Energy and Water for Offices

Is the Supply Yours or Your Landlord’s?

Offices are bought and let in every way imaginable: a whole building on one lease, a floor with its own meter, a suite in a multi-let block, or a desk in a serviced office where energy is simply part of the fee. Your tenancy agreement says whether energy costs are included, and that one clause decides most of what follows, so it’s the first thing we’ll look at with you.

If the meter and the contract are yours, you’re a business energy customer in your own right, with the same contract rules as any other business customer. When your contract has ended or is about to, or you’re on a rollover or deemed rate, we’ll compare suppliers and arrange the switch. If you’re mid-contract, tell us your end date and we’ll plan it for the right time. If you’re the landlord, you hold the contracts for the building and decide how to pass the cost on to tenants. Either way, we start by finding out exactly which meters exist and who holds each contract, because a quote for the wrong supply helps nobody.

When Your Landlord Recharges Energy

In a multi-let building, the landlord may buy the energy and recharge each tenant. That’s reselling: buying gas or electricity from a supplier and passing it on to another consumer. As of Ofgem’s October 2025 call for input on reselling gas and electricity, the maximum resale price only applies when the end use is domestic. So the cap on what a landlord can charge for resold energy doesn’t cover an office tenant.

If you’re a tenant on a recharge, your share might be worked out from a sub-meter, floor area or a fixed sum. Send us the recharge and we’ll go through it with you. If you’re a landlord, the building’s own contracts are where you can make a difference. Picture a landlord whose five-storey building has one main electricity supply and a separate gas supply for the heating, each renewing in a different month. We keep every contract end date on record in one place, and our dedicated retentions team handles the renewal reminders and timetables, so the building’s supplies don’t roll over unnoticed.

Moving Into a New Office

If you start using energy at new premises before you agree a contract, you could be put on a deemed rate contract, and rates on those can change more often than on a fixed contract. When a business moves in or out, the current supplier needs to hear about it as soon as possible, with a meter reading if you can, and may ask for evidence such as a lease, which it reviews within 10 working days. We’ll sort that with you.

If you’re moving, we’d rather start the contract before the keys change hands than sort out a deemed rate afterwards, so we’ll plan your energy and water together as part of moving premises. To price the new office, we’ll need the MPAN and MPRN for each supply, and we can help you find them.

Small Office Rules and Bills

Your office may well count as a microbusiness. A microbusiness is a business that employs fewer than ten employees (or FTE equivalent) and has annual turnover or balance sheet of not more than £2 million; or consumes not more than 293,000 kWh of gas per year; or not more than 100,000 kWh of electricity per year. If yours does, a rollover contract can’t last more than 12 months. In 2018, Ofgem also announced a ban on suppliers backbilling microbusinesses for energy used more than 12 months ago. Those are two of the small business energy protections we’ll check your contract and bills against.

Tax on office energy is straightforward. Electricity for non-qualifying use is standard-rated under HMRC’s VAT rules for fuel and power, which is 20%, unless the quantity is below the small-use limit of 33 kWh a day or 1,000 kWh a month on average. The Climate Change Levy main rate from 1 April 2026 is £0.00801 per kWh for both electricity and gas. Has your bill ever gone up when the office was half empty? That’s what our bill validation is for: we check each bill against your agreed rates and recorded consumption, and take up any error with the supplier.

Water in Shared Buildings

Water follows the same landlord or tenant question. About 1.2 million non-household customers in England can choose their business water retailer, while in Wales only those using more than 50 megalitres a year can switch. It’s the individual premises that’s eligible, where its primary use is non-domestic. In a shared building, we’ll check who holds the water account for your office and when its contract ends before we look at prices, so any switch happens at the right time.