Methodology for energy ratings

If you’ve browsed our energy review pages you may have noticed that many of them feature star ratings at the top. They’re there to give you a quick indication of how good an energy supplier’s service is and how it treats its customers.

To make sure everything is transparent, here we explain how we crunch the numbers to come up with the ratings.

Finder score

★★★★★ – Excellent

★★★★★ – Good

★★★★★ – Average

★★★★★ – Subpar

★★★★★ – Poor

How it works

To come up with our expert ratings, we score suppliers across 6 key areas. Each contributes a different amount to the overall score.

• Clear bills (25% of total score). This part of the overall score measures the proportion of a firm’s customers who were given an accurate bill (based on actual use) at least once a year. We get this information from Citizens Advice and the energy market watchdog Ofgem directly.
• Can customers manage their account easily? (25% of total score). This measures how easily a supplier’s customers can contact customer service staff and manage their account. Most of this score is determined by response speeds. These figures are collected by Ofgem, and by Citizens Advice which publishes data on firms’ customer service performance every 3 months.
• Is the supplier signed up to energy industry guarantee schemes? (5% of total score). We award suppliers 5 percentage points if they’re signed up to both the Energy Switch Guarantee and the Vulnerability Commitment.
• Is the supplier open about its fuel mix? (5% of total score). We give firms 5 percentage points for giving Ofgem data about how the energy it sells customers is sourced. If it doesn’t make this information easily available to the regulator, it gets zilch in this section.
• Payment methods (5% of total score). This score takes note of how many accessible ways customers can use to pay for their energy.
• Quality of complaints handling (35% of total score). We use Ofgem data which records how many customer complaints were sent to a firm that then needed to be escalated to third parties like the Energy Ombudsman. This figure measures how many complaints were escalated per 10,000 customers. The fewer escalated complaints, the better the score.
• Overall. Percentage scores are converted into a star rating and rounded to the nearest half star.