What electricity and gas actually cost a pub in 2026, per pint

A wet-led pub in 2026 is paying somewhere between 13p and 69p of electricity and gas on every pint it sells, and most land between 20p and 40p. The cellar cooler alone is about 3p to 6p of that, more if you run several chillers. On a £5.34 pint that's typically a twelfth to a sixth of your gross profit gone before you've paid for the beer or the staff. Here's the arithmetic, what's changed this autumn, and the one contract check that beats every energy-saving tip ever written.

Every energy article about pubs quotes annual figures. £14,000 a year, £20,000 a year, numbers so big they stop meaning anything. You don't sell anything by the year. You sell pints. I run a pub in the North East. The cellar cooler never switches off, the glasswasher runs all session, and the meter spins whether the bar is full or empty. That last part matters, and we'll come back to it.

What pubs are actually paying in 2026

Two of the bigger business-energy guides publish current figures, and it's worth saying plainly that both are written by brokers who make money when you switch, so treat the ranges as ranges.

Type of pub	Monthly energy, all in	Source
Small wet-led pub, drinks only	£650 to £1,300	EnergyCosts, updated 5 October 2026
Medium pub with basic food	£1,200 to £2,500	EnergyCosts
Gastro pub with a full kitchen	£2,300 to £4,300	EnergyCosts

EnergyCosts puts unit rates at 21p to 24p per kWh for electricity and 6.5p to 8.2p for gas, with standing charges of 50p to £1.10 a day on electricity and 30p to 75p on gas. EnergyPlus, updated 10 September 2026, is a touch higher: 24p to 32p per kWh on a negotiated fixed contract, and 35p to 45p or worse if you've drifted onto out-of-contract deemed rates. It puts a small wet-led pub at £6,000 to £9,500 a year ex VAT on a decent contract, using 15,000 to 25,000 kWh of electricity and 20,000 to 35,000 kWh of gas.

Don't skip the standing charge. At £1.10 a day it's £400 a year before you've used a single unit, and it doesn't care whether you opened. That's part of why closing a quiet night saves less than people think, which I worked through in should a pub close on quiet nights.

VAT and the levy on top

Business energy carries VAT at 20%, unless your use is tiny. EnergyPlus gives the de minimis line as an average under 33 kWh a day of electricity or 145 kWh a day of gas, below which VAT drops to 5% and the Climate Change Levy doesn't apply. Almost every trading pub is well over 33 kWh a day, so assume 20%, and if you're VAT registered you'll reclaim it anyway.

The Climate Change Levy went to 0.801p per kWh on both fuels from 1 April 2026. Not huge per unit. It's a few hundred quid a year on a pub's usage, and nobody rings you up to tell you it went on the bill.

The per-pint table

Take three realistic annual energy bills and three levels of wet trade. Divide one by the other. This is the whole-site bill against wet sales only, so if you do food the true per-pint share is lower and your kitchen is carrying the rest.

Annual energy bill	500 pints a week	800 pints a week	1,200 pints a week
£8,000	31p	19p	13p
£12,000	46p	29p	19p
£18,000	69p	43p	29p

Author's arithmetic: annual bill divided by pints per week times 52.

Sit with that middle column for a second. A pub doing 800 pints a week on a £12,000 bill is paying 29p of electricity and gas on every pint before you've paid for the beer or the staff. The average pint is £5.34 on the Morning Advertiser's 2026 survey, and at a 55% wet GP that leaves about £2.45 of gross profit once VAT and the beer come off. So on the middle row energy is taking about 12% of the gross profit on every pint, an eighth. On £18,000 at the same volume it's 43p, nearer a sixth. A small pub doing 500 pints on that bill is losing more than a quarter of its GP to the meter. The full anatomy of that £5.34 is in the price of a pint guide, and the other big overhead nobody prices per pint is in the Sky Sports cost guide.

The cellar is the bit you can't switch off

EnergyCosts puts a standard cellar cooler at 500 to 900 kWh a month, about £105 to £210 at their rates, and a high-volume cellar with several chillers at 1,200 to 2,500 kWh, about £250 to £525. At 800 pints a week, call it 3,467 pints a month, a standard cooler is about 3p to 6p a pint and a multi-chiller cellar 7p to 15p, before you've pulled anything through the lines. Add the gas that carries it to the tap, which I costed at about 3.3p a pint in the cellar gas guide, and a normal cellar is near 10p a pint on cold and carry alone.

You can't turn the cellar off. You can stop it fighting you. A propped cellar door, a condenser furred with dust, perished door seals, cases stacked against the airflow, all of it makes the same cooler pull more kWh to hold the same 11 to 13 degrees. Cleaning the condenser and shutting the door are free. On a 900 kWh cooler, a unit working 20% harder than it needs to is about £40 a month for nothing. A daily cellar temperature reading is the early warning, and the temperature log guide shows what to write down.

The deemed-rates trap is the biggest fixable number

EnergyPlus runs a worked example on a mid-size food pub using 37,500 kWh of electricity and 47,500 kWh of gas: about £14,050 a year on a fixed contract at 27p and 7.5p, and about £21,065 on deemed rates at 40p and 11.5p. Same pub, same kettles, £7,000 difference for not signing something.

If you don't know your contract end date, that's the job today, not the LED bulbs. Rollover and deemed rates are where pubs bleed. Everything else on the usual energy-saving lists is pennies next to that. With energy prices back in the news ahead of the Budget, I'd also look at how long a fix you're offered before you sign, not just the unit rate. What the Budget could change elsewhere on a pint is in what each Budget ask is worth.

Count your kWh like you count your stock

I do a weekly stocktake because monthly numbers hide things. The meter is the same. Read it every Sunday night and write it down next to your wet sales for the week. Within a month you'll know your pub's real pints-per-kWh shape, and you'll spot the week the cellar cooler started running flat out because a fan died, instead of finding out on a bill 60 days later.

Then divide. This week's kWh times your unit rate, plus seven days of standing charge, divided by this week's pints. That's your own number for the table above, and it's the only one that's true for your pub. Energy is a stock line. Treat it like one.

Common questions

How much electricity does a pub use in 2026?

EnergyPlus puts a small wet-led pub at 15,000 to 25,000 kWh of electricity and 20,000 to 35,000 kWh of gas a year, and a mid-size pub at 25,000 to 50,000 kWh of electricity. Your own meter, read weekly, is the only figure that's true for your pub.

What's a fair price per kWh for a pub in 2026?

Current broker guides quote 21p to 32p per kWh for electricity on a negotiated fixed contract and 6.5p to 9p for gas, plus standing charges of roughly 50p to £1.10 a day. Out-of-contract deemed rates run 35p to 45p or more.

How much does energy add to the cost of a pint?

On my arithmetic, between 13p and 69p depending on your bill and your volume, with most wet-led pubs in the 20p to 40p range. On a £5.34 pint with about £2.45 of gross profit, that's typically a twelfth to a sixth of the GP.

Do pubs pay 5% or 20% VAT on energy?

Almost always 20%. The 5% rate applies only below the de minimis level, an average under 33 kWh a day of electricity or 145 kWh a day of gas, which nearly every trading pub exceeds.

How much electricity does a pub cellar cooler use?

EnergyCosts puts a standard cellar cooler at 500 to 900 kWh a month and a high-volume cellar with several chillers at 1,200 to 2,500 kWh. At 800 pints a week that's about 3p to 6p a pint for a standard cooler.