UK Commercial Electricity Costs 2026: p/kWh by Size

Business size	Typical unit rate (p/kWh)	Typical annual electricity spend	What is included
Small business	~40-47p	~£3,000-£10,000	Micro and small firms — shops, small offices, small workshops. Highest unit rates: least buying power, standing charges spread over low volume, often on out-of-contract or default tariffs. Solar canopy self-consumption displaces electricity at the top of the price band.
Medium business	~33-42p	~£10,000-£60,000	Mid-sized offices, retail units, care homes, light industrial. Better negotiated contracts than micro firms but still exposed to wholesale and network costs. Strong daytime demand makes canopy self-consumption (60-80%) realistic.
Large business	~28-38p	~£60,000-£250,000+	Multi-site retail, large offices, distribution, hotels. Volume buys keener rates, but total spend is large, so each p/kWh shaved off is worth thousands. Big car parks suit multi-bay canopies at the lowest £/kWp.
Industrial / high-volume	~25-33p	£250,000 to £1m+	Factories, warehouses, cold storage, data-adjacent sites. Lowest unit rates via half-hourly metered contracts, but enormous volumes mean self-generated solar at ~10p/kWh still delivers a large absolute saving. Ground-mount or large canopy schemes typical.

What UK businesses pay for electricity in 2026

Commercial electricity in the UK is not one price. In 2026, non-domestic unit rates sit in a broad band of roughly 25p to 47p per kWh, and where you land inside that band depends mostly on how much you buy and when you last fixed a contract. Small businesses pay the most — often 40-47p/kWh — because they have the least buying power, their standing charges spread across low volume, and many sit on out-of-contract or default tariffs. Industrial sites on half-hourly metered contracts pay the least, down towards 25p/kWh, but their sheer volume means the total bill is enormous.

The pattern is worth stating plainly: the smaller you are, the more you pay per unit; the larger you are, the more units you buy. Either way, electricity is a major, rising, and largely uncontrollable line on the P&L — unless you start generating some of it yourself. The full breakdown by size is in the table above, and our cost page covers what a canopy itself costs to build.

Why self-generated solar changes the maths

Here is the number that makes on-site solar compelling: electricity you generate from your own solar canopy costs about 10p per kWh over the system’s lifetime, once you spread the build cost across ~25 years of output. Set that against a grid price of 25-47p and the gap is the return. Every unit you generate and use on site is a unit you don’t buy at the top of your tariff band.

The critical detail — and one many installers gloss over — is self-consumption. Solar you use on site is worth roughly twice what you earn exporting it. Exported units earn the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG), typically 1-15p/kWh; self-consumed units save you the full grid rate you’d otherwise pay, 25-47p. So the value of a canopy is driven not by how much it generates in total, but by how much of that generation your business consumes during daylight hours. Sites with strong daytime demand — retail, offices, care, clinical, industrial — can realistically self-consume 60-80% of what a canopy produces.

Why a canopy, specifically

A solar canopy earns its keep because it turns land you already use — a car park — into a generating asset without giving up the parking. A standard parking bay carries about 2 kWp of panels (four to six 450W modules), and at the UK average yield of 900-950 kWh per kWp that’s roughly 1,500-2,700 kWh per bay per year. A 100-bay car park works out at around 180-270 kWp; double-sided structures can reach ~4 kWp per bay.

The trade-off versus ground-mounted solar is instructive. Ground-mount is cheaper — about £700-£900/kWp — but it needs open land you’re not otherwise using. A canopy costs more (about £900-£1,400/kWp at commercial scale, or £6,000-£12,000 per bay) because you’re buying an engineered steel structure and its foundations as well as the solar — the steelwork alone is around 45% of the project cost. What you get for that premium is generation stacked on top of land that keeps working as a car park, plus weather protection and a natural home for EV charging.

A worked example

Take a mid-sized business paying 38p/kWh on an annual bill of £40,000 — roughly 105,000 kWh a year. Suppose it builds a 60-bay canopy at about 120 kWp, generating around 111,000 kWh a year (at 925 kWh/kWp). If daytime demand lets the business self-consume 70% of that — about 78,000 kWh — the direct saving is that generation valued at the avoided grid rate:

• 78,000 kWh × 38p = ~£29,600 a year saved on grid electricity, plus
• the remaining 33,000 kWh exported under SEG at, say, 5p = **£1,650 a year**.

That’s roughly £31,000 a year against a build of around £120,000-£150,000. It lines up with the government’s own evidence: DESNZ (May 2025) estimated an 80-space car park could save around £28,000 a year through self-consumption, and the real, documented Princess Royal Hospital canopy in Telford — a 200 kW scheme, £445,000 funded by Great British Energy, working from early 2026 — is projected to save about £35,000 a year.

Honest payback

We won’t quote you a five-year solar-only payback on a canopy — because of the structure premium, an honest solar-only payback is 8-12 years (rooftop, with no structure to pay for, is 4-6). Add EV charging underneath and it shortens to 7-11 years, because solar at ~10p feeds 7-22kW chargers that would otherwise pull grid power. The bigger lever, usually, is funding: capital allowances and grants change the numbers materially.

Funding the gap

For a business buying outright, the main relief is the £1m Annual Investment Allowance (100% first-year relief, the practical route for almost every single-site canopy), plus the 50% First-Year Allowance on any balance above the cap. Note the caveat that trips people up: solar PV is a special-rate asset and is excluded from full expensing — so don’t let anyone tell you it qualifies for that. On-site solar is also exempt from business rates in England to 31 March 2035, and the Workplace Charging Scheme (to 31 March 2027) can offset EV socket costs. Where capital isn’t available, a Power Purchase Agreement lets a funder build, own and maintain the canopy while you simply buy the power at a fixed rate below grid — zero upfront, off balance sheet. The full picture, including SEG and public-sector schemes like GB Energy and Salix loans, is on our grants and funding page.

Planning note

If your site is in England, a car-park canopy on non-domestic off-street parking usually falls under Class OA permitted development (in force since 21 December 2023) — that means a lighter-touch prior-approval process covering siting, design and glare, not a full planning application, provided the structure is 4m or lower, sits more than 10m from any dwelling, isn’t on a listed building or scheduled monument, and meets a drainage (SuDS) condition. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland still need standard planning consent.

The bottom line

With grid electricity at 25-47p and self-generated solar at about 10p, the case for a canopy is arithmetic, not sales talk — and the higher your unit rate, the stronger it gets. As a turnkey MCS-certified installer, we deliver the structure, panels, electrics and DNO connection under one contract, and we’ll model your actual numbers against your half-hourly consumption before quoting. Request a fixed-price feasibility or call +44 7707 970661.