather than £16.10. On the £25 unlimited plan it is 6%, and the newer customer is better off. The pounds-and-pence regime made the rise legible, which was the point of it; on a cheap SIM it did not make it smaller.

And the amount is set per cohort, not once and for all. The SIM-only deal EE Business is advertising today prints its own steps on the tile: £19.00 a month now, £21.08 on 31 March 2027 and £23.16 on 31 March 2028 — a step of £2.08, which is 10.9% of the opening price and 39% larger than the £1.50 a late-2024 SIM-only customer pays. Taken over a 24-month term starting in November 2026, that is five months at £19.00, twelve at £21.08 and seven at £23.16: £510.08 ex VAT, or £612.10 with VAT, against the £456.00 you get by multiplying the headline by 24. The term ends with the customer paying 21.9% more than they agreed to. The month you sign moves that total, so treat it as a worked example rather than a quotation — but the method is the only honest way to read a price with two steps in it.

The line BT draws at ten employees is the same line Parliament drew

BT Business splits its mobile menu three ways: mobile plans for 1-10 employees, mobile plans for 11-249 employees, and Device Lifecycle Management for “businesses with 400+ devices”. That first boundary looks like ordinary sales segmentation. It is also the boundary of the law.

Ofcom's General Condition C1 carries the contract protections a mobile customer is likely to care about most — notice of “not shorter than one month” of any modification likely to cause material detriment, the right to exit within 30 days when one lands, and since 17 January 2025 the prohibition on writing inflation-linked or percentage-based rises into a new contract at all. Who gets them is set by section 52(6) of the Communications Act 2003, which defines a “Domestic and Small Business Customer” as a customer who is neither a communications provider nor “a person who is such a Customer in respect of an undertaking carried on by him for which more than ten individuals work”. Ofcom's own guidance puts it plainly: the prohibition “applies to small business customers with 10 or less employees”. Hire an eleventh person and the protection stops.

You can see that line in BT Business's own price-rise table. Digital Voice for Business “up to 10 employees” rises by a fixed £1.00 per user a month from 1 April 2026; Digital Voice for Business “11+ employees” rises by 6%. Same product, same company, same date, and the mechanism changes at exactly the headcount the Act changes at. Ofcom accepts that providers “do not routinely collect or hold information about the number of employees of their business customers” and will look instead at whether reasonable steps were taken to identify who qualifies, using proxies such as annual spend or the number of lines.

A third number is in play as well. EE's own General Condition C1.3 additional-information document, version 1.6 dated 18 January 2024, opens by stating it is “applicable to EE business customers with greater than 50 employees”, and sends anyone with fewer than 50 to the small business pay monthly terms instead. So one group operates a statutory threshold of ten, a product menu that breaks at ten and again at 249, and a documentation threshold of 50. A company of 30 people reading its way through this has to work out which of the three it is on.

What the regulated price list does not manage to say

The EE Price Guide for Small Business is a genuinely useful document — 24-month, 12-month and rolling prices for every tier in one place, which is more than most networks publish — and it is revised often: the copies dated 22 July, 26 August and 3 September 2026 were all read for this page. Not one Business Essential or Business All Rounder SIM-only price moved across the three. A confirmed figure is a result, and it says the range is stable rather than quietly creeping.

Two things in it cannot be read, though. The allowance row of the 24-month Business Essential table carries four entries for eight price columns — “Unlimited Texts and Minutes in the UK and ROI”, “250 Texts and 250 Minutes”, “500 Texts and 500 Minutes” and “Unlimited Texts and Minutes” — with nothing in the table saying which tier gets which. A buyer looking at the £6 250MB SIM cannot tell from the price guide whether the calls on it are unlimited or capped at 250 minutes. The data row and the price row line up cell for cell; the allowance row does not, and on three separate revisions of the document it has not been fixed.

The second is the exit charge, and it is the one a business signing for two years would most want. The guide's contents page lists Early Termination Charges on page 39, and that part of the document would not return readable text on any attempt here. BT's own help article for business mobile billing points customers at the BT Price List for “UK mobile and international mobile tariffs”, and that address is closed to automated readers by BT's robots file, so it was not read either. The charge itself is described in the terms rather than priced: clause 9.1.2 of the EE Pay Monthly terms for Small Business, version 11 dated 16 January 2026, makes it “calculated based on the sum of all outstanding Monthly Charges”, “factoring in any recurring monthly discount to which You are entitled”, “minus any costs we save from you leaving early”. No percentage is attached to the saving and no worked example is given anywhere a prospective customer can reach.

The same clause set holds one detail worth having: 30 days' notice or more is required to cancel, under clause 9.1, and that applies when the minimum term has already expired as well as during it. A business that simply stops paying at the end of 24 months has not ended the contract.

Running out of data slows the phone down rather than stopping it

Stay Connected is the best feature in the range and it is described in one line of the price guide: when the full-speed allowance is used, “speed drops to 0.5Mb per second until the next cycle or until a data pass is bought”. Half a megabit is enough for email, messaging and a maps lookup and not enough for a video call, which is the right trade for a working phone — and it means an engineer on site does not simply go dark on the 28th of the month.

Read the table carefully, because it is not on everything. The price guide marks Stay Connected “Not Included in price plan” on the cheaper tiers and “Included in price plan (except for Unlimited plans)” on the rest. Unlimited plans are excluded because they cannot run out, which is fair enough; the cheap tiers are excluded precisely where running out is most likely. On the 250MB SIM at £6 a month there is no soft landing at all.

Without it, the out-of-bundle rates take over, and they are the real reason to buy more data than you think you need. Data beyond the allowance in the UK and EU is 1.6p per MB, which works out at about £16.38 a gigabyte — more than the whole monthly cost of the £15 10GB plan, for one gigabyte. Calls to UK and EU mobiles outside an allowance are 69p a minute, so a ten-minute call is £6.90; texts are 45p each to UK and EU mobiles and 12p to UK and EU regional landlines, and a picture message is 69p. Calls to 0800, 0808 and 116 numbers are free. Calls to 084, 087, 118 and 09 numbers are 69p a minute plus the service charge set by whoever you are ringing.

Two more lines in the table are easy to miss. Network Boost, which prioritises traffic at busy times, is “Included in Unlimited price plan” only. 5G+ — the standalone network, which is where the low latency and the better indoor performance come from — is “Included in all new price plans from 13th May 2026”, so a business still inside a contract signed in 2024 or 2025 is not getting it on these terms.

Two documents, two answers on European roaming

Here the group's own pages do not agree, and both are worth printing. BT Business's plan page states that “Every plan is 5G-ready, with unlimited voice and roaming in our Europe Zone at no extra cost”. EE's price guide, pricing the same plans, says that without an Inclusive Extra, a roaming add-on or Business Connect, a day's use in the EU and EEA carries a charge of £2.26. Those two sentences cannot both be true for the same customer.

The likeliest reconciliation is in the tables rather than in either sentence. Inclusive Extras are marked “Not included in price plan” on Business Essential and “1 x Inclusive Extra” on Business All Rounder, so on the face of the two documents it is the cheaper plan that pays the daily charge and the dearer one that roams free — the opposite of what “every plan” implies. Neither document says that in terms, so confirm it for the tier you are buying before you travel rather than taking it from either page. If the £2.26 does apply to your plan, a fortnight away is £31.64, which is more than the £19 monthly price of the 100GB plan and over twice the £15 on 10GB.

Where the Europe Zone is included, fair use applies and the guide states it: plans above 50GB, 60GB and 100GB can use up to 25GB, 30GB and 60GB of roaming data in the zone before surcharges start. The passports are the expensive way to cover everything else, and they are quoted excluding VAT: the EE Business Passport is £9.32 a day for 1GB or £46.61 a month for 10GB with unlimited calls and texts, and the World Passport £11.64 a day or £69.93 a month on the same allowances. The monthly Business Passport is 2.45 times the cost of the airtime it is bolted onto. The cheapest route for a regular traveller is the Roam Abroad Passport at £11.90 a month ex VAT, which lets them use the minutes, texts and data they already pay for.

Full out-of-bundle roaming rates are not in this document at all — the guide refers them to a separate Non-Standard Price Guide, which is a second PDF a buyer has to find and open. On a price list that otherwise prints everything, that is the one gap that costs money.

Who measured the best-network claim, and what the complaints data can and cannot tell you

BT Business leads with “Together with EE, the UK's best mobile network for 13 years running”, and unusually for a superlative of that kind the working is published. The claim rests on RootMetrics' UK RootScore reports from H2 2013 to H1 2026; in the first half of 2026 RootMetrics “conducted approximately 609,000 coverage tests around the UK”, including in 16 major cities and driving 21,798 miles on UK roads, and EE serves the substantiation report itself. BT's own footnote then adds the line most advertisers leave out: “The Rootmetrics award is not an endorsement of EE.” Under CAP Code rule 3.34 a comparison with identifiable competitors has to be verifiable and the route to checking it has to be accessible rather than buried, and on this claim it is — the report is one click from the footnote.

The independent measure that is missing is complaints. Ofcom's quarterly telecoms data for Q1 2026, the quarter from January to March, puts pay-monthly mobile complaints at 1 per 100,000 customers for EE, level with Vodafone and giffgaff, against 2 for Three UK and Tesco Mobile, 3 for O2 and iD Mobile and an industry average of 2. Ofcom's own caveat belongs with the figures: where the measurable difference between providers is less than one complaint per 100,000, it considers the results comparable, so EE sitting a point below the average is a good result rather than a decisive one.

Two limits on using it here. The table carries no Q1 2026 figure for BT Mobile at all, so BT's own mobile base is not measured in it. And Ofcom compiles the data to understand dissatisfaction among residential customers — so even EE's figure describes consumer complaints, not business ones. There is no published complaints or satisfaction measure for UK business mobile from any regulator, which is worth saying plainly rather than borrowing the consumer number and hoping it transfers.

The gaps a business buyer should price in before signing

The plan prices in the price guide are not labelled for VAT. The roaming passports and the surcharges are explicitly marked “excl. VAT” and the sales pages label their monthly figures “ex VAT”, so the plan tables are ex-VAT figures too — but the document itself does not say so beside the numbers, and 20% on a £19 plan is £3.80 a month a non-reclaiming buyer would not have budgeted for.

The current offer carries a savings claim with no published basis. “Save up to £617 until 29 October” sits above a single product, the 100GB Business All Rounder SIM at £19.00, and nothing in the terms, footnotes or small print says what the £617 is measured against, whether it includes VAT, or how many connections it assumes. The price guide's own list price for that plan is £24, so the discount on the plan shown is £5 a month and £120 over the term. The ASA's position on “up to” savings claims is that a significant proportion of customers should be able to reach the advertised figure; no proportion is given here.

Version control on the price guide is loose in a way that matters for a document people cite. The copy served at a filename ending v21-2-03-09-2026 prints “V20.01 03.09.2026” in its own footer, and the copy at v21.1-26.08.2026 prints “V20.01 26.08.2026”. The dates are reliable and the filenames are not the same as the version strings inside. Quote the date, not the version number, and note that EE's terms page states “Any changes to the Price Guides take effect from the date of publication” — which means a price can change under a customer the day a new PDF goes up.

One last point about who you are dealing with. BT Business's mobile terms name BT Limited and set out the CPI-linked rise; the plans on sale today are EE Limited's, under EE's small business pay monthly terms, with EE's own price guide and EE's own increase dates. Both companies are inside BT Group and both sit at 1 Braham Street, so this is not a case of a brand badging somebody else's product. It does mean that when a bill or a price rise needs querying, the first question is which of the two companies the line was bought from, and the BT Business pages do not ask it for you.

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.