Octopus Agile price change 2026: what the new formula means for each region

Octopus has published a new version of the Agile pricing formula in its "Agile pricing explained" page. It raises the peak charge in 13 of the 14 regions, reshuffles the regional multipliers, and lowers the price cap from 100p to 70p per kWh.

The most important thing to know first: it is not live yet. At the time of writing, every region's rates published by the Octopus API are still produced by the current formula, to the penny. The new formula is announced, not applied.

This article explains what changes, what it means for each region, and why the headline "prices are going up" is only half the story: the cap and the multipliers push in opposite directions.

Agile's import price for a half-hour slot is built like this:

min(D × W + P, cap)

W is the wholesale price for that half-hour, which is the same everywhere in Great Britain. D is your region's multiplier, and P is a charge added on top only between 16:00 and 18:59, the evening peak. VAT and a green-levy discount are applied after that, and the levy is what decides when a rate lands below zero. That corner is easy to get wrong, so section 3 below comes back to it.

Three things change:

• The cap falls from 100p to 70p per kWh. In formula terms the ceiling comes down from 95 to 67, because VAT is applied after capping. This is a hard limit on what any half-hour can cost you.
• P rises in 13 of 14 regions. Yorkshire is the sole exception, and it falls. The average rise is a little over a third, but it is very uneven. See the table below.
• D changes in 7 of 14 regions. Three go up (London, Merseyside & Northern Wales, Yorkshire) and four go down (South East England, South Wales, South West England, North Scotland).

Because the multiplier applies to the wholesale price and the peak charge is a flat addition, these two changes hit at different times of day. That is the key to reading the regional table.

These are the multipliers and peak charges Octopus has published. D is the regional multiplier applied to the wholesale price all day; P is the extra charge added only between 16:00 and 18:59. Each change is shown against the value in force today.

D moves in 7 of the 14 regions: up in 3, down in 4. P rises in 13 and falls in 1.

To make this concrete, we took every half-hour of the last twelve months of real Agile prices for each region and recalculated it under both formulas. That gives an honest answer to "what would this have cost me", rather than a comparison of multipliers in the abstract.

The results are more varied than the peak-charge increases suggest, because the lower cap protects you at exactly the moments prices would otherwise run away.

Averaged over the last twelve months of real prices. "Off-peak" is everything outside 16:00 to 18:59, "peak" is that window. The last column is the change in annual cost for a household using 3,000 kWh a year. Calculated by applying both formulas to every half-hour of published Agile rates from August 2025 to October 2026. Years differ, so treat these as the direction and rough scale of the change rather than a forecast.

Three things worth knowing, in plain terms.

1. The 70p cap is new protection, not a tighter limit

The cap is the most any half-hour can cost you, however high the wholesale price goes. The old cap was 100p, and in practice it almost never applied: across all 14 regions and a whole year, only four half-hours ever reached it.

The new cap is 70p, which is much easier to reach. Over the same year, 822 half-hours would have hit it. So this is not the cap getting stricter for people who were already hitting it. It is a ceiling appearing where, for almost everyone, there wasn't one.

That matters because it limits the damage on the worst evenings. In East England, for example, 61 half-hours would have been capped at 66.85p. Under the current formula none of those 61 got near 100p; the most expensive was 91.65p.

2. Four regions would have paid less

South West England, North Scotland, South East England and South Wales would have been cheaper over the last twelve months under the new formula.

There is a simple reason. In those four regions the multiplier goes down, and the multiplier applies to every half-hour of the day. The evening peak does get more expensive, but the peak is only three hours out of 24. A small saving across the other 21 hours adds up to more than the peak costs.

South East England shows this most clearly. Its peak charge almost doubles, from 12p to 23.5p, the biggest in the country. It still comes out about £22 a year better off, because its multiplier falls from 2.20 to 2.00.

3. Negative prices change, but not the same way everywhere

In some half-hours the rate goes below zero, which means you are paid to use electricity rather than charged for it. People call these "plunges".

Before going further, one thing that trips almost everyone up: a plunge is not the same thing as the wholesale price going negative. There is a 3.5p "green levy" taken off every half-hour's rate, as the very last step after VAT. If the rate before that levy is less than 3.5p, the result is below zero even though the wholesale price was still positive.

The dividing line is easier to see as a number. In London today the rate comes out negative for any half-hour whose wholesale price is below about +16.7p. Not zero. About +16.7p. Raise that region's multiplier and the line moves down to about +15.2p.

That single fact explains why raising the multiplier gives you fewer plunges, which sounds backwards. A higher multiplier scales the whole calculation up, so the line between "negative" and "not negative" moves. Plenty of half-hours sit just under it and get pushed back above zero. In London, of 652 negative half-hours over the year, 440 had a positive wholesale price: cheap overnight slots that went negative on the bill only because of the levy. Those are the ones a higher multiplier sweeps back above zero.

Half-hours that are genuinely expensive-negative are a much smaller group, and they respond the other way: a bigger multiplier makes an already-negative number more negative. So both things are true at once, which is why the effect looks contradictory until you see where the line is.

With that in mind, here is what happens in each group of regions:

• Where the multiplier goes up (London, Merseyside & Northern Wales, Yorkshire), there would be fewer plunges. 181 half-hours over the year would no longer dip below zero; they land just above it instead. A typical one is a half-hour at +16.6p wholesale, which is −0.01p today in London and +0.34p after.
• But the deep ones go deeper. A bigger multiplier makes a strongly-negative price more negative, not less. London's deepest half-hour would go from −11.28p to −12.05p.
• Where the multiplier goes down (South West England, North Scotland, South East England, South Wales), it is the reverse: 298 more negative half-hours across those four regions, but each one worth less.
• Where the multiplier is unchanged (the other seven regions), nothing moves at all.

Across Great Britain as a whole the net is more negative half-hours, not fewer: 298 gained against 181 lost. A Yorkshire battery owner and a South West one get opposite answers from the same change.

None of this makes any half-hour expensive. A plunge that stops being negative becomes roughly free. But if you chase negative prices with a battery or an electric car, check which group your region is in before assuming the new formula helps or hurts you.

Nothing has been announced for Agile Outgoing. Everything above is about Agile Import, the tariff you pay for electricity coming in. Octopus's published explanation covers the import formula only, and we have found no reference anywhere on their site to the export formula changing.

That said, it would be a surprise if it stayed exactly as it is.

Agile Outgoing is built from the same wholesale price as Agile Import. It uses its own numbers, a transmission-loss multiplier, a flat per-kWh benefit and a peak addition, but the underlying market price it tracks is identical. Octopus's stated reasons for the import change apply just as much to export: the formula has not been seriously revised since 2018, and the costs it reflects have moved a long way since then. If the inputs no longer describe the import side of the market accurately, there is no obvious reason they would still describe the export side.

So our expectation, and it is only an expectation, is that an Outgoing revision follows at some point. We have no date, no figures, and no confirmation that it is even planned. Every Outgoing rate on this site remains calculated from the current formula, and we will write about it properly if and when something is actually published.

If you export, the practical advice does not change: keep watching your region's Outgoing rates as they are today, because those are the ones you are paid.

Not much, yet. Specifically, nothing based on the new numbers until they are live. Three practical points:

• Don't re-plan around these figures today. The rates on this site, and in the Octopus app, are still worked out with the current formula. That is the price you pay.
• Shifting away from the evening peak matters more, not less. In every region the peak window gets more expensive relative to the rest of the day, with the sole exception of Yorkshire. The case for running the dishwasher overnight gets stronger.
• If you have a battery, the sums shift slightly in your favour. A wider gap between cheap and expensive hours is exactly what makes it worth storing energy when it is cheap and using it at 6pm.

We will update this site, and the rates it shows, as soon as the change actually lands, and we will say so clearly when it does.

The new D and P values and the 70p cap are taken from Octopus's own "Agile pricing explained" page. The historical comparison uses the half-hourly rates published by the Octopus API for each region.

One caveat worth stating plainly: the published page prints the multipliers at a tenth of the scale this site uses (0.21 rather than 2.10). We have read them as the same number in a different unit, which is the only reading consistent with the worked example on that page. If Octopus meant something else, the off-peak figures here move, though the peak-charge changes stand regardless.

You can see the current formula, the live multiplier and peak charge for your own region, and worked examples, on the Agile Formula page.

Everything above rests on two assumptions that Octopus's announcement does not actually address. They are worth knowing about, because they are where our figures could turn out to be wrong.

The green levy

Every rate on this site is calculated with a 3.5p per kWh green-levy discount subtracted as the final step. Octopus's published explanation of the new formula does not mention the levy at all. Its formula stops at min(D × W + P, 67), and the only deduction it describes is VAT.

We have assumed the levy carries on at the same 3.5p, because it is a separate charge with its own policy and nothing suggests it is being withdrawn. But that is an assumption, not something Octopus has stated.

The temporary VAT relief

VAT is currently suspended on domestic electricity. Between 1 October 2026 and 31 March 2027 the rate is 0% instead of the standard 5%, and during the same window the levy discount is 3.34p rather than 3.5p.

The published explanation also says nothing about this window. The 67 is a pre-VAT ceiling: it is the number inside the formula, min(D × W + P, 67), and it does not change when the VAT rate does. What changes is what a reader pays for a capped half-hour once VAT and the levy have been applied. At 5% VAT that is 66.85p. During the relief window there is no VAT to add, so the same pre-VAT ceiling of 67 becomes 63.66p after the levy. Octopus's "capped at 70p/kWh once VAT is added" describes only the first case, and we do not know which regime they expect the new formula to start in.

Neither gap changes the direction of anything above. Both change the absolute numbers a little: a missing or altered levy moves every rate by a few pence per kWh, and the VAT question moves only the capped half-hours. We will correct this page if Octopus clarifies either.