Utility Warehouse Gas

Our interest: the Utility Warehouse link on this page is our own UW Partner link. We are a registered UW Partner, which means UW pays us a one-off bonus and a percentage of the monthly bill if you join through it. It costs you nothing extra and it does not change what we say about UW — including the parts below that are critical. UW does not publish the Partner rules that govern where a Partner link may be used, so we have said so rather than claim an approval we cannot show you.

Utility Warehouse publishes every gas rate it sells, for all 14 regions, on labelled PDFs anyone can download. That is more than several larger suppliers manage, and it let us check its central claim properly. Here is what the labels show.

UW’s variable gas discount is taken entirely off the standing charge. Value, Gold and Double Gold charge an identical gas unit rate in every single region. The gap between the cheapest and dearest of the three is 10.230p a day — and it is exactly 10.230p in all fourteen, which is not a coincidence but a flat daily credit.

That shapes who benefits. A flat £37.34 a year (our arithmetic: 10.230p × 365, excluding VAT) is worth the same to a flat using 4,000 kWh as to a five-bedroom house burning 20,000. Proportionally, the light user gains far more — the reverse of how bundling discounts usually work.

The three variable tariffs, side by side

These are UW’s own published gas figures for the Eastern region, paying by Direct Debit, excluding VAT. Watch the last column.

We re-downloaded the labels and re-typed the figures, because an unchanging column usually means someone has copied a cell wrongly. It is not an error. London reads 28.551, 24.584 and 18.321 against a flat 7.758p; Southern reads 27.559, 23.592 and 17.329 against a flat 7.778p. Same pattern, same 10.230p spread, every region.

On a 10,000 kWh household — a round number we have picked, not a published typical — that works out at £854.62 a year on Value and £817.28 on Double Gold, before VAT. Useful, worth having, and entirely driven by the fixed daily charge.

One gap you should know about before you count on it: UW does not publish how many services unlock Gold or Double Gold. Its fixed and tracker labels state their requirements precisely. The variable ones say nothing, and the website offers only that getting it together “unlocks the cheaper variable rate”. You cannot work out in advance which of those three rows you would land on.

Buying gas on its own puts you on UW's dearest gas

UW sells four fixed tariffs, and which one you are allowed to buy depends on how many of its services you take. The gas rates run in the opposite direction to what a single-fuel shopper would hope:

Fixed Start 98 carries the highest gas unit rate of any tariff UW currently sells. The tariff aimed at someone who wants energy and nothing else is the one that charges most per kWh — 0.632p above the rest, which is £63.20 a year on 10,000 kWh.

Run the whole annual bill on that usage and the ladder reads £930.00 on Fixed Start, £862.98 on Fixed 98 and £844.11 on Fixed Saver, excluding VAT. The gap between top and bottom rung is £85.89 a year on gas alone — more than twice what the entire variable discount is worth.

Two quirks in that table are real and not transcription slips. Fixed 98 and Fixed Essentials 98 share an identical unit rate in every region, differing only on the daily charge. And Fixed Saver’s whole advantage over Fixed 98 is the standing charge: the per-kWh price is the same 7.725p. Again, the discount lands on the fixed charge.

All four fixed tariffs end on 30 September 2027 and carry an exit fee of £75 including VAT per fuel.

Six tracker prices are live at once, and nobody tells you which you get

UW’s tracker range follows the Ofgem cap at what it calls “a set discount”. What its own label library shows is that each tracker tariff exists in six separate tranches, all published and all current for the October to December 2026 period — and their rates differ by more than a rounding.

Take Tracker Saver, where the standing charge is identical across both tranches so the comparison is clean. At 10,000 kWh the tranche 1 price comes to £817.39 a year and tranche 6 to £777.29 — a difference of £40.10 for a tariff with the same name, on the same day, from the same supplier.

UW does not publish any rule for which tranche a new customer joins. We looked for one and found nothing. Nor does it ever state the size of the “guaranteed discount” below the cap — not in pence, not as a percentage, not in the labels and not on the site. A discount you cannot measure before you sign is a difficult thing to shop on.

The tracker tariffs also end on 30 September 2027 and carry the same £75 per fuel exit fee, though UW says no fee applies in the first 14 days or the last 49 days of the term.

Where you live changes the gas price more than you might think

UW prices gas by the same 14 regional areas the industry uses, and the spread across them is real. On the Value tariff:

• Cheapest unit rate: East Midlands at 7.450p
• Dearest unit rate: Southern at 7.778p — 0.328p higher, or £32.80 a year on 10,000 kWh
• Lowest daily charge: Southern at 27.559p
• Highest daily charge: London at 28.551p

Southern is a neat illustration of why a headline rate tells you little: it has the dearest gas per kWh and the cheapest standing charge of all fourteen. Put the two together on 10,000 kWh and the annual range runs from £846.48 in the East Midlands to £880.01 in London, ex VAT.

Economy 7 rates sit in the same labels, as do the Cash Cheque columns, which are materially higher than Direct Debit throughout.

Prepayment gas, and a label that contradicts itself

UW does offer pay as you go gas on a smart prepayment meter, which not every supplier in its class does, and it publishes a prepayment label with the full regional table. In Eastern the figures are 27.940p a day and 7.313p a kWh.

Set against the Value tariff’s 7.534p, that prepayment unit rate looks lower — which would be unusual and worth knowing. We are not going to tell you it is cheaper, because UW’s own prepayment PDF disagrees with itself about VAT. Page one is headed “Prepayment (exl VAT)” while the product information printed on that same page says prices include VAT at the applicable rate. Page two is headed “Prepayment (inc VAT)”.

Those two readings are 5% apart, which is larger than the difference we would be reporting. Until UW fixes the document, treat the prepayment comparison as unresolved and ask them to confirm the basis in writing before switching on the strength of it.

It is not the only caption error in the set. On the Value and Gold labels, both the Direct Debit page and the Cash Cheque page say “Payment method: Direct Debit”; on Double Gold, both say Cash/Cheque. The rate tables underneath are correct and distinct — it is the captions that are wrong. Read the table heading, not the small print above it.

Who actually sells you the gas

Utility Warehouse does not produce gas and does not hide the fact. Its annual report states plainly that it sources energy from E.ON, and the supply licence is held by a subsidiary, Gas Plus Supply Limited, alongside Electricity Plus Supply Limited for the other fuel.

The parent is Telecom Plus PLC, company number 03263464, listed and filing accounts, registered at Network HQ, 508 Edgware Road, London NW9 5AB. The most recent annual report gives 1,434,403 customers, up 23.3% in a year, and 3,803,823 services supplied.

That matters in two directions. A listed parent with audited accounts is a good deal more transparent than most of the small suppliers that failed in 2021 and 2022. But you are buying a reseller’s product: the gas is bought wholesale, and UW competes on packaging and price rather than on generation.

Churn is disclosed too, at 14.2%, up from 13.7% the year before — so roughly one customer in seven leaves each year.

The service record, with the gas-specific detail

Citizens Advice scores Utility Warehouse 2.63 out of 5 for April to June 2026, ranking it 13th. That is below the middle of the table and it is the number to weigh against the rates above.

The components that bear on a gas account specifically:

• Billing and metering: 3.0 out of 5. Bill accuracy 97.07% on smart meters against 92.55% on traditional ones, and 90.4% of smart meters working correctly.
• Complaints: 2.5 out of 5, on 40.6 complaints per 10,000 customers.
• Contact: 2.4 out of 5. Average call wait 3 minutes 35 seconds; 43.9% of emails answered within two days, against 98.8% of WhatsApp messages.

The gap between 97.07% and 92.55% is the clearest argument for taking the smart meter. The email figure is the one to plan around: write to UW and fewer than half the replies arrive within two working days, so use WhatsApp or the phone for anything time-sensitive, such as a disputed meter reading.

The last Energy Ombudsman data UW published is Q1 2023, which is old, and the Ombudsman has issued nothing for UW since. For what it is worth, billing accounted for 27.72 of the 48.8 complaints accepted per 100,000 accounts, and the three leading causes were “disputed gas or electricity usage”, estimated readings and incorrect opening or closing meter readings. The average award was £61.

There is also a regulatory finding on the record. In November 2021 UW agreed to pay £1.5 million into Ofgem’s voluntary redress fund over its treatment of customers in debt between 2013 and 2019, Ofgem concluding it had “failed to treat some of its customers fairly”. It is five years old and it was settled, but if you expect to need a payment plan, it belongs in your decision.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 8 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.