EDF Energy Dual Fuel

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EDF takes 13.05p a day off the standing charge on each fuel for customers on its Simply Tracker Extra tariff, which its own tariff page puts at £50 a year per fuel — £100 across gas and electricity. That is one of the largest dual-fuel discounts any big British supplier publishes a number for. Figures checked 27 October 2026 against EDF's own rate card DM1903.08/26.AW16.V1 effective 1 October 2026, its tariff eligibility page, its deemed contract terms of 31 October 2024, its quarterly complaints return, Ofgem and Companies House.

The company behind it is the largest generator of zero-carbon electricity in Britain. EDF runs five nuclear power stations supplying about 12% of UK electricity demand, has put almost £9 billion into that fleet since 2009, owns more than 35 onshore and three offshore wind farms with over 2GW of renewable generation running and more than 10GW in construction or planning, and says it invests more than £100 million a week in British electricity infrastructure. Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C are expected between them to cover 14% of UK demand, enough for around 12 million homes. On the supply side it serves 5 million customers.

One thing decides whether the discount above is yours: whether you have ever chosen a tariff. EDF prints Standard (Variable), Deemed and Welcome prices on a single rate card at identical figures, adds its Safeguard Assist tariff on a second card at the same figures again, and none of those four carries any dual-fuel discount. The £100 sits only on the tracker range, and you have to go and take it.

Four doors onto a tariff you never picked

EDF publishes its default prices on a rate card headed “Standard (Variable), Deemed and Welcome - prices”, reference DM1903.08/26.AW16.V1, effective 1 October 2026. Three tariff names, one set of numbers: there are no separate rates for the Deemed or Welcome tariffs anywhere on it. A fourth name, Safeguard Assist, gets a card of its own — DM1905.08/26.AW15.V1 — and the figures on it match to the third decimal place. On Direct Debit in London, all four charge 42.915p a day and 26.595p a kWh for electricity and 30.199p a day and 8.146p a kWh for gas. In the East Midlands all four charge 51.452p and 25.355p for electricity and 29.414p and 7.823p for gas.

That uniformity is genuinely good news, and it is the opposite of how deemed supply used to work. A deemed contract is what governs your supply when there is no contract at all — EDF's residential terms put it plainly at clause 2.d: “Any supply made during any period where there is no contract between us will be governed by our deemed terms.” You arrive on one by moving into a house EDF already supplies, by having your account sold to EDF by another supplier, by failing a tariff's smart meter condition, or by your old supplier going out of business and Ofgem handing EDF the book. In each case EDF charges you its capped standard price rather than a penalty price.

What none of those four routes gives you is a dual-fuel discount. The entire reduction EDF publishes for taking gas and electricity together lives on the tracker tariffs, and a customer who has never opened a tariff page has never been offered it. EDF's own reading of the market is that around 19 million households — roughly 60% to 65% of British homes — are sitting on standard tariffs.

13.05p a day, per fuel, and what the VAT holiday does to it

The mechanism is simple and unusually transparent. EDF's eligibility page states it for both Simply Tracker Extra and New Home Tracker in the same words: “We apply a discount of 13.05p/day (excluding VAT) to the standing charge for each fuel, this is equivalent to 13.70p/day or £50 a year, including VAT.” Simply Tracker and Ensure Tracker run the same machinery at half the rate — 6.53p a day per fuel before VAT, which EDF converts to 6.8565p a day or £25.02 a year. When EDF relaunched the Extra tariff on 27 June 2025 it described the effect as a guaranteed £100 dual fuel saving against the price cap, and quoted an average annual dual-fuel bill of £1,619 on the July 2025 cap against £1,681 on its twelve-month fixed deal.

Doubling EDF's own per-fuel figure gives the £100. The cash is slightly less than that this winter, and the reason is tax rather than anything EDF has done. Because the discount comes off the standing charge before VAT, the amount you keep depends on the VAT rate on that fuel. Gas carries VAT at 5%, so 13.05p becomes 13.7025p a day and £50.01 a year — EDF's figure exactly. Domestic electricity carries no VAT at all from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027, so the electricity half is a flat 13.05p a day, or £47.63 a year. The pair comes to £97.65 rather than £100. That is this page's arithmetic on EDF's own numbers, and the gap closes again on 1 April 2027 when electricity VAT returns.

Worth knowing where the discount bites hardest, because a standing charge is a regional number and the discount is not. Against the East Midlands gas standing charge of 29.414p a day on Direct Debit, 13.7025p removes 47% of it. Against the London electricity standing charge of 42.915p, 13.05p removes 30%; against North Wales and Merseyside at 67.657p — the dearest of the fourteen distribution regions on the card — the same 13.05p removes only 19%. Identical discount, very different proportion of the bill, depending on the postcode.

Twenty-eight days after you move in, and then the door shuts

New Home Tracker is the most useful tariff EDF sells and the easiest to miss. Its eligibility condition is a single sentence — “Have moved into a property within the last 28 days that is supplied by EDF” — and it carries the full 13.05p a day per fuel discount, for a term that “will run for a period of 12 months starting from the day you agree the contract”.

Set that against what happens if you do nothing. Move into an EDF-supplied house and you are on a deemed contract from the moment supply starts: the Deemed Electricity Terms and Conditions, version 4.2, effective 31 October 2024, say at Schedule 1 clause 1.1 that the contract “will be regarded as coming into effect at the earliest of the following times”, which is when EDF began supplying the premises or when you began taking supply. The price is the capped standard price, which is fair, but the discount is not there. Twenty-eight days is a short window in the middle of a house move, and nothing about the deemed arrangement puts a clock in front of the customer.

Two details in the deemed terms are worth reading before you leave one. Ending it when you move out needs “not less than 2 working days notice” under clause 8.3, which is a short fuse for anybody who vacates on a Friday. And clause 4.1 allows EDF to “request a security deposit if we are concerned about your ability to pay our bills” — repaid with interest, and within 14 days under clause 4.2.1 if every bill in the previous full year was paid inside the payment period.

The smart meter condition that sends you backwards

Almost every EDF tariff now assumes a smart meter. On Standard (Variable) the consequence is mild and clearly stated: “If you don't already have a smart meter installed at your property, we will contact you to arrange an appointment for installation”, and “If you decide to decline the opportunity to have a Smart meter fitted, you may not be eligible for some of our discounts, services or Smart meter tariffs which may save you money.”

On the fixed and tracker tariffs it is sharper. The eligibility page states, for Ensure Tracker and Essentials Fixed among others, that “If you haven't had your smart meter installed within three months of your tariff start date we'll transfer you onto our deemed contract.” EDF then adds its own warning in the next breath: “A deemed contract may have different price to your current tariff and we recommend that most customers will be better off on their current tariff.” So a customer who signed a discounted tracker and then waited three months for an appointment can be moved to the undiscounted default, by a term they agreed to, on a timetable they do not control.

How much of that timetable is in the customer's hands is a fair question, and the regulator is asking it. Ofgem's consultation on smart meter guaranteed standards of performance, reference OFG1164, published 28 March 2025 with responses due by 9 May 2025, proposes that suppliers offer an installation appointment “within six weeks of the request being made” — defined in its own footnote as 42 calendar days or 30 working days — complete an initial assessment of a faulty meter within 5 working days, and restore a meter to smart mode within 90 calendar days, with a repeat payment every 365 days it stays broken. The existing compensation for a missed installation appointment was “recently raised from £30 to £40”. The rest of it remains a proposal: Ofgem says it would publish a statutory consultation and a draft statutory instrument before any of it binds anyone, and no commencement date is given. Six weeks is also longer than one third of three months.

A safeguard tariff that costs exactly what the standard one costs

Safeguard Assist is EDF's tariff for customers who qualify for the Warm Home Discount, and it has its own rate card, DM1905.08/26.AW15.V1, effective 1 October 2026. The prices on it are the Standard (Variable) prices. London on Direct Debit: 42.915p a day and 26.595p a kWh for electricity, 30.199p and 8.146p for gas. North Wales and Merseyside: 67.657p and 27.862p for electricity, 30.078p and 7.904p for gas. Both cards state that the prices are “only available for supplying electricity and gas to continuously occupied premises used only or mainly for domestic purposes”.

Nobody on it is paying more than a standard customer, there is no exit fee, and EDF describes the Deemed Safeguard Assist variant as providing “capped energy charges for eligible persons”. The name promises protection beyond the cap; the figures deliver the cap. Reading the two cards side by side is the only way to establish that, and it takes one minute.

The published eligibility rule has not kept up. To qualify, EDF says, you must “meet the criteria for the “core” or “broader” group as set out in the Warm Home Discount Regulations, or as otherwise directed by Ofgem from time to time; and be on years 6, 7 or 8 of the Warm Home Discount Scheme.” Ofgem's own social programmes pages say “Scheme Year 16 begins in 2026”, running 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027 in England and Wales and 1 May 2026 to 31 March 2027 in Scotland. Scheme years 6 to 8 ended in March 2019. The group names have moved on too: the Government's eligibility statement for England and Wales, published 7 August 2026 with a qualifying date of 23 August 2026, says that “From scheme year 16, core group 1 and core group 2 have been merged into one “core group””, and Ofgem's pages describe the broader group as operating in Scotland only, on individual application. The catch-all clause about Ofgem directing otherwise is presumably doing the real work, but an eligibility rule pointing at a window that closed seven years ago is not something a reader on a low income should have to decode.

Where 40,000 Utilita customers landed, and where Utility Point's did in 2021

The Welcome tariff on that rate card has a specific population behind it. On 13 October 2025 EDF announced that Utilita Energy had agreed to sell it “more than 40,000 of its credit customers”, with the transfer taking effect from 8 November 2025. The commitments were clear: “All accounts and credit balances will remain fully protected”, and “prices will remain unchanged during the current price cap period”. Philippe Commaret, managing director of EDF Customers, and Bill Bullen, Utilita's chief executive, both put their names to it. EDF's own customer page told the transferring households they would move to “an EDF tariff tailored to match your existing Utilita pricing”, that credit balances would follow their accounts, that EDF would start collecting Direct Debits “from December onwards” with no new instruction needed, that payment dates on the 29th or 30th would move to the 1st, and that Utilita's terms and conditions would continue to apply “until 1 Jan 2026”.

What “tailored to match your existing Utilita pricing” turned into is visible on the rate card: Welcome Utilita Smart and Welcome Utilita Premium are variable tariffs whose “standing charge and unit rates track those of the Ofgem cap”, priced identically to Standard (Variable). For customers moving from a cap-priced tariff that is a true statement and a fair outcome. It is also an open-ended variable tariff with no dual-fuel discount attached, reached without anybody choosing it.

EDF has done the harder version of this before. Ofgem appointed EDF Energy Customers Limited supplier of last resort for Utility Point Limited, announcing it on 17 September 2021 with the licence revocations and last resort supply directions taking effect the following day. Ofgem's decision letter of 23 June 2022 records that the bidders who volunteered offered deemed tariffs “set at or near the current price cap level”, that EDF was “willing to absorb the greatest share of costs claimable through the industry levy”, and that it would honour both existing credit balances and refunds owed to customers who had already switched away. On the two occasions a book of customers has landed on EDF without choosing it, they landed at the cap.

Electricity got cheaper to buy and dearer to make

The cap for 1 October to 31 December 2026 is £1,723 a year, up 4%. Ofgem's own figures for a Direct Debit customer are 26.32p/kWh and 54.83p a day for electricity and 7.97p/kWh and 29.68p a day for gas, and the critical footnote is that “There is no VAT on electricity from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027” while gas still carries 5%. EDF's own rate cards carry the same distinction in their own words: “All Electricity prices below reflect that VAT is charged at 0% on Electricity supplies” and “All Gas prices shown are inclusive of VAT charged at 5% and rounded.”

EDF's price cap explainer of 26 August 2026 then sets the old rates against the new: electricity 26.11p to 26.32p a kWh, described as up 0.8%, and 57.19p to 54.83p a day, described as down 4.1%. Gas goes 7.33p to 7.97p a kWh, up 8.7%, and 29.04p to 29.68p a day, up 2.2%. Those are accurate as cash: an EDF customer really does pay 4.1% less in electricity standing charge than in September.

They are not like-for-like, because the July figures include 5% VAT and the October ones include none. Strip the tax out of both and the picture inverts. The electricity unit rate goes from 24.867p to 26.32p, a rise of about 5.8%, and the standing charge from 54.467p to 54.83p, a rise of about 0.7%. The gas percentages are unaffected, since gas VAT did not move. So the whole of the electricity reduction on a bill this winter is the Treasury's doing and none of it is the supplier's, and it reverses on 1 April 2027. Neither Ofgem nor EDF has concealed any of this; both state the VAT position in terms. It simply means the one number a household will compare — last quarter's bill against this one — is comparing two tax regimes, and anybody budgeting past March should assume the electricity standing charge goes back up by about 2.74p a day before any cap decision at all.

Three times the nuclear, and more carbon than the national average

EDF publishes its fuel mix for April 2025 to March 2026: 41.1% nuclear, 28.5% gas, 23.0% renewable, 5.0% coal and 2.4% other, at 173g of CO2 per kWh and 0.0025g of radioactive waste per kWh. Beside it, credited to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, sits the UK average: 13.7% nuclear, 31.4% gas, 48.0% renewable, 4.7% coal and 2.2% other, at 147g of CO2 per kWh.

EDF generates three times the national share of its electricity from nuclear and sells power that is about 18% more carbon-intensive than the British average. The explanation is in the same two columns: renewables are 23.0% of EDF's mix against 48.0% nationally, and its coal share is slightly above the average rather than below it. Nuclear displaces less of the gas than a reader would expect from the headline percentage. EDF does not spin this — it prints both columns next to each other and lists a separate per-tariff table for its zero carbon and renewable products, so a customer on one of those is not buying the whole-business mix.

On a dual-fuel account the figure covers one of the two fuels. A fuel mix disclosure is an electricity obligation, and no supplier publishes a carbon intensity for the gas it sells: EDF's gas comes off the same network as everybody else's, and on a typical dual-fuel home burning 9,500 kWh of gas against 2,500 kWh of electricity under Ofgem's revised consumption values, the unmeasured fuel is the larger one by a factor of nearly four.

The service record, and the paperwork that stops short

Citizens Advice scored EDF 2.96 out of 5 for April to June 2026, placing it tenth in its supplier table. The components are more useful than the total. Complaints scored 2.0 of 5 on a measured 47.7 complaints per 10,000 customers reaching the Citizens Advice consumer service, the Extra Help Unit, Advice Direct Scotland and the Energy Ombudsman. Contact scored 3.2 on an average call centre wait of 2 minutes 47 seconds, with 85.4% of emails answered inside two days, 91.0% of WhatsApp messages and 90.9% of texts. Billing and metering scored 3.2 on bill accuracy of 97.6% for smart meters and 90.75% for traditional ones, with 92.67% of smart meters working correctly. Customer commitments scored a full 5 of 5, EDF being a member of both the Switch Guarantee and the Vulnerability Commitment.

EDF also publishes its own quarterly complaints return, which most suppliers do not. For April to June 2026 it received 46,534 domestic complaints, 965 per 100,000 customer accounts, and resolved 42,360 — 62% by the end of the next working day and 86% within eight weeks, the second figure including complaints raised in earlier quarters. The causes are broken out: customer service 33%, billing and meter reading 17%, payment issues 12%, debt and debt-related disconnections 9%, and meter installation, exchange or failure 7%. Dividing the two headline figures gives a customer account count EDF does not publish anywhere — about 4.8 million — which sits sensibly below the 5 million customers its press material claims.

Where the documents stop is domestic charges. EDF's residential terms, last updated 1 September 2026, promise that “we'll give you advance written notice (a ‘variation notice’)” before a price change, and say that “Any changes will apply from the date we publish them on our website”, with no number of days attached. Clause 17.a refers to a debt “still not paid after 28 days”, and the fixed tariffs carry an exit fee if ended more than 49 days early. The deemed terms are thinner still: clause 3.7 says only that “The Deemed Contract Schedule of Charges set by us from time to time will remain in force until we change it”, with clause 3.6 entitling EDF to “vary, all or any of our charges by giving notice in writing to you” and clause 3.8.2 confirming that variations “shall not operate retrospectively” — and no notice period anywhere. The late payment, debt collection agency, premises visit, warrant, de-energisation and re-energisation steps are all described on EDF's own site with no amount against a single one of them, and that page is written for business customers. A household cannot find out what being late costs.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 27 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.