Happy New Year! Your energy bill
has gone up. By £3.
Ofgem announced a tiny rise in the January price cap. It made headlines. It probably should not have. Here is what it actually means.
📰 What actually happened?
Ofgem set the January 2026 price cap at £1,738 per year for a typical household. That is up £3 from the October 2025 figure of £1,735.
Most of the coverage called it a tiny rise and moved on. Which is technically correct. But it missed the bigger picture entirely.
📊 What is the actual picture?
The cap is still £170 higher than it was a year ago. It is still more than double what it was before the 2021 energy crisis. The £3 movement is noise. The underlying level is the story.
And forecasters are already warning that the April 2026 cap could fall slightly, before rising sharply again in July. So any relief is likely to be short-lived.
💡 What this means for you
If you are just watching the cap number each quarter, you are watching the wrong thing. The number that matters is how much you are paying versus how much you could be earning back.
At £1,738 a year, a FlexMyPower household with an EV and a heat pump can offset a significant chunk of that bill entirely. The cap going up by £3 is not interesting. Cutting your net cost by £400 is.