Uswitch free electricity
Earn free electricity hours via your smart meter that turn into cash with the Uswitch app.
What is free electricity?
Uswitch offers free electricity to customers with compatible smart meters to help them keep energy bills down as much as possible. The free electricity is delivered through our Power Hours scheme, which is run through the Uswitch app.
How do I sign up for free electricity with Uswitch?
Power Hours enables customers to get free electricity during selected periods, no matter which energy supplier they’re with, by using the Uswitch app.
Get the app and connect
Sign up to Power Hours
You’ll be prompted to sign up when you connect your smart meter.
If you can't connect your smart meter, we can run a one-off address check using a bank card - don’t worry, you won’t be charged for anything.
Activate your offers
Look for new ways to earn with your smart meter and activate to take part.
How does free electricity work?
- Earn hours
Connect your smart meter and do other things in the app to build up hours.
- Book a weekend slot
Choose a five-hour time slot to use your hours.
- Power up your plans
Use electricity during your time slot, and we’ll pay you back for what you use, up to £5.
- We work out your earnings
We use your smart meter data and energy plan rate to work out how much to pay you back.
- We'll pay it back as cash
You can then withdraw it to your bank account to use as you like.
What are Uswitch’s current free electricity offers?
You can currently get 10 hours of free electricity when you connect your smart meter to our app.
You can also sign up with the steps above to stay in the loop for future offers we hope to run.
What were Uswitch’s previous free electricity offers?
We have exclusive offers year-round to help you get the most out of your smart meter.
Free electricity on Christmas Day
We've run two previous events where customers could get free electricity on Christmas Day.
25 hours of free electricity
In November 2025, we offered customers 25 hours of free electricity to celebrate 25 years of Uswitch.
Early May bank holiday free electricity
During the first bank holiday in May 2026, we gave customers eight free hours of electricity on the day of their choice.
Earn even more by shifting your electricity
When you connect your smart meter to the Uswitch app, you can also access exclusive Reduce & Earn and Increase & Earn sessions.
These sessions allow you to earn cash by reducing your electricity usage at peak times or increasing it when the grid has an excess of renewable energy.
We'll pay you for every kilowatt-hour (kWh) you save or use compared to your normal usage, and you get to keep 100% of what you earn.
All you have to do is sign up on our app and join sessions when they pop up.
FAQs
If your question isn't answered below, you can find more answers to our most frequently asked questions about free electricity here.
Who can sign up?
Our offers are open to anyone with a compatible smart meter, no matter who their energy supplier is.
How do you calculate my earnings?
We use the kWh usage data from your smart meter to work out how much you've used during your booked slot. Then we pair that with the unit rates from your electricity plan to calculate your earnings.
If your plan is not listed, we’ll use your supplier's SVT rates instead.
If you’ve switched supplier or change plans, make sure the right plan details are shown in the app to get accurate earnings.
We'll add any calculated earnings to your total, ready to withdraw from the app direct to your bank.
Why are my earnings still calculating?
Once your booked slot has finished, we need to get your smart meter data and calculate your earnings. This can take a few days.
Sometimes there are technical issues, meaning we cannot get your smart meter data for certain time periods. If we cannot get enough smart meter readings or plan data for your account, we’ll use average earnings to calculate your total instead.
When can I withdraw my earnings?
Once approved, your earnings will be made available to withdraw from the app. You have 90 days to withdraw your earnings once they become available. They’ll expire after 90 days.
Withdrawal terms apply, so check the app for the exact timeframe for your earnings.
What do I do if my energy plan isn't listed?
Confirming your plan name ensures we calculate the correct earnings based on your current energy plan.
We rely on energy suppliers to share their plan rates with us, and they often don’t share details for less typical plans, like time-of-use tariffs, EV tariffs or tracker tariffs.
If you cannot find your plan in our app, select 'My plan isn't listed'. This will default you to the Standard Variable Tariff for your supplier, which we’ll use to calculate the cost of your usage.
We understand this might be frustrating, but we would rather you were still able to take part at slightly different unit rates than miss out completely. We’re constantly working with energy suppliers to get more plan information, so we can support more plan types in future.
What's the difference between free electricity and Reduce & Earn sessions?
These are separate ways to earn through Power Hours.
Free electricity pays you back for electricity you use during a slot you book.
Reduce & Earn, part of NESO’s Demand Flexibility Service (DFS), pays you back for using less electricity during pre-set sessions.
You can take part in free electricity offers while also being enrolled in an energy saving scheme with another provider. However, when you sign up to Power Hours, you'll be automatically enrolled in Reduce & Earn sessions too, and you can only be registered with one NESO DFS scheme at a time.
If you're enrolled in multiple NESO DFS schemes when a session takes place, you may be paused from earning in both until you opt out of all but one. If we notice you’re in another scheme, we’ll pause your entry in ours until you rejoin Reduce & Earn sessions.
How do I opt out?
You'll find a link to opt out on the Earn tab in the Uswitch app.
