Live UK Wholesale Energy Pricing 2025 (Daily Update)

Introduction: How UK Energy Suppliers Buy Electricity

UK wholesale energy pricing changes every day and sets the baseline for electricity bills. Most suppliers don’t buy all their power on the spot; they secure much of it in advance through futures contracts, a process known as hedging. That helps keep supply predictable and limits volatility, but when wholesale costs rise, households and businesses still feel it. If you want a deeper dive into how hedging works, see this guide from Simply Switch.

Alongside those long-term contracts, the UK also runs a day-ahead electricity market where suppliers bid in half-hourly auctions. Prices here can move sharply, especially when gas sets the marginal cost or when renewables flood the grid. These wholesale prices feed directly into tariffs such as Octopus Agile, making them visible to consumers in real time.

On this page you’ll find live graphs, historical trends, and data updated every day. You can also download wholesale pricing CSV files to run your own analysis.

What You’ll Learn On This Page

• How UK wholesale energy pricing works in futures and day-ahead markets

• Why hedging affects electricity bills for homes and businesses

• How the Octopus Agile tariff reflects wholesale costs in real time

• Daily updated graphs of wholesale electricity prices

• Where to download historical wholesale pricing CSV data

Table of Contents

This article is about Wholesale Pricing is a comprehensive read, drawing on both data and hands-on Agile testing.

Use the Table of Contents below to jump straight to the questions that matter most — or scroll through at your own pace.

UK Day-Ahead Wholesale Electricity Pricing Explained

The UK day-ahead market is one of the main drivers of wholesale electricity pricing.

While most electricity is bought months in advance through hedging, suppliers sometimes need extra power closer to real time.

This is where the day-ahead market comes in. Suppliers bid in half-hourly auctions to buy electricity for delivery the next day. Prices are set using marginal pricing, which means the most expensive generator needed to meet demand, often a gas plant, sets the final wholesale price for everyone. Even when cheaper renewables like wind or solar are available, gas can still drive the cost.

Occasionally there’s so much supply on the system that the market tips into negative pricing, where generators effectively pay to offload power. These spikes and dips show how dynamic the wholesale market can be and why tariffs linked to it, such as Agile, change every 30 minutes.

I’ve always been interested in the relationship between the Octopus Agile tariff, the underlying wholesale cost, and day-ahead auction pricing.

To understand it better, I contacted a few day-ahead auction data providers to see how much detailed wholesale pricing access would cost. Bearing in mind that Energy Stats UK is just a geeky hobby site, the subscription fees were way out of reach.

You can see single-day UK auction prices here: Nord Pool UK day-ahead prices.

Access to historical or broader datasets requires a subscription. For example, the Nord Pool Data Portal charges €1,200 per year for up to three users on the BASIC plan.

This challenge led me to explore how to reverse engineer indicative wholesale electricity prices from the Agile data that’s publicly available.

Here’s a graph showing the indicative daily average UK wholesale electricity price over the past two years:

Indicative Daily Average UK Wholesale Electricity Pricing (last 2 years)

How the Octopus Agile Tariff Reflects Day-Ahead Pricing

The Octopus Agile tariff is a real-world example of a time-of-use tariff that passes through wholesale costs almost directly. Every 30 minutes, the price you pay is linked to the day-ahead wholesale market, with a small adjustment for distribution charges and balancing costs.

This setup means household bills track market movements in near real time. When wholesale prices fall, such as during windy nights or sunny afternoons with strong renewable output, Agile users often benefit. But if prices spike because gas sets the marginal cost, customers see that reflected too.

For anyone interested in tracking Agile pricing, we publish current and historical data on our dedicated page: Octopus Agile Tariff Pricing.

The graph below from Tuesday 24 June 2025 shows how half-hour prices can move throughout a single day.

Graphs like these, from Agile and other tariffs, are shared daily on Energy Stats UK’s social channels (Twitter/X, Bluesky, Mastodon), so it’s worth following to stay up to date

Graphs like these, from Agile and other tariffs, are shared daily on Energy-Stats UK’s social media (Twitter/X, Bluesky, Mastodon), so it’s worth following us to stay up to date.

How the Agile Tariff is Calculated from Wholesale Pricing

Agile is based on the wholesale day-ahead auction price, multiplied by a factor, with peak surcharges and VAT added.

The formula has been public since Agile launched in 2018, and in practice it works like this:

1. Start with the wholesale auction price (for example £123/MWh = 12.3p/kWh).

2. Apply the Agile multiplier (×2.2).

3. Add the peak-time charge between 4pm and 7pm.

4. Include 5% VAT.

So a £123/MWh slot at 10am becomes roughly 28.4p/kWh, while at 5pm it rises to about 40.4p/kWh.

Analysts often compare these costs with benchmarks such as spark spreads, which show the profitability of gas plants, to understand how wholesale conditions flow through to tariffs. For households, the key takeaway is that Agile makes those wholesale dynamics visible on your bill.

Note that wholesale pricing data from Nord Pool (or Epex) is often in UTC, so during daylight saving time it may be one hour out from UK local time (BST).

Guy Lipman has detailed information on the Agile formulas and how they differ slightly across the 14 DNO regions: Guy Lipman Agile Formulas

Recreating Wholesale Prices from Octopus Agile Data

To estimate the wholesale cost, I ran the Agile calculation in reverse.

Because both Octopus Agile and Octopus Outgoing Agile prices are needed to account for caps and offsets, I could only go back to May 2019, when Outgoing Agile launched.

Using that data, I replayed my script across the full historical dataset to calculate indicative wholesale electricity prices for every 30-minute slot.

The result is a set of daily and half-hourly values that line up closely with real day-ahead market prices, giving a good picture of how the wholesale market has moved over time.

The graph below shows the last seven days of indicative wholesale prices alongside Agile Import and Agile Outgoing tariffs.

Indicative Wholesale Electric, Agile Import and Agile Outgoing (last 7 days)

Indicative Average Wholesale Electricity Pricing for each 30 minute time slot (last 30 days)

This chart shows the average wholesale electricity price for each half-hour slot across the past 30 days. It highlights when prices typically peak and when they drop, helping to show how time-of-use tariffs such as Agile reflect real wholesale movements.

Periods with high renewable output, such as overnight or midday during sunny and windy conditions, tend to show lower prices. Evenings, when demand rises and gas generation often sets the marginal cost, remain the most expensive times.

Indicative Wholesale Electric Daily Average and Gas / Electric Tracker (last 2 years)

This chart compares the indicative UK wholesale electricity daily average with the Octopus Tracker gas and electricity tariffs over the past two years. It doesn’t include wholesale gas auction data, but the gas Tracker tariff closely follows daily wholesale benchmarks, giving a good sense of how the two fuels move together.

For anyone comparing energy types, the data shows a clear link between wholesale electricity prices, gas market trends, and how both flow through to consumer tariffs. Periods of high gas costs usually push electricity prices up too, since gas often sets the marginal price in the day-ahead market.

Wholesale Energy Price Graphs & Downloadable Data

Energy Stats UK publishes daily updated graphs of indicative wholesale electricity prices, along with free CSV downloads for anyone who wants to run their own analysis.

The formulas are applied to all pricing data going back to the start of Agile Outgoing in May 2019. A daily script keeps everything current using Octopus’ published data, so the graphs and CSV files refresh automatically each day.

On this page you’ll find fixed timeframe graphs for quick reference. If you want more flexibility, the interactive dashboard lets you explore different time periods and compare tariffs side by side.

For deeper analysis, you can download the indicative wholesale electricity data in CSV format from the Download Historical Pricing Data page. These files update daily, making it easy to track long-term trends or build your own charts.

Please give credit and link back to Energy Stats UK if you use the data publicly. Thank you.

Disclaimer

These figures are provided on a best-effort basis and should be treated as indicative wholesale pricing rather than exact market data.

The values are reverse-engineered from day-ahead market prices and Octopus Agile tariff formulas. They give a realistic picture of historical wholesale electricity costs, but they are not official datasets.

Other Smart Tariffs

These smart tariffs all link back to wholesale energy pricing in different ways, either through daily variable rates or time-of-use structures.

Explore more time-of-use tariffs in our Time-of-Use Tariffs hub. Quick overview:

• Agile — half-hour day-ahead pricing that tracks wholesale costs.

• Cosy — time-bands for cheaper heating periods.

• Go — overnight EV charging at low rates.

• Flux — export-friendly for home solar/battery users.

• Intelligent Go — smart-scheduled EV charging at cheap times.

• Tracker — daily variable unit rate linked to wholesale benchmarks.

Tip: these tariffs reward shifting usage to off-peak times — good for bills and for a more renewables-friendly grid.

Looking for a full breakdown of these tariffs? Check out our Time-of-Use Tariffs hub, where we compare Agile, Cosy, Go, Flux, Intelligent Go, and Tracker side by side and explain how each one works.

If you switch to Octopus Energy using my referral link, you can claim £50 FREE credit. Thank you if you do!