Switching Broadband When You Move House

For years, switching broadband between two different network providers — say, from an Openreach-based ISP to Virgin Media, or vice versa — meant contacting both your new and your old provider yourself. Miss a step, and you could end up with an overlap where you were billed by both at once, or a gap where you had no service from either. Ofcom’s One Touch Switch (OTS) process replaced that on 12 September 2024: now you only contact your new provider, and they take on the job of notifying and cancelling with your old provider on your behalf.

1. 1

   You sign up with a new provider

   You give them your details and consent to switch — that's the only contact you need to make.

2. 2

   Your new provider notifies your old one

   They confirm a switch date and send you a summary of any impacts, such as remaining contract charges.

3. 3

   The switch happens on the agreed date

   Your old service ends and your new one starts, coordinated between providers rather than left to you.

One Touch Switch covers changing provider. Moving house is a related but separate situation, and most UK ISPs handle it with a dedicated “home mover” process rather than treating it as a fresh sign-up. Which of the two cases below you land in determines what you can actually expect.

Neither of these is covered by One Touch Switch or the home-mover process above, and both are common sources of last-minute surprises when people move or switch.

If things go wrong with an install or a repair, Ofcom’s automatic compensation scheme means participating providers (covering the large majority of UK broadband customers) have to pay you a fixed amount automatically — you shouldn’t need to fight for it. The scheme covers three situations: a delayed start to a new service, a missed or late-cancelled engineer appointment, and a total loss of service that runs past the guaranteed repair window.

These figures are indexed to inflation and reviewed every 1 April, so treat them as illustrative of the current scale rather than fixed forever — check Ofcom’s automatic compensation page for the rate in force when you need it. Not every smaller provider participates, so it’s worth confirming yours is signed up before you rely on it.

It’s worth keeping this one clearly apart from One Touch Switch, since both landed within a few months of each other but do completely different jobs. From 17 January 2025, Ofcom banned phone, broadband and pay-TV providers from writing inflation-linked or percentage-based price-rise terms — the old “CPI + 3.9%” style wording — into new contracts.

In practice this means that when you sign up, a provider now has to show you the exact price you’ll pay and the exact price you’ll move to on a stated future date — something like “£30.00 until 31 March, increasing to £31.50 on 1 April” — rather than a formula you’d have needed a calculator to translate into real money. If you’re comparing home-mover deals, this makes it much easier to see upfront exactly what a contract could cost you later, in cash terms, before you commit.

Signing up for broadband online or over the phone counts as a distance contract under the Consumer Contracts Regulations, which gives you a statutory 14-day cooling-off period from the day you agree to the contract. If you change your mind within that window — because you’ve found a better home-mover deal, or your moving date shifts — you can cancel without needing a specific reason, though you may be liable for the value of any service you’ve already used if installation happened quickly.

Before you lock in a provider or an install date for your new address, it’s worth checking what’s actually available there rather than assuming your current provider (or the fastest option) covers it. Ofcom and individual providers publish postcode-level coverage and speed checkers — use one before you commit, particularly if you work from home and a slower-than-expected connection would actually matter to your day-to-day life at the new place.

New-line installs — as opposed to a straightforward switch on an existing line — routinely take two weeks or longer to schedule, and popular moving periods (end of month, school summer holidays) can push that further. As soon as you have a confirmed moving date, get your new broadband order in; waiting until you’ve actually moved in is the single most common reason people end up without internet for their first fortnight in a new home.

If there’s an unavoidable gap between your old service ending and your new one starting, a mobile data plan with a generous allowance, a portable 4G/5G dongle, or tethering from a phone can bridge the gap — worth arranging in advance rather than discovering the gap on moving day itself.