Octopus Energy Group Limited

Overview

Octopus Energy Group Limited is a private company registered in England and Wales (number 09718624), incorporated on 5 August 2015, with its registered office on Oxford Street in London. The retail brand launched to customers in 2016. The audited accounts name Greg Jackson as Chief Executive Officer and Founder and Stuart Jackson as Chief Financial Officer and Co-founder. At 30 April 2025 the group had 7.6 million UK customers across 13.9 million domestic meters, over 2.4 million international customers across 2.5 million meters, and an average of 10,030 employees including directors, up from 6,438 the year before. The GB retail licence sits in a separate company, Octopus Energy Limited (number 09263424), which files its own accounts; group figures are not licensee figures.

The shareholder register at 30 April 2025 gave Octopus Energy Holdco Limited 32.07%, Origin Energy International Holding 22.18%, GIM Willow (Scotland) LP 12.78%, CPP Investment Board 12.31%, Tokyo Gas United Kingdom 10.02%, a management and employee bare trust 9.82%, Lightrock Climate Impact Fund 0.41%, Galvanize Innovation & Expansion Fund I 0.25% and OE Holdco Limited 0.16%. The directors state there is no single controlling party but that OE Holdco has significant influence. In a May 2024 primary round, Generation Investment Management and CPP increased their stakes at a valuation of about $9 billion, which Octopus described as a 15% uplift on the prior round. Companies House then records a restructuring: Octopus Energy Holdco ceased to be a person with significant control on 12 June 2026 and Octopus Energy Topco Limited was notified in its place, with new articles filed on 9 June 2026. The resulting ownership is not public and will not be until the FY26 accounts are filed. There is no disclosed post-separation valuation of the group excluding Kraken.

The two halves of the business are very different in size. Energy supply produced £13,026.7 million of FY25's £13,682.8 million of revenue, 95.2% of the total, at a group gross margin of 8.4%. Kraken licensing produced £101.9 million, 0.74%. The group recorded an operating loss of £352.1 million in FY25 and £94.7 million in FY24. Seven months after the FY25 year end, the December 2025 round priced Kraken alone at $8.65 billion.

Business lines

Financial performance

Revenue rose 10% to £13,682.8 million in FY25. Gross profit was £1,149.9 million, a margin of 8.4% against 9.0% in FY24. Administrative expenses rose from £1,217.6 million to £1,502.3 million, and the group recorded an operating loss of £352.1 million against £94.7 million the year before. The loss after tax was £254.8 million, against a profit of £83.3 million in FY24. That FY24 profit came from £194.8 million of finance income, largely interest earned on the ring-fenced cash held since the Bulb acquisition. The group did not keep most of it. Under the terms of the acquisition £140.4 million of that finance income was payable back to the government-owned Bulb in special administration, and a further £47.3 million in FY25. Finance income fell to £127.1 million in FY25 as that cash left the balance sheet.

Three items make the two years hard to compare directly. Revenue from energy supply includes a £70.3 million reduction in amounts recoverable from government under the Energy Price Guarantee and Energy Bills Relief Scheme, against a £374.4 million increase in FY24, a £444.7 million swing inside the revenue line from the reconciliation of a scheme that ended in June 2023. The warmest UK spring on record cut group EBITDA by approximately £103 million. Two changes in accounting estimate, both applied prospectively from 1 May 2024, extended the useful life of customer acquisition costs from 3 years to between 3 and 5 depending on territory, and of internally developed software to between 3 and 5 years, reducing the FY25 amortisation charge by £72.5 million and £31.8 million respectively. Deferring that £104.3 million of cost is permitted under IFRS as a revision of an estimate. It is also why FY24 was not restated, which leaves the two years on different bases.

Reported EBITDA was negative £93 million against positive £136 million in FY24, and ties to the statutory lines. The group also presents underlying EBITDA of £90 million (FY24: £290 million), its own adjusted measure. A full reconciliation appears in an "Additional information: adjusted performance measures" section at page 83: the operating loss of £352.1 million, plus £115.9 million of depreciation and £143.2 million of amortisation, gives EBITDA of negative £93.0 million; adding back £73.9 million of Bulb Wholesale Adjustment Mechanism Agreement impact, £70.3 million of Energy Price Guarantee settlement, £27.8 million of non-cash accounting treatment changes and £11.0 million of acquisition, restructuring and other one-off items gives underlying EBITDA of £90.0 million. Both years tie. The KPI footnote points the reader to page 52 rather than page 83, a cross-referencing error in the document. The narrative also states that the £103 million warm-weather effect is not adjusted for. Underlying EBITDA is a non-IFRS measure the group defines itself.

Cash and cash equivalents fell from £4,202.1 million to £1,512.4 million, almost entirely because restricted cash dropped from £2,920.7 million to £77.6 million as the Bulb ring-fence unwound. Net assets were £1,482.2 million. Borrowings totalled £363.9 million, of which the £292 million long-term element is described as EV fleet external financing secured against the vehicles. No equity was raised in FY25, against £616.4 million in FY24, and no dividend was paid in either year. Capital expenditure on property, plant and equipment and intangibles together rose from £253.0 million to £652.4 million. On 15 August 2025 the group extended its letter of credit facility from £800 million to £925 million. Deloitte's unqualified opinion identifies the migration of the accounting system from Aqilla to NetSuite as the greatest fraud risk in the FY25 audit, and describes general ledger mapping comparison and dual-population testing in response. That is a risk assessment, not a finding of error.

The group accounts present no operating segments, no geographic revenue split and no net debt measure. The group is private and is not required to present them. No primary source therefore shows how group profit divides between retail supply, services and Kraken licensing. On remuneration, the accounts disclose that the highest paid director received £348,000 of short-term employee benefits and £17,000 of employer pension contributions in FY25, against £280,000 and £15,000 in FY24, within a board total of £0.8 million. They do not name that director, and record that five directors employed by the group's shareholders receive no remuneration for their services to the group. No individual director's shareholding or option holding is disclosed anywhere.

Kraken and the separation

Two Kraken account measures circulate, and they count different things. Live accounts on the platform reached 44.2 million at 30 April 2025, up 35%, of which 19.0 million belong to the group's own retail subsidiaries, leaving 25.2 million third-party accounts. Contracted accounts are a larger, forward measure covering signed contracts whose accounts have not yet migrated: Kraken said over 70 million in September 2025, and reporting of the FY26 results of Origin Energy, a 22% shareholder, put it at 95 million across more than 20 countries, with 52 million live, for the year ended 30 June 2026. The FY25 accounts use a third number three times and label it differently in each: the chief executive's foreword says Kraken has "over 73 million contracted accounts", the chief financial officer's statement says the platform "supports more than 73 million accounts", and the foreword's own footnote calls them "73 million live accounts", against the KPI table's 44.2 million live. Only the 44.2 million live figure is audited. Migration is what turns a contracted account into a live one, and it costs money.

The revenue measures divide the same way. Contracted annual recurring revenue was £422 million at 30 April 2025, double the prior year, of which £112 million is internal, leaving £310 million external. Kraken's December 2025 release separately describes "more than $500m" of contracted annual revenue as of September 2025, in dollars and at a different date. cARR is the annualised value of signed contracts and converts into recognised revenue as accounts migrate and customers use the service. The figure that reached the audited income statement for the year to 30 April 2025 is £101.9 million of licensing revenue, up from £81.0 million.

Octopus announced its intention to spin Kraken out on 18 September 2025. On 29 December 2025 Kraken announced a $1 billion round at an $8.65 billion valuation, led by D1 Capital Partners with Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board, Fidelity International, Durable Capital Partners and existing Octopus investors; a separate $320 million from investors led by Octopus Capital was described in the release as going into Octopus. Octopus Energy Group retains 13.7% of Kraken. Companies House records the change of controlling entity over the group effective 12 June 2026, which matches Origin Energy's statement that legal separation completed in June 2026, with the equity raise completing in July 2026. The FY25 accounts state that the announced demerger does not affect the group's impairment analysis or the values disclosed.

The price has drawn published scepticism. The independent analyst Kathryn Porter, writing at Watt-Logic on 27 January 2026, quoted the Financial Times describing Kraken as "priced at 17 times contracted annual revenue of $500mn, many knots ahead of its peer group" at a time when software-as-a-service companies had performed poorly. That is a multiple of contracted revenue rather than of recognised revenue, and the two are not interchangeable. Octopus's position on the valuation is Greg Jackson's statement in the round announcement that "Kraken is in a class of its own, in terms of technology, capability, and scale". D1's Dan Sundheim said that "we believe Kraken is adding significant value to utilities, as reflected in its customer satisfaction, stickiness, and growth". No Octopus or Kraken publication responding directly to the multiple was located.

Porter made a second criticism, on margins rather than on the multiple: Kraken's own accounts, she wrote, showed margin compression, with administrative expenses up sharply and operating losses replacing earlier profitability. Kraken Technologies Limited files its own accounts, separately from the group, and they bear that out on the lines they disclose. Deloitte gave an unqualified opinion, signed on 29 December 2025 by senior statutory auditor Anthony Matthews, with no emphasis of matter and no going concern qualification. The accounts cover the 9 months to 31 January 2025, after the company changed its year end from 30 April. Revenue was £163.8 million against £143.4 million for the 12 months to 30 April 2024, gross profit £116.3 million against £114.9 million, operating profit £0.6 million against £31.3 million, and the result before tax a loss of £5.0 million against a profit of £27.1 million. Two qualifications travel with those figures. The periods are 9 months against 12, so revenue up 14% on the face of the two columns is closer to 52% on a monthly run rate. And the comparative is unaudited, which Deloitte states under an "Other matter" heading: "The corresponding figures in consolidated financial statements are unaudited." The reason is structural, because these are the first consolidated financial statements of the Kraken group. Gross margin is the measure the change of period does not distort, and it fell from 80.1% to 71.0%.

That £163.8 million does not belong beside the group's £101.9 million licensing line. The two cover different periods, 9 months to 31 January 2025 against 12 months to 30 April 2025, and different reporting entities, and the group figure is stated after intra-group revenue is eliminated while the entity figure is not. Customer concentration is the other reason to keep them apart. Note 4 of the entity accounts discloses that the top 5 customers were 94% of revenue (2024: 99%) and that the largest single customer was 46% (2024: 34%), which puts roughly £75 million of the £163.8 million with one counterparty. Kraken does not name it. The foreword to the same accounts adds two further measures on bases of their own: more than 62 million contracted customer accounts at 31 January 2025, and contracted recurring revenues up 58% to £334 million.

There is no company statement of an IPO decision, venue or date. Kraken chief executive Amir Orad told CNBC in September 2025 that the listing "opportunity is significant", while saying Kraken needed to focus on being a pure software company first. Reports of a possible float in London or New York rest on unnamed sources.

The Bulb acquisition

Bulb Energy, with 1.5 million customers, entered the Special Administration Regime on 24 November 2021 under a High Court order, the largest failure of a UK energy supplier. Lazard launched a sale process in February 2022, which ran to October and concluded with the administrators recommending the only final bid received, from Octopus. Government announced the agreement on 29 October 2022. The transfer used an Energy Transfer Scheme, a statutory mechanism used for the first time, effective 20 December 2022: Bulb's licence and customer book moved to a new supplier registered in October 2022 as Bulb UK Energy Limited, subsequently purchased by a wholly owned Octopus subsidiary and renamed Octopus Energy Operations Limited in March 2023. Octopus paid £113 million for the customer book. That book had still not been merged into the main GB licensee more than 2 years later: the accounts of Octopus Energy Limited record Bulb's 1.3 million customers sitting in Octopus Energy Operations Limited at 30 April 2025, with a hive-up planned.

The National Audit Office investigated and reported on 29 March 2023. It put gross taxpayer funding since November 2021 at £3.02 billion as at 31 January 2023: £1.09 billion running the special administration, £1.22 billion injected at the transfer, and £0.71 billion of wholesale energy costs to 31 March 2023. The £1.22 billion included a one-off £1.06 billion payment, described by the NAO as made to assist the new supplier to build up the collateral necessary for it to purchase energy supplies, with the balance expected to come from its own net trading income. The NAO estimated net taxpayer funding after Octopus repayments at £0.24 billion and the expected final net cost to the taxpayer at nil. Its own footnote is explicit that the nil figure holds only because the special administration legislation allows government to recover any shortfall from energy bill payers.

The NAO also found that the department, supported by HM Treasury, instructed the administrators not to hedge and to buy day-ahead instead, against Ofgem's advice. That left the taxpayer exposed to price movements, and the administrators estimated in January 2023 that it saved £240.7 million between December 2021 and December 2022.

The unwind runs through the FY25 accounts. Operating cash flow carries a £2,837.9 million line for settlement of the Wholesale Adjustment Mechanism Agreement, the financial instrument created at the acquisition; the accounts state the final WAMA balance was repaid in September 2024 and that the repayment was funded entirely from ring-fenced cash held since the transaction. A £74 million accounting impact from finalising the arrangements is one of the items added back to reach underlying EBITDA, and a further £86.6 million of deferred consideration for Bulb was settled in investing cash flow. The NAO's £2.96 billion estimate of the amount to be repaid by Octopus was made as at 31 January 2023 and is not the same measure as the £2,837.9 million settled in FY25. No NAO or government publication stating a final settled taxpayer cost after that repayment was located.

British Gas Trading, ScottishPower and E.ON challenged the government's Funding Decision of 27 October 2022 and Approval Decision of 7 November 2022 by judicial review, on subsidy control grounds under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement and on conventional public law grounds. Octopus Energy Group and Octopus Energy Retail 2022 were interested parties. In a rolled-up hearing the Divisional Court refused permission on 31 March 2023 for undue delay, said it would in any event have refused permission on the public law grounds as not reasonably arguable, and said that but for the delay it would have granted permission on the subsidy control grounds and then rejected them on their merits. British Gas and E.ON appealed; ScottishPower did not.

The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal unanimously on 5 March 2025, while differing from the court below on two points: it held that the appellants should not have been refused permission on delay grounds in respect of claims for purely financial relief, and it accepted the Secretary of State's and Octopus's argument that the correct standard of review was conventional judicial review rather than proportionality. Neither point changed the outcome. No court has found the transfer, or the government support behind it, unlawful.

Tariffs and demand flexibility

Agile Octopus, launched in February 2018, sets 48 half-hourly unit rates a day from the day-ahead wholesale market and requires a smart meter reading at half-hourly granularity. Octopus publishes the arithmetic: the rate is min(D × W + P, 95), where W is the wholesale cost for that half-hour in p/kWh, D is a regional distribution multiplier that Octopus's own table puts between 2.00 and 2.40, P is a peak premium of 11 to 14 applied only between 16:00 and 19:00, and 95 is a pre-VAT cap that Octopus says holds the price at 100p/kWh after VAT. Because D multiplies the wholesale price rather than adding to it, the tariff moves further than the wholesale price in both directions; Octopus says the formula "exaggerates the difference in the costs" to encourage behaviour change, describes the tariff as experimental, and reserves the right to amend the formula with notice. Rates for the following 24 hours publish between 16:00 and 20:00 each day.

From 1 April 2026 every Agile half-hourly rate is 3.5 p/kWh lower. Octopus attributes the change to the government removing levies from bills, and the policy is on the record: from that date 75% of domestic Renewables Obligation costs move to the Exchequer for the three years to 2028/29, and the Energy Company Obligation stops being levied on energy bills, which DESNZ says gives the average household a £150 reduction in bill costs. A flat 3.5 p/kWh shift mechanically pushes more half-hours below zero, so any comparison of how often Agile went negative before and after April 2026 picks up a policy change as well as wind output.

Intelligent Octopus Go prices all household electricity use at 8 p/kWh between 23:30 and 05:30, plus up to 6 hours a day of off-peak-priced car charging scheduled by Octopus, which may fall inside that window or outside it. The customer sets a target charge and a ready-by time, and Octopus then picks the slots, integrating either with the car's API or with a supported home charger. The peak rate is regional and Octopus publishes no single national figure. On 7 May 2026 Octopus said it was moving the tariff to what it calls a "dynamic 4-rate system" that prices car charging and home use separately and schedules by grid conditions rather than by a fixed window, with that 6-hour allowance measured midday to midday and charging beyond it billed at the peak rate whatever the time. Octopus justifies the cap on the basis that over 80% of EV charging sessions take less than 6 hours. Its own posts describe the change as rolling out and give no completion date.

Octopus Tracker takes a different approach again: one unit rate a day for both electricity and gas, set from the previous day's N2EX GB day-ahead baseload average and a Marex Spectron day-ahead gas price, with a published regional coefficient (in East England, W × 1.29 + 9.854 p/kWh for electricity) and caps of 100 p/kWh and 30 p/kWh. Its electricity multiplier is roughly half Agile's, so it passes wholesale movement through much closer to one-for-one.

The GB licensee's accounts put numbers on these tariffs, which the group accounts do not. Octopus Energy Limited reports 278,000 EVs on Intelligent Octopus Go at 30 April 2025, up from 156,000 a year earlier, over 100,000 customers on Agile and Tracker, and roughly 1.7 GW of distributed capacity under management. Those are GB figures, not group ones, and the licensee does not split the 100,000 between the two tariffs.

Saving Sessions is the consumer-facing demand response programme, running since winter 2022/23 as a route into NESO's Demand Flexibility Service. Customers earn OctoPoints for consuming below a smart-meter baseline during a called window, and since 2025 for consuming above baseline when there is surplus low-carbon supply. In winter 2022/23, on Octopus's own analysis as reported by Solar Power Portal, 13 sessions shifted 1.86 GWh of demand, averaging 128 MW, and paid £5.3 million to 700,000 participating customers. By June 2026 Octopus put the cumulative total paid at nearly £6 million, so most of the money was paid in that first season.

The service changed in between. On 27 November 2024 the Demand Flexibility Service became a year-round in-merit service competing on price against other balancing actions rather than being procured at an administered price. NESO's stated basis was that its 2024 Winter Outlook showed adequate system conditions and no continuing need for the service as an exclusively enhanced-action tool, so it moved to a merit-based margin tool instead. Octopus campaigned publicly against the change, telling customers on 21 November 2024 that it would "reduce the reward you receive by ~90%", from about £2.25 per unit saved to around 22p. NESO announced a redesign on 25 March 2026, available to its control room from 14 April 2026, adding bi-directional flexibility, cutting the minimum participation size from 1 MW to 0.1 MW, and allowing participants to take part more than once in a day. During the June 2026 heatwave Octopus said 528,213 customers opted in to a session paying 196 OctoPoints per kWh, then announced a second session that week, open to 1.2 million eligible customers between 19:30 and 20:30, paying 415 OctoPoints per kWh, which it stated as 52p.

Zonal pricing and standing charges

Great Britain sets one national wholesale electricity price. Under zonal, or locational marginal, pricing the country would be split into zones so that the wholesale price reflected local supply, demand and network constraints. Octopus campaigned for the change during the Review of Electricity Market Arrangements and commissioned modelling to support it. The FTI Consulting report it published on 25 February 2025 estimated £3.7 billion a year of consumer savings, rising to as much as £5 billion a year if planned infrastructure were delayed, and £55 billion by 2050. That £55 billion is the lowest of three modelled scenarios: £64 billion with delays to certain power lines, and £74 billion with accelerated Scottish wind plus further nuclear delays. Greg Jackson said in the announcement: "The evidence is overwhelming - zonal pricing is the way forward, and we need action now."

Octopus's position was contested inside the industry as well as by government. SSE, ScottishPower and the trade bodies RenewableUK and Scottish Renewables all opposed zonal pricing, and their central argument was financing cost rather than system efficiency. Alistair McGirr of SSE, writing for Scottish Renewables on 10 February 2025, argued that "the purported benefits of zonal pricing will be outweighed by the increased cost of borrowing caused by the greater volatility that zonal pricing would bring", and that zones would not be confirmed until 2030 with the earliest introduction in 2032. Scottish Renewables, an industry association and so an advocacy source, cited government analysis putting the sensitivity at a net cost of £2 billion to £12 billion for each one percentage point rise in the cost of capital, against estimates that locational pricing could raise it by two to three points.

ScottishPower chief executive Keith Anderson welcomed the decision for lifting uncertainty over investment. SSE said the same day that zonal pricing "would have introduced unnecessary complexity and risk into the UK energy market and would have negatively affected consumer energy prices", and RenewableUK's executive director of policy and engagement, Ana Musat, said it was "good news for billpayers, in part because the prices set in the government's auctions for clean power contracts will be lower than they would have been under the costly zonal pricing regime".

Octopus had answered the trade bodies directly: a company blog by strategy director Arthur Downing on 9 August 2024 argued that RenewableUK "risks becoming the voice for inertia". Both cases rest on commissioned modelling. FTI's savings estimate was commissioned by Octopus, and the cost-of-capital sensitivities were pressed by companies whose own financing costs were at issue. Neither was tested against outturn, because zonal pricing was never implemented.

The government ruled zonal pricing out on 10 July 2025 in the REMA summer update, deciding to "retain a single national, GB-wide, wholesale electricity market" and to "not implement zonal pricing". The document gives four reasons: that locational signals would be unstable because "market boundaries (and therefore volume risks) could change during an asset's lifetime"; that zonal would "create additional risk and uncertainty for investors"; that mitigations for regional price disparities "would themselves have distributional impacts and fairness risks"; and that implementation would take "7 years assuming no delays". What replaced it is a package: a Strategic Spatial Energy Plan led by NESO, transmission network charging reform including deepened connection charges and more predictable TNUoS targeted for completion by 2029, a 25-year Centralised Strategic Network Plan, and operational changes including a lower Balancing Mechanism participation threshold and possible 15-minute or 5-minute settlement periods.

On standing charges, the fixed daily amount charged per meter point regardless of consumption, Octopus argues in its own explainer that they are far too high and that big changes are needed to bring them down. Its stated remedy is reallocation rather than abolition: moving cost recovery onto unit rates with extra support for low-income and disabled customers. The audited number behind that position is the £57 million cost of holding its standard variable tariff below the price cap through reduced standing charges in FY25.

Ofgem opened a standing charges review in 2023 and consulted in February 2025 on a zero standing charge price cap variant. On 24 September 2025 it confirmed plans to require every supplier to offer at least one lower standing charge tariff in all regions and for all payment methods. That consultation closed on 23 October 2025 and, in Ofgem's account, faced significant opposition from charities, consumer groups, most suppliers and over half of responding consumers. On 25 February 2026 Ofgem replaced the proposed mandate with a one-year pilot, launched in June 2026, covering British Gas, EDF, E.ON and Octopus, with a cap on participant numbers. Ofgem says participating dual-fuel customers could expect about £150 less per year on standing charges, with the shortfall recovered through higher unit rates.

Octopus's trial tariff went live on 7 July 2026 for 33,000 homes, described on its own page as an experiment run to gather data for Ofgem rather than a permanent product. Octopus states the break-even: customers using more than about 1,800 kWh of electricity or 7,500 kWh of gas a year pay more on the trial tariff than on its standard fixed tariff, because "if we lower the daily standing charge, we have to increase the unit rate". Citizens Advice did not support Ofgem's zero standing charge proposal, responding in April 2025 that "some consumers in vulnerable circumstances - namely those with medical needs that require higher energy usage and prepay consumers - are more prone to harm", saying it was unconvinced that sufficient consumer demand existed, and urging Ofgem to focus instead on minimising fixed costs in the energy system. Nobody in the debate disputes that the fixed costs exist; the disagreement is over who pays them. Ofgem proposed a market-wide requirement in September 2025 and delivered a capped pilot in June 2026.

Capital adequacy and regulatory record

Ofgem's minimum capital requirement for suppliers with domestic customers took effect on 31 March 2025. It sets a Capital Target of £115 of adjusted net assets per dual-fuel-equivalent customer, or £57.50 per domestic electricity customer and £57.50 per domestic gas customer, and a Capital Floor of zero. Adjusted net assets are defined as net assets minus intangible assets plus any alternative source of capital Ofgem has approved. A supplier below the Target faces default Transition Controls, which prohibit all sales, marketing and customer acquisition activity and any non-essential payments, until Ofgem approves a credible capitalisation plan. Falling below the Floor is a more serious matter and may attract enforcement action.

The FY25 accounts address this directly. They state that the UK retail business "was and remains above the Ofgem capital floor requirement" and is "on an agreed path towards meeting its set target of £115 per dual fuel customer", which the group calls "well beyond anything required in any other market in which we operate" and says takes no account of trading arrangements that shield it from mark-to-market collateral. Centrica chief executive Chris O'Shea took the opposite view in July 2025, telling The Telegraph "you can have a look at Octopus Energy's accounts yourself, and you can see that the shortfall is over £1bn", and calling for suppliers not meeting the capital rules to be barred from taking on new customers. Octopus replied that this was "yet more naked self-interest from British Gas" and said it complied with Ofgem's rules and had agreed a compliance pathway with the regulator. Ofgem's stated position is that "where a supplier is not meeting the capital target but has a credible and agreed plan in place, that is not a breach of the rules", and that capitalisation plans "come with restrictions and controls" it expects suppliers to deliver on.

Ofgem does not name suppliers in this position and says so. Its Supplier Financial Resilience Report of 9 June 2026 records 3 of 24 suppliers below their Capital Target in March 2026, and 5 below at some point during 2025-26. It declines to identify them, citing legal restrictions on publishing information about a particular business and the risk of jeopardising a remediation or a trade sale. Whether Octopus has since reached the Target is not public and will not be until the FY26 accounts or an Ofgem disclosure.

All three parties describe the same underlying fact pattern and disagree about what should follow from it. Centrica's position is that a supplier below the Target should not keep growing while it gets there. Octopus's position is that the Target exceeds any comparable market requirement and ignores its trading arrangements. Ofgem's position is that being below Target with an agreed plan is not a breach; its rules make a sales ban the default for a supplier below Target until a plan is approved.

On enforcement, Ofgem decided on 8 July 2025 that Octopus would pay a total of £1.483 million to 34,494 former prepayment meter customers for failing to issue final bills within 6 weeks, in breach of Standard Licence Condition 27.17, between 2016 and October 2023. The package was £0.231 million of credit balances refunded, £1.040 million of Guaranteed Standards of Performance compensation and £0.212 million of additional redress, an average of £43 per affected customer. Ofgem recorded no financial penalty; this was redress, not a fine. Beth Martin, Ofgem's Director for Consumer Protection and Competition, said it is "important that customers receive final bills in accordance with our rules, so they are aware of any credit remaining on their accounts and can reclaim it." The decision also records that Octopus voluntarily wrote off the debt of customers who left supply during the period of non-compliance and has updated its billing systems. Octopus published a response the same day. It argued that its own prepayment pricing put more money in vulnerable customers' pockets than the final-billing rule would have, stating that it charged prepayment customers on average £70 below the price cap, that around 60% of them do not tell it when they move, and that only about 16% would have received a final statement under the rule.

The Advertising Standards Authority ruled against Octopus on 23 April 2025, on a complaint brought by British Gas Trading, whose chief executive contested Octopus's capital position three months later. Seven advertisements were investigated, carrying claims including "Most homes would save with Octopus" and "9 out of 10 Octopus customers pay less than they could with any other large supplier". The misleading claim was upheld: the ASA found that customers already on a fixed tariff with another supplier might not save, and that an Octopus standard variable tariff customer moving to a fixed tariff elsewhere might save more. A second issue, on signposting to the underlying calculation, was upheld in part, against three of the seven ads; the radio and billboard versions carried a link to Octopus's workings and were not found in breach. Octopus told the ASA that the claims were aimed at standard variable tariff customers, and that Ofgem and Energy Networks Association data showed 71% of electricity and 80% of gas customers with other suppliers were on such tariffs. It also said its own standard variable tariff had been the cheapest of the major suppliers since January 2019, and that the "9 out of 10" email claim was accurate when published and had since been withdrawn.

In the Citizens Advice Star Rating for January to March 2026, published 24 June 2026, Octopus scored 3.67 out of 5 against a median of 3.26, up from 3.17 the previous quarter, and ranked fourth of the suppliers compared, behind 100Green on 4.33, Outfox Energy on 4.25 and E.ON Next on 3.71. Citizens Advice named E.ON, Octopus and Ovo as the best performers among the largest six. Octopus recorded 21.3 complaints per 10,000 customers, an average call centre wait of 1 minute 17 seconds, and 86.1% of emails answered within 2 days. A revised Star Rating methodology applies from the October to December 2025 quarter, so quarters before and after that point are not on the same basis.

Greg Jackson holds three government advisory roles, all recorded by gov.uk as unpaid: member of the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council, non-executive board member of the Cabinet Office on a three-year term from 21 July 2025, and co-chair of CustomerFirst at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. He was awarded a CBE in 2024 for services to the energy industry. Dale Vince, the founder of competitor Ecotricity, raised what he called urgent questions in 2026 over whether Jackson had influenced heat pump subsidy policy, saying "there are significant potential conflicts of interest here". Octopus called the claims "wild and categorically unfounded insinuations", and said Jackson advises voluntarily at the invitation of both the current and previous government, has declared his conflicts and recuses himself from discussions about energy. A government spokesman said "we reject the idea this is a conflict of interest", that members are appointed to the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council for their sector experience "not as representatives of companies or employers", that Jackson "has not provided any advice to government on heat pumps in his capacity as a council adviser", and that the council "has not considered this policy issue". That denial is framed around the advisory council alone, not the Cabinet Office or CustomerFirst roles. No regulator, committee or watchdog finding on the question was located.

Strategy and outlook

After the separation the group is a retailer, a services and hardware business and a fund manager, holding 13.7% of Kraken. International retail is the fastest-growing line: customers roughly doubled in FY25 to over 2.4 million, and the smart tariffs it sells in the UK were being extended market by market. Octopus Energy Generation reported £8.5 billion of assets under management across 5.7 GW and more than 400 sites on 18 June 2026, against £6.8 billion and 4.6 GW at the audited year end. The company states those figures were calculated in May 2026 and are subject to change.

On the services side, the group targets 100,000 Zero Bills homes by 2030, houses fitted with a heat pump, battery and solar and sold with a guarantee of no energy bills for 5 to 10 years. The delivered count is not cleanly disclosed. Octopus said over 1,200 were accredited through developer contracts in May 2025, and 5,000 across the UK, Germany and New Zealand in October 2025; those are different measures. The audited accounts do not mention Zero Bills volumes at all. Two acquisitions closed just after the FY25 year end: 75% of Moca Energy, a commercial real estate decarbonisation software business, on 2 May 2025, and a 14.8% investment in Mobile Power on 8 May 2025.

The group did not cover its cost base at the operating line in either audited year presented. The GB retail licensee did: Octopus Energy Limited reported an operating profit of £223.3 million on turnover of £9,722.0 million for the year to 30 April 2025, a margin of 2.3%, against £183.6 million restated the year before. The licensee puts its own cost of holding tariffs below the price cap through reduced standing charges at £45 million, against the £57 million stated at group level, and its turnover excludes Bulb's 1.3 million customers, who sat in a separate licensee at the year end. The group loss therefore arises outside that licensee, in international retail, services and hardware, the separate Bulb licensee and central costs. No published disclosure splits it further, because the group presents no operating segments. Across the sector, Ofgem estimates aggregate domestic supply profit at £0.27 billion for 2025 and forecasts a weighted average of £8 of EBIT per domestic customer for that year, against an actual £26 in 2024. Growth is expensive: expensed acquisition and marketing costs rose to £190 million from £88 million and average headcount rose 56%. The £115 per dual-fuel-customer capital target has to be funded out of the same earnings. FY26 accounts are due by 31 January 2027 and will be the first to show the group without Kraken.

Key considerations

Measurement is the first thing to get right about this company. Six different Kraken account counts are in circulation, and only one is audited: the 44.2 million live accounts at 30 April 2025, 19.0 million of which are Octopus supplying itself. Kraken's own accounts supply the sixth in their foreword, more than 62 million contracted accounts at 31 January 2025, on a different date and a different basis again. Contracted annual recurring revenue of £422 million includes £112 million the group bills itself, and it is a forward measure of signed contracts rather than a revenue line. The audited recognised licensing revenue is £101.9 million. Anyone comparing the $8.65 billion valuation to a revenue figure should say which revenue, on what basis, in which currency and at which date.

The retail business is large, thin-margin and capital-hungry. Energy supply was 95.2% of FY25 revenue at an 8.4% gross margin, and the group added over 800,000 UK customers while raising expensed acquisition and marketing costs to £190 million and growing average headcount 56%. Ofgem's capital regime requires that growth to be matched by adjusted net assets at the licensee, and the group's own accounts say it was above the floor and on an agreed path to the target rather than at it. Whether it has since reached the target is not public.

Disclosure is the binding constraint on any analysis of this group. It is private, publishes no interims, presents no operating segments, no geographic revenue split and no net debt measure, and has no public cap table for either the post-June-2026 group or Kraken. Two changes in accounting estimate deferred £104.3 million of amortisation into later years without restating the comparative. That is permitted, and it means FY25 and FY24 are not directly comparable. Every audited figure on this page is for a year that ended on 30 April 2025.

Sources