If you want to end your contract early, you may have to pay an exit fee. If the exit fee isn’t capped or isn’t stated, you’re signing an open-ended liability, not a fixed contract.

Businesses don’t leave a supplier they’re happy with. tem’s 98% retention rate speaks to that. If you’re leaving early, it’s almost always because something’s gone wrong. That’s a hard enough moment without a supplier piling on a chunky exit bill for leaving. We’d rather stand with you through it than profit from it. We don’t charge an early termination fee. Leave early and there’s nothing to pay.

Usage rarely tracks a forecast cleanly. Most businesses go through busier months and quieter months: a manufacturer might be ramping up in March and slowing down in August, a retailer’s December might look a lot different to its February. Seasonal swings are normal. If they trigger a penalty, check how wide that tolerance band is and what you’re charged for going over or under it.

We don’t have volume tolerance clauses on our contracts. The industry standard sits at around 20%, meaning if you go above or below your forecasted energy usage, penalties apply. We won’t punish you for normal swings in energy usage, ever.

Missing a narrow renewal window can move you onto a worse rate with little warning.

We tell you your contract’s ending well before it does, at 60, 30 and 15 days out, so you’re never caught out by a rate you didn’t agree to. We also never want to punish a supplier for the timing of their renewal. In 2026, when prices were volatile, we were able to bring down rates for our renewing customers. A business should not fall victim to a market beyond their control simply because of bad timing.

Check whether the supplier can walk away whenever it suits them. Some contracts let the supplier exit if supply becomes “commercially unviable” in their own opinion, with no breach required on your side and no compensation. A supplier may attract you with a great price but pull the plug to cut their losses when the market moves. They’re at fault, but you lose out.

We can’t walk away from your contract for no reason. The terms you signed hold for both sides.

If you’re in credit with a supplier that goes under, business customers may not be guaranteed that money back the way households are. Any supplier that’s fully exposed to the wholesale market carries that risk: if prices spike hard enough, it’s not just your bill that’s exposed, it’s whether they can keep supplying you at all.

HSBC guarantees our payment obligations, independently, at an A+ rating (S&P). But that guarantee is a backstop, not the reason we’re stable. On average, around 90% of the power you buy comes through our own infrastructure rather than the wholesale market, so we’re structurally protected against most of the swings that put wholesale-exposed suppliers at risk in the first place. That’s not full insulation, but it makes us inherently more stable, not just better insured against instability.

If a supplier won’t publish its score, it’s worth asking why. A poor credit rating could point to a supplier who routinely, and riskily, underprices their contracts for short-term gain.

Our CreditSafe score is 69/100, putting us in the Low Risk bracket. We also carry zero debt.

Most suppliers buy through the wholesale market and pass that exposure into your price. Wholesale prices can move sharply on events that have nothing to do with your business: a supply shock, a geopolitical flashpoint, a colder than usual winter. A supplier fully exposed to that market is betting your price, and sometimes its own ability to keep supplying you, on how that market behaves. When it moves against them, you’re the one who feels it, either in your bill or in whether they’re still standing to honour the contract at all.

tem optimises and prices every transaction across our portfolio of thousands of generators and businesses, rather than routing through the wholesale market and its web of intermediaries. That means two things: your price isn’t riding on wholesale price swings and it isn’t carrying the costs of the intermediary layers before it reaches you. While we monitor the wholesale market, our pricing intelligence technology means that we are structurally delinked by design, making the wholesale market a reference point rather than an end point.

Non-power costs make up over 60% of a typical bill. Some suppliers bake them into the unit rate or standing charge, others itemise them as passthrough. Bundled, you can’t see what you’re paying, and if a charge changes mid-contract, it shows up as an increase you weren’t warned about.

We add no markup to any non-power charge and every one is itemised on your quote by name and amount. Some, like TNUoS, move when the underlying charge moves. We show you which ones and by how much, rather than folding them into a single number.