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. Work the 2026 figures through and a typical wet-led pub is paying somewhere between 13p and 43p of electricity and gas on every pint before beer, duty or staff, and the cellar cooler alone is about 4p to 6p of that. Here's the arithmetic, and the one contract check that beats every energy-saving tip ever written.

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 published current figures this summer, and it's worth saying plainly that both are written by brokers who make money when you switch, so treat the ranges as ranges.

EnergyCosts.co.uk (updated 7 August 2026) puts a small wet-led pub at £650 to £1,300 a month all-in, a medium food pub at £1,200 to £2,500, and a gastro pub at £2,300 to £4,300. Their unit rates: 21p to 24p per kWh for electricity, 6.5p to 8.2p for gas.

EnergyPlus (updated 10 September 2026) is a touch higher on rates: 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. They put a small wet-led pub at £6,000 to £9,500 a year ex VAT on a decent contract.

On top of whatever you negotiate, 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.

Energy cost per pint at three annual bills and three trade levels. Author's arithmetic: annual bill divided by pints per week x 52.
Annual energy bill500 pints/week800 pints/week1,200 pints/week
£8,00031p19p13p
£12,00046p29p19p
£18,00069p43p29p

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 beer, before duty, before staff. The average UK pint made about £2.23 of gross profit in 2026 on my arithmetic from the Morning Advertiser's £5.34 average price, so on the middle column energy is quietly taking 13% of the GP on every pint you pour, and at the dear end of the table it's nearer a fifth. It's the second biggest overhead nobody prices in, and I wrote about the biggest one in the Sky Sports cost guide.

The cellar is the bit you can't switch off

EnergyCosts puts a cellar cooler at 500 to 900 kWh a month. At 24p that's £120 to £216 a month running one room. At 800 pints a week, call it 3,467 pints a month, keeping the beer cold costs 3.5p to 6p per pint 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 you're 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 £40 a month for nothing.

The deemed-rates trap is the biggest fixable number

EnergyPlus ran 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, about £21,065 on deemed rates. 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.

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. Energy is a stock line. Treat it like one.

Common questions

How much electricity does a pub use in 2026?

Broker figures put a small wet-led pub at roughly 15,000 to 54,000 kWh of electricity a year depending on whose table you read, plus gas on top. The spread in published numbers is itself the lesson: your meter is the only figure that's true for your pub.

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

Current guides quote 21p to 32p per kWh for electricity on a negotiated fixed contract, and 6.5p to 9p for gas. Out-of-contract deemed rates run 35p to 45p or more. If you're paying deemed rates, fixing that beats every other saving available to you.

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. A typical wet-led pub lands in the 20p to 40p range. It's the whole-site bill spread over wet sales, so food pubs should split it in their heads.

Can I just put the pint price up to cover it?

You can, and most of us have. The average pint hit £5.34 in 2026, up 3.3% in a year. The point of knowing your per-pint energy cost isn't to pass on every penny, it's to stop guessing which pints still make you money. That's a GP question, and your stocktake answers it.

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