The £300 Wall: what it costs to leave a broadband contract
Between May and August, 2,472 UK households used our calculator to work out the cost of cancelling their broadband contract early. This is what they found, provider by provider. Every household counts once, so no single heavy user can skew the numbers.
*The sum of each household's typical estimated fee, before any switching credit is applied.
As featured in ISPreview
Key findings
All figures are medians per household, after removing implausible entries. Fees are estimates built from each provider's published early termination method, not billed amounts.
The typical household checking the cost of leaving faces a £279 exit fee. The mean is £317.
More than 4 in 10 households face a fee of £300 or more, matching or beating the largest switching credit any provider pays. For them, no deal on the market fully buys their freedom.
Virgin Media is the most expensive big-provider escape. TalkTalk, with its flat monthly fee, is the cheapest.
The TV trap: households with a TV bundle face a £396 median exit fee against £261 for broadband only.
More than one in eight households face £500 or more, rising to a £450 median for Virgin Media TV households.
A year still to serve: the typical household checks the cost of leaving with 12 months left on their contract, at almost every major provider (TalkTalk households have 13).
“What struck us most is that the typical household checks the cost of leaving with a whole year still to serve. That is twelve months of paying for something you already regret. Knowing your exit fee early gives you options: haggle with your provider, time your exit, or find a deal that helps cover the cost.”
The escape league table
Median estimated exit fee per household, by provider, across all package types. The typical household checks with about a year left on its contract.
| Provider | Households | Median monthly bill | Median exit fee | Fee relative to highest provider |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Virgin Media | 1,001 | £38 | £360 | |
| NOW Broadband* | 94 | £30 | £324 | |
| Vodafone | 554 | £31 | £317 | |
| Sky | 813 | £39 | £286 | |
| EE | 670 | £40 | £270 | |
| BT | 623 | £40 | £208 | |
| Plusnet | 267 | £30 | £198 | |
| TalkTalk | 369 | £30 | £146 |
*NOW Broadband's sample is 94 households, the smallest in the table, so treat its figure with more caution than the rest. Provider counts sum above 2,472 because some households check more than one provider. Figures blend broadband-only and TV-bundle households; the broadband-only view further down strips the TV effect out.
The order is mostly a story about method. Virgin Media and NOW Broadband charge close to the full remaining bill, so their customers face the steepest fees. TalkTalk charges a flat fee for every month left, whoever you are (published rates run £10.20 to £11.25 a month depending on plan; we model the £11.25 Full Fibre rate), which is why its customers get away lightest.
BT, EE and Plusnet sit lower than their bills suggest because they deduct the costs they no longer incur once you leave. Virgin Media also tops the table on volume: more households checked the cost of leaving Virgin than any other provider, with over a thousand doing so in three and a half months.
The TV trap
Median exit fee per household, TV bundle vs broadband only, at the four biggest providers.
Exit fees scale with the size of your bill, and nothing inflates a bill like a broadband and TV bundle. The result is a quiet irony: the households that bought the most are the ones that can least afford to leave.
The premium is not a Virgin Media quirk either. It shows up at all four providers that sell TV, and EE's is actually the largest, at £149 per household.
The same two providers lead a different table as well. Ofcom's complaints data for the first quarter of 2026 (published 23 July, covering January to March, so a period just before our window) found EE and Virgin Media were the most complained-about pay-TV providers, and categorised Virgin Media's TV complaints as mainly about billing, pricing and charges. The two datasets measure different things, but a TV household weighing up a £450 exit fee is weighing it against that backdrop.
The broadband-only league table
The same league with the TV effect stripped out: broadband-only households, same pipeline, same window.
| Provider | Households | Median monthly bill | Median exit fee | Fee relative to highest provider |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Virgin Media | 805 | £35 | £340 | |
| Vodafone | 546 | £31 | £314 | |
| NOW Broadband* | 85 | £30 | £304 | |
| Sky | 688 | £35 | £264 | |
| EE | 577 | £39 | £247 | |
| BT | 550 | £39 | £202 | |
| Plusnet | 261 | £30 | £197 | |
| TalkTalk | 349 | £30 | £135 |
*NOW Broadband's broadband-only sample is 85 households, the smallest in the table, so treat its figure with more caution than the rest. Household counts are the broadband-only subset of each provider's panel, and the four providers that sell TV bundles match the broadband-only figures in the section above exactly: one dataset, two views.
Stripping TV out reshuffles the order. Vodafone becomes the second most expensive provider to leave and NOW Broadband third, despite modest monthly bills, because their published formulas retain a high share of the remaining payments. Virgin Media still tops the table, and TalkTalk stays cheapest by a distance on its flat per-month charge.
Where leaving costs most: 16 cities ranked
Median estimated exit fee per household by city, same pipeline and window. Only cities with at least 20 households are shown.
| City | Households | Median exit fee | Facing £300 or more | Fee relative to highest city |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edinburgh | 46 | £336 | 63% | |
| Newcastle upon Tyne | 46 | £304 | 52.2% | |
| Birmingham | 104 | £303 | 54.8% | |
| Norwich | 62 | £300 | 50% | |
| Wolverhampton | 55 | £295 | 47.3% | |
| Stevenage* | 21 | £294 | 47.6% | |
| Plymouth | 62 | £292 | 50% | |
| London | 541 | £288 | 45.5% | |
| Manchester | 90 | £288 | 47.8% | |
| Bath* | 22 | £280 | 31.8% | |
| Belfast | 33 | £270 | 36.4% | |
| Luton* | 29 | £265 | 31% | |
| Cardiff* | 23 | £259 | 43.5% | |
| Swindon | 41 | £240 | 41.5% | |
| Leeds | 34 | £232 | 35.3% | |
| Glasgow* | 27 | £209 | 33.3% |
*Fewer than 30 households, so treat these figures with more caution than the rest. City comes from each household's internet connection rather than a postcode, which is why we also removed five locations that are really provider network hubs rather than places the sampled households live, including a large Sky hub that presents as Isleworth. Mobile connections can resolve to the nearest big city, and at these sample sizes each city's median carries a wide margin (the city CSV publishes 95% confidence bounds per row), so this table describes our sample: read it as indicative, and don't over-read small gaps between neighbouring rows.
Edinburgh tops our table at £336, and the city's strongest finding is one that holds up statistically even at this sample size: 63% of Edinburgh households face £300 or more, well clear of the 43.7% national figure. Those fees match or beat the largest switching credit on the market, so most of the city cannot count on a new deal to cover the cost of leaving. Glasgow sits at the bottom of the table at £209, so in our data the typical Edinburgh household's fee was around 60% higher than the typical Glasgow one.
The pattern behind the ranking is provider mix, not geography. The cities near the top are the ones where the largest share of households were checking Virgin Media fees: 45.7% in Edinburgh against 18.5% in Glasgow. Virgin Media has the steepest published exit method of any provider, so where cable customers cluster, the city's typical escape cost climbs with them.
The full city table is included in the city CSV (CC-BY 4.0, same terms as the provider data).
How big is the wall?
The 2,472 households by their typical estimated exit fee.
Switching credits are the market's answer to exit fees: a new provider pays towards the charge you owe your old one. They work well for the majority under the wall. Above it, households either pay the difference themselves or sit out the rest of the contract with a deal they no longer want.
Steady demand, all summer
Households checking the cost of leaving, by month.
| Month | Households |
|---|---|
| May (from the 16th) | 473 |
| June | 848 |
| July | 841 |
| August | 730 |
Demand is steady rather than seasonal. More than 700 households a month checked the cost of leaving in every full month of the window, peaking near 850 in June, with no April price rise in the news to drive them. Contract regret is a year-round condition.
Methodology
- Source: Switchity's free broadband early termination fee calculator. All inputs (provider, monthly cost, remaining months, TV status) are self-reported by users.
- Sample: 2,472 UK households, 16 May to 31 August 2026. A household is one browser: we count the anonymous identifier Google Analytics assigns it. The calculator collects no names, emails, addresses or any other personal data.
- Every household counts once: the typical household modelled 2scenarios and a small minority modelled dozens, so all headline figures take each household's own median scenario first, then the median across households. No single user, however active, can move the results. Across the window households ran 18,483 calculations in total.
- Industry traffic excluded: households whose visits were referred from corporate intranets or workplace collaboration tools were excluded as likely industry use rather than genuine consumers.
- Combined total: the £783,498headline figure is the sum of each household's typical (median) estimated fee, assuming no switching credit is applied.
- Estimates, not bills: exit fees are estimated using each provider's published early termination methodology (verified May 2026; Virgin Media and NOW Broadband re-verified August 2026), not billed amounts. The formulas are built into our calculator, which anyone can check, and each provider publishes its own method: Virgin Media, NOW Broadband, Vodafone, Sky, EE, BT, Plusnet and TalkTalk.
- Named providers only: the report covers the eight providers whose published early termination methods our calculator models. Households who selected a smaller provider are excluded, because the calculator's estimate for those uses a general industry assumption rather than a published method.
- Data cleaning: entries outside plausible bounds (monthly cost £5 to £200, remaining term 1 to 24 months) excluded. Medians quoted as the primary measure throughout.
- Self-selection: the sample is households actively considering leaving mid-contract. Findings describe that population, not all UK broadband customers.
Use this data
Journalists and researchers are welcome to republish these figures and tables with attribution and a link to this page (CC-BY 4.0). The full provider table is available as a CSV, and we can cut the data further on request: hello@switchity.co.uk.
Download the CSVMore Switchity research: The UK Full Fibre Divide, our Ofcom-based coverage dataset for 123 UK towns, and the UK mobile coverage hub.
Exit fees: your questions answered
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