Currys No Contract Phones: 360 Handsets, From £24 to £1,899

Affiliate disclosure: we may earn a commission if you take out a product through links on this page. It costs you nothing extra and does not influence how providers are listed.

Currys listed 360 SIM-free phones on 23 October 2026, running from a £24.00 Nokia 105 to a £1,899.00 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, with a Motorola Moto G06 at £99.00 and a Samsung Galaxy A16 at £139.00 in between. Every price here was read that day from the shop's own mobile phone listing and its own product pages.

The useful thing about this particular shop is that the whole range is already what you came for. Currys sells phones outright and nothing else: there is no pay-monthly phone category anywhere in its own sitemap, no airtime attached to any tile, and the headings over the listing say “Choose your new SIM-free smartphone today” and “SIM-free mobile phones from top brands”. Contracts live on Carphone Warehouse, which sits in the Currys footer under “Our websites” and which the group's own recycling page identifies as a separate company, Currys Retail Ltd. So you do not have to filter the bundles out of this range. There are none in it.

Behind the till is a listed British retailer with audited numbers. Currys plc reported group revenue of £9,254m for the year ended 2 May 2026, up 6% with like-for-like growth of 4%, adjusted profit before tax of £191m (up 18%), statutory profit before tax of £153m, free cash flow of £157m and year-end net cash of £176m. It operates 691 stores in six countries and employs more than 24,000 people, it doubled its full-year dividend to 3.0p, and it started a £50m share buyback on the day it published. On a phone you are buying outright, with no ongoing relationship to fall back on, the solvency of the shop is the warranty behind the warranty.

What £24 buys, and the network that stops answering in 2029

The cheapest phone in this shop is a Nokia 105 (2023) at £24.00 in cyan or red and £24.99 in black. For that you get a 1.8-inch screen, 4 MB of storage and 4 MB of RAM, a 1,000 mAh battery rated at up to 12 hours of talk and up to 22 days of standby, a 3.5 mm headphone socket, a torch, an MP3 player and Snake. No camera, no WiFi, no Bluetooth, no NFC, no GPS. It weighs 78.7 g. As a second phone for a festival, a spare for a glovebox or a first phone for a child, that specification is honest about itself and the price is hard to argue with.

One line of it decides whether the phone works in five years, and it is not on the Currys page. HMD, which makes and sells Nokia-branded phones, publishes the specification for the same model — it calls it the Nokia 105 C (2023) — and gives its maximum network speed as 2G, with GSM bands 900/1800 and nothing else. No 3G bands. No LTE bands. The SIM slot takes a mini SIM, the full-size card most networks stopped posting years ago.

Now set that against Ofcom's own page on the switch-off, published 6 March 2024 and last updated 10 August 2026. Britain's 3G networks are already off. On 2G, EE has said it will begin switching off from May 2029, O2 from Summer 2029 and Vodafone during 2030, and every operator has confirmed to the Government that 2G will be gone by 2033 at the latest. Ofcom's instruction to anyone holding a 2G-only handset is four words long: such devices “will need to be upgraded to at least 4G”.

There is a sharper version of that, and it bites today rather than in 2029. Three has never run a 2G network at all. Ofcom's page says so in terms, and adds that Three customers with older devices must replace them to make calls, send texts and use mobile data now that 3G has gone. A 2G-only phone is therefore not a phone with a 2029 problem on Three or on SMARTY, the brand Three runs. It is not a working phone on those networks on the day you unwrap it.

The fix is £15.99. The Nokia 110 sits two tiles away at £39.99, and its Currys product page gives “4G network: 4G” and “Dual Nano SIM”, with 128 MB of storage, microSD support to 32 GB and a line about HD voice over 4G. HMD's own specification for the Nokia 110 4G (2023) confirms networks of 2G, 3G and 4G and a nano SIM. Same shape of phone, same two-year guarantee, a third more money, and roughly seven more years of network behind it. On a £24 purchase that is a 67% uplift; on the decision it is the whole thing.

The one specification row Currys leaves blank

Currys does better than most big retailers on its own product pages. Prices render. Full specification tables render. The delivery charges are printed on the page you are reading, rather than hidden behind a basket. On the Nokia 105's page you can read the processor (Unisoc), the operating system (Nokia Series 30+), the screen resolution (QQVGA), the dimensions (115 x 49.4 x 14.45 mm) and the manufacturer's guarantee (2 years). It even labels the product type, in its own words, as a “SIM-free mobile phone”.

Under Connectivity, that table lists a row called “4G network” and a row called “2G”, and shows a value against neither of them. Both are empty. A shopper reading the only page the shop gives them for this handset cannot tell from it which generations of mobile network the phone speaks — which, given everything above, is the single field that decides whether the £24 is well spent or wasted. The Nokia 110's page, for contrast, fills the same row in: “4G network: 4G”. One of the two phones that most needs the answer is the one that does not get it.

Credit where it is due: the 105's page does carry a warning, which is more than nothing and more than the 110's page bothers with. The sentence reads “2G and 3G mobile signals will begin to be phased out within the next year.” Read on 23 October 2026, it is wrong in both directions at once. 3G has not begun to be phased out within the next year; it has already finished, on Ofcom's own account. And 2G does not begin to be phased out within the next year either — the earliest operator start date any network has published is May 2029, a little over two and a half years away. The instinct to warn is right and the copy behind it has not been read since it was written.

The honest summary is that this is stale text rather than a misleading claim, and a shopper who takes it at face value errs on the side of caution, which is the safe direction. But it is a warning on the cheapest product in a 360-line range, and the correct version of it — that this handset will not work on Three now and will not work on anything by 2033 — is both shorter and more useful than the one printed.

Four in five of us are keeping a dead phone, and Currys counted them

Currys commissioned its own research into this and published it on 22 June 2026: a study of 2,000 UK adults through Opinium. Four in five of us are holding onto a defunct mobile. One in three still have their very first phone, and “a quarter of which are old Nokias”. Citing Material Focus, the release puts 880 million unused items in British homes, an average of 30 per household.

That finding and the shop's own entry price are the same object seen from two ends. The retailer whose research says a quarter of hoarded first phones are old Nokias is also the retailer whose cheapest new phone is an old-style Nokia with a published network expiry date. Neither fact is a criticism of the other. Together they are the best argument on this page for spending the extra £15.99: the thing people do with a cheap feature phone is keep it for a decade, and this one has rather less than a decade of network left.

The release is worth reading for the reasons people gave, because they are not the ones a retailer would choose. 33% simply had not got round to recycling, 27% keep devices “just in case”, 23% do not know how to recycle and another 23% worry about data security. Only a third had recycled any tech in the past year, while 81% knew batteries in household waste can start fires, 77% understood that recycling cuts the need to mine new material and 64% knew old tech can be worth money. The gap between knowing and doing is the whole story, and Currys published it about its own customers. 41% have bought refurbished, rising to 50% of 18 to 34-year-olds against 29% of the over-55s, and the group collected 5.5 million items of e-waste for reuse and recycling last year. Paula Coughlan, its Chief People, Communications and Sustainability Officer, is quoted as wanting “to give tech its longest life”.

What the shop does about it is genuinely good and comes with one piece of arithmetic attached. You can recycle any tech free at a Currys store, in the page's own words “even if you didn't buy it from us”, and the group publishes its producer registrations rather than referring vaguely to a scheme. In return you get £5 off a later purchase — and the same page states “Minimum £25 spend to redeem voucher”. The cheapest phone in the shop is £24.99 in black and £24.00 in cyan. Hand in your old Nokia, take the voucher, and the newest Nokia on the shelf is a penny short of being allowed to use it. The £39.99 Nokia 110 clears the bar comfortably, which is one more small reason the 4G phone is the better buy.

The monthly figure on the tile is the dear one, and the small print says so

Most tiles in this range carry a second price in bold underneath the first. The Google Pixel 10 at £499.00 shows “From £20.22 per month for 36 months*”. The Pixel 10 Pro XL at £849.00 shows £34.40. The Galaxy S26 Ultra at £1,129.00 shows £45.75.

Currys' credit page leads with a different offer. It advertises paying “in monthly instalments, interest free, over terms of 12, 24 or 36 months”, a 48-month option at a 9.9% purchase rate, and buy-now-pay-later over 6, 9 or 12 months with no interest if the balance clears inside the period. On that reading, 36 months on a £499 phone would be £13.86.

Follow the asterisk and the shop tells you plainly which figure you are looking at: “Monthly prices displayed are based on 29.9% Representative APR (variable).” So the instalment printed beside each price is the interest-bearing one, and the interest-free terms are a promotion the same footnote describes as “offered on selected products from time to time”, with no indication on the tile whether this handset is one of them.

Do the sum the footnote invites, and label it as ours rather than theirs. Thirty-six payments of £20.22 is £727.92 against a £499.00 cash price — £228.92 more, or about 46% on top. The Pixel 10 Pro XL comes to £1,238.40 against £849.00, £389.40 more. The Galaxy S26 Ultra comes to £1,647.00 against £1,129.00, £518.00 more. All three land on the same 45.9% uplift, and all three reconcile to the penny with a straight 29.9% APR amortised over 36 months — which is a point in the shop's favour, because the numbers it prints are arithmetically exactly what its footnote says they are.

Two smaller things sit alongside. Credit here requires a £99 minimum spend, so the four cheapest phones in the range — the £24.00 and £24.99 Nokia 105s, the £39.99 Nokia 110 and the £64.99 Nokia 2660 Flip — cannot be spread at any rate, interest-free or otherwise. And the terms are better than the headline rate suggests for anyone who can clear the balance early: no deposit is required, there are “no early payment fees”, and overpayments of some or all of the balance carry no charge. The lender is Creation Consumer Finance Ltd, with Currys Group Limited acting as credit broker under exclusive arrangements with it, on an assumed credit limit of £1,200.

Free to collect, £3.99 to deliver, and on this phone that is a sixth of the price

The page that is supposed to explain delivery would not open. Five separate attempts on /services/delivery-installation/delivery-collection.html returned a client error, and it is linked from the top navigation and twice from the footer. The charges are on the product pages instead, which is where a shopper is standing anyway, and they are complete.

Standard delivery is £3.99 on an order under £40 and free over it. Next day is £5.99. Weekend all day is £6.99. A four-hour time slot is £9.99, and a weekend morning slot before noon is £10.99. Store collection is free, and the listing advertises it as available “in as little as an hour”, subject to availability, across a store estate the annual results put at 691 in six countries.

That free-over-£40 threshold does something specific to the cheap end of this range. A £24.00 Nokia 105 delivered costs £27.99, so the carriage is 16.6% on top of the goods. A £24.99 handset delivered is £28.98, or 16.0% on top. The £39.99 Nokia 110 is a penny below the threshold, so it too attracts £3.99 and arrives at £43.98 — and adding a £4.00 phone case would make the delivery free and the whole order cheaper than the phone plus postage. The £64.99 Nokia 2660 Flip ships free.

None of that is a trick, and the collection route sidesteps it entirely: on every tile in the range the cheapest way to get the goods is £0, by walking in. It is simply worth doing the sum before you check out, because on a £24 phone the postage is the largest single percentage any charge on this page adds to anything.

Thirty days either way, with the statute left unmentioned

Currys is more generous on returns than the law obliges and quieter about the law than it should be. Buy online and you can return the phone within 30 days — the page says “even if you've opened it for inspection” — provided it comes back unused, in resaleable condition, in its original box with every accessory. Buy in a store and you also get 30 days, but the packaging must be “unopened and sealed”. A faulty item is covered for 30 days from purchase or delivery, and after that the page offers repair “if still under guarantee”, which it describes as “usually 12 months from when you bought it”.

That last figure understates what you actually have on the phones at the cheap end of this range. Both Nokia product pages give a manufacturer's guarantee of 2 years, in the spec table and again as a banner. A shopper who reads only the returns page would think their cover ran out twelve months early.

Three gaps are worth knowing before you buy rather than after. The returns page gives no refund timescale at all — not a number of days, not a working-day window. It does not say who pays return postage on a change-of-mind return, which on a phone is the difference between a free return and a tracked parcel at your own cost. And it does not mention the Consumer Rights Act 2015 or the distance-selling cancellation right anywhere, so the 30 days reads as a company policy that could be withdrawn rather than as a voluntary extension of rights a shop cannot take away. It is worth saying plainly that a phone bought outright here has no ombudsman behind it either: the Financial Conduct Authority reaches the credit agreement and Ofcom's approved complaints schemes reach an airtime contract, which on a SIM-free purchase you have not bought. A dispute the shop will not settle ends in the county court.

One exclusion catches people out and it is specific to this department. In-store returns do not cover “connected products with airtime, like a mobile phone, SIM contract or broadband connection”, and the same page notes that contracts with the iD network can be changed or cancelled within 14 days while Vodafone contracts cannot be changed or cancelled at all. None of that touches a SIM-free handset, which is exactly the point: the cash purchase is the simplest thing in the shop, and the complications all belong to the bundles Currys does not sell here.

Currys prints the dates behind its own was-and-now prices. Two of three survive the test

Plenty of this range is marked down, and Currys does something unusual with the markdowns: it prints the window during which the higher price actually applied. The Pixel 10 reads “£499.00 Save £200.00 Was £699.00 (from 22/07/26 to 01/09/26)”. The Pixel 10 Pro XL reads “£849.00 Save £250.00 Was £1,099.00 (from 23/09/26 to 13/10/26)”. The Galaxy S26 Ultra reads “£1,129.00 Save £150.00 Was £1,279.00 (from 08/09/26 to 06/10/26)”. Most retailers give you the two prices and leave the dates out, and the dates are the only thing that makes a saving checkable.

The yardstick is the Chartered Trading Standards Institute's guidance for traders on pricing practices, last reviewed and updated in November 2025. It asks two questions of a was-and-now claim: “How recently was the higher price offered, compared to when the price comparison is being made?” and “How long was the product on sale at the higher price, compared to the period for which the price comparison is made?” A comparison is more likely to comply where it runs “for a period that is the same or shorter than the period during which the higher price was offered”. Its worked example of a claim that is more likely to comply refers to a price “charged less than two months ago with no intervening prices”; one that is less likely to comply refers to prices “charged many months ago”.

Because Currys published the dates, a reader can run both tests, and the arithmetic below is ours. The Pixel 10 Pro XL held its £1,099 for 20 days and has been at £849 for 10: recent, and the discount period is shorter than the full-price period. Clear on both counts. The Galaxy S26 Ultra held £1,279 for 28 days and has been at £1,129 for 17. Clear again. The Pixel 10 is the one that does not sit comfortably: £699 applied for 41 days and the £499 has now been running for 52, so the comparison period has outlasted the period it compares against, which is the situation the guidance puts on the wrong side of the line. At 52 days it is also brushing up against that two-month example.

That is a narrow point and it is not an accusation — the guidance sets out factors rather than a deadline, the £200 is real money off a real price, and a £699 Pixel 10 genuinely was sold at £699 this summer. The reason it is worth printing is that nothing else on this page can be audited by a shopper and this can, because Currys chose to publish the dates. The price promise is the opposite case. It offers to “price match before or after you buy” and says “We'll even price match 7 days after your purchase!”, refunding the difference if you find the same item cheaper elsewhere — and that page names no retailers it will match against, publishes no exclusions and sets out no claim procedure. Seven days is a real promise; what it covers is not written down.

Pages that would not open, and the questions they leave

Six Currys pages could not be read on 23 October 2026, and the pattern is consistent: the product pages work and the service pages do not. /services/mobile-phone-insurance.html failed on three attempts, which matters because it is linked from the footer of every page and because phone insurance is the one financial product a SIM-free buyer is most likely to be sold. /services/instant-replacement.html and /services/care-services/care-repair.html also failed, so the price bands for Currys' two protection plans could not be checked against a handset. /terms-conditions.html failed, so the clauses on when the contract forms and what happens on a pricing error could not be read. /services/delivery-installation/delivery-collection.html failed five times, and /phones/mobile-phones/refurbished-phones failed as well, so the refurbished range could not be priced at all — the only figure available for it is the 12-month guarantee named in the June 2026 press release, against the two years on the new Nokias.

What did open is worth naming for anyone retracing this. Product pages under /products/ fetch reliably, which the site's own robots.txt confirms by explicitly allowing /products* while disallowing search, basket, checkout, wishlist and every filter and sort parameter. The practical consequence of those filter rules is that the 360-tile range cannot be sorted by price or filtered by budget from outside, so the cheapest handset here was found by reading the Nokia brand page, which returned “Showing 6 of 6” and all six prices.

Two further things could not be settled. Currys Group Limited's own FCA firm reference number is not printed on any page that invokes its authorisation — the credit pages say only “Authorised & regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority” — and the register itself would not load, so this page cites the wording rather than a number. And the listing's own product count moved while it was being read: the first two loads returned “Showing 20 of 360”, a load between them returned “Showing 40 of 377”, and a later load returned 360 again. That is a presentation quirk of a stock feed rather than a criticism, and it is the reason the 360 above is dated to the day. There is also no independent rating of handset retail from anybody — Defaqto and Fairer Finance do not reach it, and Ofcom's complaints tables measure networks rather than shops — so on the quality of this retailer, as opposed to the quality of its disclosures, there is nothing to cite.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 23 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.