BICS pro-rating bands: 25, 50 and 100 per cent explained

Last updated 31 July 2026.

Your BICS exemption is not proportional to how much of your site's electricity goes into eligible production. It is banded, and one percentage point can be worth half the benefit.

The bands are settled. If eligible production accounts for less than 25 per cent of the electricity used at a site, the site gets nothing. Between 25 and 50 per cent, it gets a 50 per cent exemption across all import meters at that site. At 50 per cent or above, it gets 100 per cent.

So the difference between 49 and 50 per cent is not one per cent of the benefit. It is half of it.

The same percentage sizes the one-off payment

The band does not only set your ongoing exemption. The same banded percentage is used to calculate the additional payment, the one-off sum covering the support you would have received had the scheme been running from April 2026. That payment is funded by the Exchequer, delivered as a credit on your electricity bill, and available only to businesses identified as eligible in the first year of the scheme.

A site that lands one point below a band boundary loses half of the annual exemption and half of a lump sum it will never have another chance at.

What that looks like in money

An illustrative site importing 3,000 MWh a year, at the government's £35 to £40 per MWh valuation: a 100 per cent band is worth roughly £105,000 to £120,000 a year, a 50 per cent band roughly £52,500 to £60,000. The gap is around £55,000 a year, before the additional payment.

Certificates run five years, with a formal Year 2 review that can move the band. But the band you submit is the basis on which you start, and the basis for the retrospective payment either way.

Where the number comes from

The chain is longer than it looks. You start with the eligible products made at the site, identified against the HS6 code list. (You can check your products against the full list of 1,641 codes here: /tools/bics-eligible-codes/.) From those, you identify the specific manufacturing processes that make them, establish how much of the site's electricity those processes account for, and relate that to the site and every import meter that serves it, the meter-to-site mapping that is the longest lead-time task in the process.

Each link is a place where the percentage moves. A site making both eligible and ineligible products, running shared plant, on multiple meters, does not have one obvious answer. It has a range of defensible answers, and the band boundaries sit somewhere inside it. Pro-rating is assessed site by site, so a group can hold different bands at different sites.

The part nobody has published yet

DBT has not published the evidence methodology for allocating electricity to eligible production. The government's free eligibility checker will tell you whether you are likely to qualify. It will not tell you which band your site falls into, what evidence will be accepted for that band, or whether a defensible reallocation moves you across a boundary.

If your own estimate lands anywhere between about 40 and 60 per cent, that site needs proper attention before you submit a figure, because you are standing on the boundary.

If you want a fixed-fee readiness audit that works through this for your site: /bics-readiness-audit

Related: MPAN mapping: what you need before 1 October · The Year 1 additional payment, explained · Excluded by your SIC code? The appeals route

Sources: the band boundaries, site-by-site basis and the April 2026 backdating are from the Government response to the BICS consultation on scheme eligibility and approach, 16 April 2026. The additional payment calculation, certificate term and Year 2 review are from the Government response on regulatory changes and scheme delivery, 8 July 2026. The £35 to £40 per MWh valuation is DBT's own. The worked example is illustrative.

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