Tariffs and grants / Supplier landscape / EDF Energy supplier profile

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EDF Energy supplier profile

Large zero-carbon generator with EV, heat pump and export products.

Company status, customer and market figures, and tariff terms in this profile were checked on 22 July 2026. Historical figures retain the date stated with them.

EDF Energy is a British energy supplier, wholly owned by the French state company EDF (Electricite de France), supplying gas and electricity to around five million UK households. It is one of the country’s largest electricity generators, with most of its own output coming from nuclear. For a home running solar panels, a battery, an EV or a heat pump, EDF offers a specific tariff for each of those loads, four SEG (Smart Export Guarantee) tariffs for exported power and its own solar and heat pump installation arms through two acquired companies.

Owned by the French state, and one of the Big Six

EDF Energy was formed in January 2002 from the merger of three former regional electricity boards, Seeboard, London Electricity and SWEB Energy, together with Virgin Energy and a set of coal and gas power stations. In 2009 it took control of British Energy, the UK’s nuclear generator, buying the government’s share capital, which made it one of the largest generators in the country. The parent, EDF SA, was delisted from the Paris stock exchange in 2023 and re-nationalised by the French state, and the UK retail business is a wholly owned subsidiary registered as EDF Energy Customers Limited, based in London.

It serves around five million households, though the figure varies by source and by whether it is counted in households or accounts. On Ofgem (Office of Gas and Electricity Markets) data cited by Confused.com for November 2025, EDF held about 10.2% of the electricity market and 8.6% of gas, making it the fifth largest supplier. It is one of the “Big Six” that long dominated the market, a label that persists even though the order behind it has changed: Octopus Energy, British Gas, E.ON Next and OVO all sat ahead of EDF on those November 2025 figures. Its UK contact centres are in Sunderland, Exeter and Hove.

A nuclear-backed fuel mix

EDF generates most of its electricity from nuclear, which gives its supply a lower carbon intensity than the UK average. Its disclosed fuel mix for April 2024 to March 2025 was 54.8% nuclear, 21.0% gas, 18.2% renewable, 4.2% coal and 1.8% other, at a carbon intensity of 135 grams of CO2 per kWh against a UK average of 154 grams. Its zero-carbon tariffs are backed entirely by nuclear generation and its renewable tariffs entirely by renewables, both disclosed at zero grams of CO2 per kWh, while electricity on its other tariffs is disclosed at 233 grams.

Behind the retail arm sits a large generation fleet: five nuclear power stations, more than 35 onshore wind farms and three offshore wind farms. EDF is building Hinkley Point C and holds a minority stake in the planned Sizewell C. Its EV tariffs are backed by 100% zero-carbon electricity.

Standard import tariffs and the price cap

EDF sells import electricity and gas across the usual UK tariff types. Simply Tracker follows Ofgem’s price cap, with unit rates that can move every three months and a standing charge held at a discount for a guaranteed year, and it carries a £25 exit fee per fuel. Simply Fixed locks the unit rates and standing charge for the term, again with exit fees. The default Standard Variable tariff, sold as Easy Online, changes with the cap every three months and has no end date. EDF also offers a no-standing-charge electricity tariff and Economy 7.

The Ofgem cap for April to June 2026 was £1,641 a year for a typical dual-fuel direct-debit household, with an electricity unit rate of 24.67p per kWh and a standing charge of 57.21p a day, and a gas unit rate of 5.74p per kWh with a 29.09p daily standing charge. The cap rose to £1,862 a year from July 2026. EDF’s cheapest fixed deal in July 2026, Essentials Plus 12M, was around £1,649 a year for a typical dual-fuel household paying by direct debit, roughly £213 below the July cap but about £113 above the cheapest fix on the whole market.

GoElectric, the Pod Point bundle and Smart Charging

GoElectric is EDF’s core EV tariff, giving seven hours of off-peak electricity every night from 11pm to 6am at 6.99p per kWh. It is a one-year fixed-price tariff, works with any EV and any home charger and carries a £75 exit fee. The off-peak window was extended from five hours to seven, and moved to 11pm-6am, from April 2026 for both new and existing customers. EDF says demand for its EV tariffs rose 32% year on year, and that an average motorist can save around £1,181 a year against petrol using GoElectric with the Smart Charging bolt-on.

Pod Point Plug & Power bundles the tariff with a Pod Point Solo 3S charger and a lower off-peak rate of 6.49p per kWh. The charger costs £499 upfront rather than £999, with the balance spread over two years. EDF owns Pod Point, having taken a majority stake in February 2020 and completed the buyout in August 2025 for £10.6 million. It is worth checking the bundle’s daily standing charge against the standalone GoElectric rate, since a higher daily charge on the bundle can offset the reduced upfront charger price over the two years. Drivers who work from home and cannot move much daytime use into the cheap window may also find the higher day rate makes GoElectric more expensive overall.

The Smart Charging bolt-on adds to GoElectric for a £60 annual bill credit, paid as £5 a month, in return for letting EDF schedule charging. It opens extra off-peak hours beyond the standard 11pm-6am window, runs on the Kraken platform and works with myenergi zappi and Hypervolt chargers. More than a thousand drivers had joined it by December 2025. EDF says GoElectric with the bolt-on can save up to £555 a year against its Standard Variable rates.

Heat Pump Tracker

Heat Pump Tracker is EDF’s tariff for homes with an air source heat pump. It gives two cheap-rate periods a day, from 4am to 7am and from 1pm to 4pm, six hours in total, with a 10p per kWh discount off the standard rate during those windows. There is no peak premium: outside the cheap periods the household pays EDF’s standard unit rate rather than a raised peak rate. The unit rates are reviewed every three months in line with the price cap, while the 10p discount stays fixed, and there are no exit fees or tie-ins.

EDF puts the saving at up to £146 a year against its standard tariff. An independent estimate from Sunsave is higher, at around £294, with the gap likely down to regional rates and different baseline assumptions, so the real saving depends on the property and its usage. To join, a household must be an EDF customer with a heat pump installed and a smart meter sending half-hourly readings, and EDF may ask for evidence of the installation such as an MCS certificate or a photo. Some heat pump owners prefer EDF’s FreePhase Dynamic tariff instead, which prices by time of day rather than fixed windows.

Empower solar tariffs and the ASA ruling

EDF’s Empower tariffs are import tariffs aimed at solar and battery homes. Empower Fixed Exclusive 12m is open only to customers who buy solar or a battery from EDF, installed by its Contact Solar arm, and it carries no standing charge for 12 months, fixed rates, a 10p per kWh overnight discount for charging a battery and no exit fees. Empower Fixed offers the same overnight battery discount and no exit fees to households that already own solar or a battery. The exclusive version launched in June 2024, marketed as “Britain’s first solar tariff with no standing charge”.

EDF’s advertising for the Empower proposition drew a ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in February 2025. The ASA upheld seven complaints against a radio advert and found EDF’s “nil electricity bill” claim misleading, on the basis that stored energy would be unlikely to cover a household’s usage consistently, particularly in winter. EDF was told to make the basis of any such claim clear in future adverts. A no-standing-charge tariff removes the fixed daily fee, but the household still pays for the electricity it imports when its own generation and storage fall short.

What EDF pays for exported power

EDF is a mandatory SEG licensee, so it has to offer a tariff paying small-scale generators for electricity they export to the grid. It runs four export tariffs at different rates. Export Exclusive 12m V3 pays 18p per kWh with no exit fees, for customers who buy solar or a battery from EDF after 2 March 2026. An earlier version, V2, is listed at 24p per kWh fixed for 12 months in a July 2026 market summary, so the rate a household is offered depends on when and how it signed up. Export 12m pays 15p per kWh on a one-year fixed tariff to existing EDF electricity customers, the SEG Export Variable Value tariff pays 5.6p per kWh to EDF electricity customers and a no-strings variable tariff pays 3p per kWh to anyone regardless of supplier.

On a Which? comparison from April 2026, the 24p V2 rate was the second best SEG rate nationally, behind Good Energy at 25p, and the 18p V3 rate ranked fourth. The tariffs accept solar PV, wind, hydro, anaerobic digestion and micro-CHP (micro combined heat and power), and a household needs a smart or half-hourly meter. A generator cannot draw SEG payments from EDF while receiving Feed-in Tariff payments or SEG payments from another supplier.

FreePhase time-of-use tariff

FreePhase is EDF’s smart time-of-use electricity tariff, splitting the day into three price bands: Green (11pm to 6am) at the cheapest rate, Amber (6am to 4pm and 7pm to 11pm) at a middle rate and Red (4pm to 7pm) at the highest. It comes in two versions. FreePhase Dynamic changes its unit rates daily with the wholesale market, and FreePhase Static fixes them for 12 months. When wholesale prices turn negative, both offer free electricity: the Dynamic version drops to a zero rate during the window and the Static version credits the equivalent back on the next bill, with EDF texting the day before each free period. The Dynamic rate is capped at 75p per kWh as a worst-case ceiling.

FreePhase has no exit fees and needs a smart meter, half-hourly data sharing and payment by direct debit, and EDF describes it as a beta tariff. In one customer’s comparison over October, FreePhase Dynamic came out around 3% more expensive than Octopus Agile, though some find its three fixed bands easier to follow than a tariff that reprices every half hour.

Sunday Saver free-electricity challenge

Sunday Saver rewards customers with free electricity on a Sunday for shifting weekday peak-time usage. Customers who move at least half of their peak usage, measured across 4pm to 7pm from Monday to Friday, out of that window earn up to 16 hours of free electricity the following Sunday, delivered as a zero unit rate during the reward hours. It needs a smart meter sending half-hourly readings, and it runs alongside GoElectric, so an EV household can combine the free Sunday hours with the nightly off-peak window.

Installing solar and heat pumps through Contact Solar and EDF Heat Pumps

EDF fits solar, batteries and heat pumps through two businesses it owns rather than through third-party installers. Contact Solar, a Chorley-based installer bought in February 2024, is MCS-certified and TrustMark-registered and delivers EDF’s solar installations using Jinko Tiger Neo 430W and JA Solar 405W panels. A typical system at launch was ten panels with a 5kW hybrid inverter and a 5.32kWh battery for an average of £8,495, with VAT at 0% on solar and battery work, a 25-year panel warranty and a 10-year warranty on the battery and inverter. Independent pricing put a 4kW system at roughly £6,495 to £7,995 installed and battery packages from around £3,995, so quoted prices vary with system size and site.

EDF’s air source heat pumps are installed by EDF Heat Pumps, a Which? Trusted Trader built on CB Heating, a heat pump installer EDF acquired in 2023. Prices start from £3,999 after the Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant of £7,500, though that entry price assumes an existing hot water cylinder can be reused. The installation is MCS accredited, comes with a “Heat Pump Promise” money-back term and can be spread over two years at 0% finance.

Warm Home Discount

EDF takes part in the Warm Home Discount, a government-mandated scheme that applies a £150 one-off discount to an eligible customer’s electricity bill rather than paying it out as cash. Dual-fuel customers may be able to take the discount against their gas bill instead. There are three eligibility groups: Core Group 1 for people on Pension Credit Guarantee Credit and Core Group 2 for people on qualifying means-tested benefits in England and Wales, both applied automatically, and a Broader Group in Scotland that has to be applied for each year. Prepayment and pay-as-you-go customers are eligible, the scheme does not run in Northern Ireland, and the 2025-2026 round has closed and reopens in October 2026.

Customer-service record and past fines

EDF scored 2.90 out of 5 in the Citizens Advice supplier star rating for January to March 2026, ranking 11th. Its underlying figures for that period were 47.6 complaints per 10,000 customers, an average call-centre wait of 2 minutes 46 seconds, 85.6% of emails answered within two days and 92.3% of its smart meters working correctly. EDF’s own homepage cites an “Excellent” Trustpilot rating.

Two Ofgem penalties sit further back. EDF was fined £2 million in 2009 for failing to meet statutory timescales for offering network connections, and it paid £3 million in 2014 after an Ofgem investigation found it lacked proper procedures to receive, record and process complaints between May 2011 and January 2012, following a new IT system. Both relate to past incidents rather than current performance. EDF was also appointed by Ofgem in 2019 to take on around 8,000 customers of the failed supplier Solarplicity, and disputes it cannot resolve fall under the Energy Ombudsman scheme.

Smart meters and digital account tools

EDF’s smart tariffs run on smart meter data, so FreePhase, Sunday Saver, the Smart Charging bolt-on and the SEG export tariffs all need a smart meter sending half-hourly readings. EDF fits credit smart meters, standard smart meters and Smart Pay As You Go meters, booked through its MyAccount portal or by phone, with its installation partner arranging the appointment. After installation an in-home display shows real-time usage and spending in pounds and pence. Customers manage their account through the MyAccount web portal and a mobile app, and the GoElectric tariff adds an Energy Hub tool for managing EV charging.

Applies to

Solar, Battery, EV charging, Heat

Last reviewed

22 Jul 2026