BICS MPAN mapping: what you need before 1 October

Last updated 31 July 2026.

Before anything else in a BICS application can be calculated, every import MPAN at your site has to be identified and mapped to the site and the legal entity it serves. It is the task with the longest lead time in the whole process, which is why it has to start before the application window opens on 1 October.

Why this is the critical path

BICS is calculated site by site, and a site is defined in practice by its meters. The government defines a manufacturing site as a location where manufacturing takes place that you own, lease or control, including facilities within larger areas such as industrial estates or ports. The chain runs: applying legal entity, then site, then import MPANs, then eligible products, then the electricity allocation that sets your pro-rating band. Nothing downstream of the meters can be evidenced until the meters themselves are pinned down.

There is a second reason this matters, and it is not widely understood. DBT has confirmed that the central eligibility dataset it shares with suppliers, administered through the BICS digital service, will hold records at MPAN level, not business level. The mapping you submit is the mapping your supplier will bill against. An MPAN missed, or wrongly attached, is not a paperwork error. It is money arriving on the wrong meter or not arriving at all.

The four situations that make it slow

Multi-building sites. Older sites accumulate meters. A site that has expanded building by building over decades can have import MPANs nobody has looked at since they were installed, some registered to predecessor entities or old addresses.

Stale registered details. Meters get replaced, consolidated and re-registered, and the details held against an MPAN can be out of date even though the MPAN itself is correct. The registered supply address may be an old one, the supplier account may sit with a predecessor entity, or the metering details may not reflect the current physical setup. Consumption history can also sit across several MPANs for what is physically one supply.

Landlord and private network supplies. If you draw electricity through a landlord or a third party's private network, you are eligible in principle, but only where the levy costs can actually be verified. The responsibility for producing that evidence sits with you, not the landlord. Where it cannot be verified, fuller arrangements have been deferred to Year 2.

Multiple suppliers. Different buildings on different supply contracts means different billing arrangements for the relief itself, and more than one supplier to chase on pass-through.

One relief: where sites or MPANs are shared between businesses, the calculation only takes the applicant's share into account.

What to gather now

A list of every import MPAN associated with each site, from bills, half-hourly data agreements and the meter operators. Twelve months of consumption against each. The registered supply address for each MPAN and the legal entity each contract sits with. Then a single document that ties MPAN to building to site to entity, because that document is what everything else in the application references.

Groups should do this per site, not per company. Different sites can land in different pro-rating bands, and the evidence has to hold at site level.

If you would rather have this done for you, the readiness audit starts with exactly this mapping: /bics-readiness-audit

Not sure where your site stands?

The BICS Readiness Audit is a fixed-fee, two-page assessment: eligibility against all four gates, an indicative pro-rating band for each site, what the exemption and backdated payment are worth, and the evidence you still need. £500, returned within two business days, credited in full if you go on to instruct the full application.

See what is included →

Sources: the manufacturing site definition and the applicant's-share rule for shared meters are from the Government response on scheme eligibility and approach, 16 April 2026. MPAN-level records in the central dataset, the BICS digital service, site-by-site assessment and the landlord supply position are from the Government response on regulatory changes and scheme delivery, 8 July 2026.

Anthony Salasidis, Meridian Trade Advisory. If you think I have got something wrong, tell me and I will correct it.