Moving Into a Student House in September? The Price Cap Changes on 1 October

Most student houses are handed over in September. The energy price cap changes on 1 October. That gap is about three weeks wide, and almost every student house in the country will move in on one set of rates and pay the next.

This is not a problem to panic about. It is a problem to take one meter reading about.

If your tenancy started in September and your household pays the energy supplier directly, your first bill will cover two different price periods. A reading taken on 30 September is what makes the split between them accurate instead of estimated.

What actually happens when you move into a student house

Nobody signs your house up to anything. The energy keeps flowing from the day your tenancy starts, and whichever supplier already serves the property bills you on their most basic terms until somebody chooses otherwise.

Ofgem calls that a default tariff, and describes the most common form of it as a deemed tariff that is standard variable. Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions.

The good news: standard variable tariffs are exactly what the price cap covers. Your house is protected by the cap without doing anything at all.

The bad news: Ofgem also states that deemed contracts and default tariffs are usually among a supplier's most expensive. The cap is a ceiling on what you can be charged, not a discount. Nobody put your house on a good deal. They put it on the legal maximum for the tariff you did not choose.

There is normally no exit fee on a default tariff, because a standard variable tariff has no fixed term. So the expensive default is not a trap. It is just what you stay on if nobody in the house does anything.

This applies to any move, not just a student one. We cover the general rule, including what the cap does and does not protect, in does the energy price cap apply when you move in?.

What changes on 1 October 2026

Ofgem confirmed the October figures on 26 August 2026. Our full breakdown is in the October 2026 price cap post; here is the part that matters to a shared house.

The headline cap goes from £1,862 to £1,935 a year on the like-for-like consumption basis we use across our cap history, a rise of 3.9%. Ofgem's own headline for the same rates is £1,723, up from £1,663, which it states as 4%. Both numbers describe the same unit rates on different assumptions about how much a typical home uses. Our UK energy price cap guide charts the full history on the like-for-like basis.

The rise is not spread evenly, and that matters for student houses specifically. Gas goes up 8.7% on the unit rate. Electricity barely moves. Most shared student houses are older terraces with gas central heating and a gas hob, which puts them squarely on the wrong side of that split. An all-electric flat sees under 1%.

The timing is unkind too. The gas increase lands on 1 October, which is roughly when a student house starts turning the heating on for the first time.

The reading you need to take on 30 September

If your first bill spans the change date, the supplier has to price the usage before 1 October at the old rates and the usage after it at the new ones.

They can do that two ways. They can use a reading you gave them, or they can estimate the split.

An estimate is not neutral. If it assumes more of your usage fell after 1 October than really did, you pay the higher gas rate on energy you actually burned in September. It is not a large sum on its own, but it is entirely avoidable and it sets the pattern for every future bill.

So:

1. Take a gas and electricity reading on 30 September or 1 October, as close to the changeover as you can manage.
2. Photograph the meters so the reading and the date are both evidenced.
3. Send the readings to the supplier and ask them to use them for the cap changeover.
4. Put the photos somewhere the whole house can see, not just on one person's phone.

Do the same thing on the day your tenancy started, if nobody did it then. An opening reading is what separates your household's usage from the previous tenants'. Without one, your first bill may start from the wrong number entirely, which is a bigger problem than the cap split.

Standing charges are the bit students consistently underestimate

Unit rates only charge you for energy you use. Standing charges do not. They accrue every single day, whether the house is full, empty, or locked up for a month.

From 1 October the capped standing charges for a direct debit dual-fuel home come to 84.51p a day: 54.83p for electricity and 29.68p for gas. That is:

• about £25.71 a month before anyone uses a single kWh
• about £308.46 over a full year
• roughly £77 per person per year in a four-bedroom house

That bill keeps running over the Christmas break, over Easter, and through any month the house is empty. A twelve-month tenancy pays twelve months of standing charges regardless of how many of those months anyone actually lived there.

One small piece of good news: the electricity standing charge actually falls in October, so total annual standing charges drop by about £6.28 compared with the July rates. It is the gas unit rate doing the damage, not the daily charges.

How to split a bill that covers two different rate periods

This is where shared houses tend to argue, and it is worth settling before the bill arrives rather than after.

If everyone moved in on the same day and everyone is staying for the whole tenancy, it does not matter. The bill covers two rate periods, but it covers the same set of people throughout, so an equal split is still an equal split. Divide the total by the number of housemates and move on.

It only gets complicated when the household changed. If somebody moved in late, moved out early, or the house was partly empty for one of the periods, then splitting the whole bill equally quietly moves money between people.

In that case, split each rate period separately:

1. Work out the cost of the usage before 1 October, and divide it between whoever was responsible during that period.
2. Do the same for the usage from 1 October onwards.
3. Add each person's two shares together.

That is the fair version, and it is only possible if you took the reading. Without a reading on the changeover date you cannot separate the periods, which means you cannot do a fair split even if everyone wants one.

Taupia does this part for you. Add the house, set the split rule once, and each bill is divided and tracked against the people actually responsible for it, with a record of who has paid. Our per-person split calculator gives you the same number manually if you would rather work it out yourself first.

If your house is bills-included, the cap does not protect you

This is the part that surprises people, and it applies to a large share of the student market.

If energy is included in your rent, or you are on an all-in-one student bills package, you do not hold the supply contract. What you pay is set by your agreement, not by Ofgem.

Ofgem's maximum resale price rules stop a landlord charging more than they paid when they recharge energy to tenants separately. But those rules do not apply where energy is included in the rent. An all-inclusive rent is a rent. It is not a regulated energy charge, and the price cap sets no ceiling on it.

So if you are on a bills-included package, the number to read closely is not the cap. It is the fair usage limit in your agreement, and what happens when the household goes past it. That is the clause that decides whether October's gas increase reaches you, and how.

We compare the two models properly in our guide to student bill packages versus splitting yourself.

What to do, by date

Should a student house fix instead?

Possibly, but do not decide on the headline figures.

The cap figure describes a typical household. A six-bedroom terrace with the heating on is not a typical household, and neither is a well-insulated two-bed flat. What decides whether a fixed deal beats the cap is your own annual kWh, not Ofgem's average one.

The practical difficulty in September is that a brand new tenancy has no usage history to compare on. That is a real argument for staying on the capped default for a billing period, gathering a genuine usage figure, then comparing. The cost of that patience is that you spend those weeks on one of the supplier's more expensive tariffs.

Two things make the wait safer:

• There is normally no exit fee on a default tariff, so you can leave whenever the comparison makes sense.
• Switching takes up to five working days under Ofgem's faster switching standard, so a decision made late still lands quickly.

One thing to check on any fixed quote for a tenancy: whether the contract runs past the end of your tenancy, and what happens if it does. A 24-month fix on a 12-month student let is a problem for the person whose name is on the account.

The VAT cut lands the same day

VAT on domestic electricity drops from 5% to 0% on 1 October 2026, the same day the new cap starts, and runs until 31 March 2027.

That reduction is already inside the £1,935 figure. Ofgem states the cap would have been around £45 higher without it, so do not subtract it again.

It is worth knowing about for one reason though: the VAT cut applies to the electricity you buy regardless of tariff. It reaches fixed-tariff households and it reaches all-electric houses, both of which a cap change does nothing for. We cover it in detail in the electricity VAT cut guide.

The short version

Your student house is almost certainly on a capped default tariff that nobody chose, which is protected from the worst prices and is still probably one of the most expensive tariffs available. The cap changes on 1 October, gas takes almost all of the increase, and the single action worth taking is a meter reading on the changeover date so your first bill splits the two periods honestly.

Everything else can wait until you have a real bill to compare against. That one reading cannot.