How commission hides in your unit rate: a worked example
Broker commission on a business energy contract is usually not a line on an invoice. It is added to the price per kilowatt hour, which is why it goes unnoticed for years.
Practical guidance · 16 April 2026
The reason undisclosed commission goes unnoticed is structural. It is almost never invoiced. It is folded into the unit rate, so it arrives disguised as the price of electricity.
The mechanism
A supplier quotes a broker a wholesale-derived rate. The broker adds an uplift, and the customer is quoted the combined figure. The supplier bills the customer at the combined rate, collects the whole amount, and passes the uplift back to the broker over the life of the contract.
Nothing on the bill separates the two. The customer sees one rate per kWh and has no way of knowing what portion of it is the broker's.
A worked example
Take a business consuming 250,000 kWh of electricity a year on a three-year fixed contract.
An uplift of 1p per kWh produces:
- 250,000 x 0.01 = £2,500 per year
- over three years, £7,500
An uplift of 2p per kWh produces:
- 250,000 x 0.02 = £5,000 per year
- over three years, £15,000
Uplifts of 1p to 2p are common. Higher has been seen. On a larger site, or across several sites, the arithmetic scales accordingly.
Why "my broker saved me money" is not the answer
This is the most frequent objection, and it is a fair one. Brokers often do reduce a business's costs, particularly where the business was sitting on an out-of-contract or deemed rate, which are among the most expensive tariffs in the market.
But the two things are separate. A broker can move you from a very bad rate to a merely poor one and still have taken several thousand pounds out of the difference without telling you. The saving is real; so is the undisclosed sum. The question in a claim is whether you were told what the broker was earning, not whether you ended up better off than before.
Working out your own exposure
You need three numbers: your annual consumption in kWh, your contracted unit rate, and the contract length. Your annual statement carries the first; the contract carries the other two.
What you cannot get from your own paperwork is the rate the supplier offered the broker. That is the gap. Establishing it usually means a formal request to the supplier, and it is the reason most businesses cannot quantify their own claim from their filing cabinet alone.