The £300 Wall: what it really costs to leave a broadband contract
Between May and August, 2,567 UK households used our calculator to work out the cost of cancelling their broadband contract early, running 19,172 calculations between them. This is what they found, provider by provider. Every household counts once, so no single heavy user can skew the numbers.
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 £278 exit fee. The mean is £317.
More than 4 in 10 households face a fee above £300, the largest switching credit any provider offers. 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 £389 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 every major provider.
The escape league table
Median estimated exit fee per household, by provider. The typical household checks with about a year left on its contract.
| Provider | Households | Median monthly bill | Median exit fee | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Virgin Media | 1,052 | £38 | £360 | |
| NOW Broadband* | 100 | £30 | £324 | |
| Vodafone | 570 | £31 | £317 | |
| Sky | 844 | £39 | £283 | |
| EE | 687 | £40 | £271 | |
| BT | 648 | £40 | £208 | |
| Plusnet | 281 | £30 | £201 | |
| TalkTalk | 382 | £30 | £135 |
*NOW Broadband's sample is exactly 100 households, so treat its figure with more caution than the rest. Provider counts sum above 2,567 because some households check more than one provider.
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 publishes a flat charge of £11.25 for every month left, whoever you are, 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 £145 per household.
How big is the wall?
The 2,567 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 | Calculations |
|---|---|---|
| May (from the 16th) | 486 | 2,544 |
| June | 878 | 5,470 |
| July | 874 | 5,922 |
| August | 757 | 5,236 |
Demand is steady rather than seasonal. More than 800 households a month check the cost of leaving, all through summer, 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: 2,567 UK households, 19,172 calculations, 16 May – 31 August 2026.
- Every household counts once: households often compare more than one scenario, 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.
- Estimates, not bills: exit fees are estimated using each provider's published early termination methodology (verified May 2026), not billed amounts. The formulas are built into our calculator, which anyone can check.
- 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
On the wrong side of the wall?
Work out your own exit fee with our free calculator, then see the deals paying up to £300 in switching credit at your address.
