The BICS Eligibility Checker.Up to 25% off, and 10 to 15% more with us.

BICS is a government scheme that exempts eligible UK manufacturers from the indirect costs of the Renewables Obligation, Feed-in Tariffs and the Capacity Market. Those levies sit inside your unit rate, so removing them is worth around £35 to £40 per megawatt hour, which the government puts at up to 25% off an electricity bill. Over 10,000 businesses are expected to qualify. Applications for year one run from 1 October to 30 November 2026, decisions land in January 2027, and the exemption starts in April 2027 for the Renewables Obligation and Feed-in Tariffs and October 2027 for the Capacity Market.

Your business must be registered with Companies House, your site must sit in one of the listed frontier or foundational manufacturing sectors by four digit SIC 2007 code, you must make products on the eligible HS code list, and the site must use at least 33 MWh of grid electricity a year. Frontier industries need electricity intensity above 0.9 percent and foundational industries above 2.7 percent.

It depends on how much of the site's electricity goes on the eligible manufacturing. At 25 percent or less you get nothing. Above 25 but below 50 percent you get a 50 percent exemption. At 50 percent or more you get the full exemption. That is what the third question in the checker above is working out.

Electricity bills covering six consecutive months within the last twelve, showing more than 16.5 MWh over that period, which is the proxy for the 33 MWh a year threshold. You also need your Companies House details and SIC codes, the MPAN for every site you are claiming for, and evidence of the products you make. If a meter is shared with a non-eligible activity you have to document the split. That last part is what delays most applications, and it is worth sorting before the window opens.

You wait for the next round and pay the full levies in the meantime. You only get one application per legal entity per year, so there is no second attempt inside this window either. For a site using 5,000 MWh a year on a full exemption that is a meaningful sum to leave on the table. The window closes at 11:59pm on 30 November 2026.

Yes, you can apply, but you cannot get relief for the same activity twice. Where you already hold Supercharger or Energy Intensive Industries relief, BICS only applies to the electricity that support does not already cover. If you are on either scheme it is worth working out which consumption sits outside it before you apply, because that is what determines whether BICS is worth anything to you.

No. It is an indicative check built on the criteria the government published in August 2026, and it cannot see your SIC codes, HS codes or meter data. The formal determination comes from the government's own service at check-eligibility-for-bics.service.gov.uk. What we can do is review your position with you and get your consumption evidence in order first.

Yes, and you should. BICS lowers what you pay per unit, voltage optimisation and controls lower how many units you buy, and the two stack. We typically cut 10 to 15% of consumption on a manufacturing site, so a full exemption plus that lands at roughly a third off the total electricity cost. Cutting consumption does not reduce your exemption, because the exemption applies to the electricity you actually use.

Then the scheme is closed to you, but the bill is not. Voltage optimisation, refrigeration and plant controls and better monitoring typically take 10 to 15% off a manufacturing site's electricity use, with a payback of 12 to 18 months guaranteed in writing. None of it depends on a scheme, a code list or an application window. Plenty of the sites we work with never qualified for anything and still cut their bill.