When to start your business energy renewal — the 6-9 month rule

Why 6-9 months, not 6-9 weeks

Most business energy contracts in the UK let you lock in a new rate up to 12 months before your current deal ends — a mechanism called forward pricing. The sweet spot for most SMEs is 6 to 9 months out. Earlier than that and forward curves get thin (fewer suppliers, wider premiums); later and you lose optionality, because suppliers price late renewals more defensively.

What can you do at 9 months out

Full market. Every supplier you're eligible for will quote, most will hold pricing for 24-72 hours, and you can genuinely compare fix lengths (12, 24, 36, and sometimes 48 months). This is also when portfolio and multi-site clients want to be — earlier alignment lets us bridge outlier meters onto a single renewal date without paying a bridging premium.

At 6 months

Still healthy. You lose access to the very longest forward positions with a few suppliers, but the competitive set stays wide. Prices are usually within a few percent of what a 9-month renewal would have got, absent a big market move in between.

At 3 months

Narrower. Some suppliers close their forward book at 90 days and only quote for start dates within the next month. You still get quotes, but with fewer options on term length and less room to negotiate. Multi-site alignment gets harder.

At 1 month

Reactive mode. You'll get quotes, but the number of suppliers in play drops sharply, and any supplier that requires a full credit check may not clear you in time — pushing you onto their default (often expensive) rate on day one of the new period. This is also when brokers add their largest margins because they know you're time-pressured.

After the contract ends — deemed and out-of-contract rates

If a contract ends without a new deal in place, you go onto the supplier's deemed or out-of-contract (OOC) rates. These are typically 60-100%+ higher than the market fixed rate for the same meter and postcode. Every additional month spent on OOC rates makes the switch mathematically more expensive — you can't recover the overpayment.

Switching away is possible but takes 4-6 weeks to complete, and until it does you keep paying OOC rates. This is why we push clients to start the renewal conversation 6-9 months out, not to sell them anything — but to stop them ever needing to.

The practical action

Diarise a reminder at 12 months from your contract start date. Even if you decide the market isn't right yet, a 30-minute conversation at that point protects you against surprise renewal letters, silent auto-renewals (still legal for micro-businesses on some contracts), and last-minute forced fixes at bad rates.