Distribution and transmission network charges

Distribution Use of System (DUoS)

These charges cover UK Power Networks only - 3 of the fourteen distribution licence areas in Great Britain (East of England, London, South East England). No other network operator publishes its Use of System charges as open data, so this page cannot tell you what the network costs where they operate. Distribution Use of System charges are paid by the electricity supplier to the network operator. A supplier recovers them inside its retail tariff, alongside wholesale energy, transmission charges, policy costs, VAT and margin. None of the figures here is a rate a household pays.

These published charges are levied on suppliers and are not household tariff rates. Time bands describe the network charge, not a meter's retail time-of-use schedule.

A charge published as zero is not shown as a charge. This release writes 0.0 both for a charge that does not apply to a tariff and for one that is genuinely zero, and nothing in it separates the two. The components affected are named without their value. UK Power Networks records a voltage level against 25 of the 27 tariffs in this release. The household tariff is not one of them, and neither is unmetered supplies. A domestic connection is a low-voltage one in practice, but the publisher does not say so in this dataset and nothing here fills it in.

Source: UK Power Networks — Distribution Use of System Charges - Annex 1, under CC BY 4.0.

Transmission Network Use of System (TNUoS)

These are the transmission charges for all 14 TNUoS demand zones, which together cover Great Britain. They do not cover Northern Ireland, which is on a separate transmission system with its own charging arrangements. Transmission Network Use of System charges are paid by the electricity supplier, or by a demand customer connected directly to the transmission system. A supplier recovers them inside its retail tariff, alongside wholesale energy, distribution charges, policy costs, VAT and margin. None of the figures here is a rate a household is billed.

These charges apply to suppliers or qualifying demand and are not household tariff rates. We do not map TNUoS zones to GSP regions: the source publishes a different geography and no verified crosswalk.

Great Britain is covered; Northern Ireland is not. The published definition changes at 2023/24: Do not read these figures against charging years before 2023/24. On 1 April 2023 the Targeted Charging Review moved the residual out of the zonal tariff into a separate per-site charge, so the zonal tariff fell sharply without anything getting cheaper. Rows on the earlier definition carry a flag saying so.

One of these bands is called Domestic and is quoted per site per day, which reads exactly like a standing charge. It is not one. It is what a supplier pays for each domestic site it serves, and it reaches a household only folded into a tariff with everything else. A TNUoS demand zone is not a distribution licence area, not a GSP group and not a postcode area. The names resemble them and there are fourteen of each, but the zones are defined by transmission nodes, the definitions are restated every charging year, and no boundary is published in this dataset. There is no way to say which zone an address is in from anything held here, so this page does not try to.

Source: National Energy System Operator — Transmission Network Use of System (TNUoS) Tariffs - demand releases, under National Energy SO Open Data Licence v1.0.