The TV Licence fee is rising from April 1st – and while millions of households won’t be happy about it, it also won’t solve all the current issues the BBC is facing.
The government announced today that the annual cost will increase to £180, up £5.50 from the current £174.50. Black and white TV licences will cost £60.50
It’s a 3.14% rise in line with inflation, following the 2022 Licence Fee Settlement, with one more increase due in April 2027 before the current Charter expires.
But the real story isn’t the price hike – it’s what’s happening to the BBC itself. The broadcaster is losing licence fee payers at an alarming rate, doorstep enforcement doesn’t work as well as it used to, and the entire funding model is under review with proposals ranging from adverts on iPlayer to placing dramas behind subscription paywalls.
The BBC’s future – and how you pay for it – has never been more uncertain.
Who Actually Needs To Pay The TV Licence Fee?
Before diving into the BBC’s funding crisis, let’s clear up who actually needs to fork out £180 from April.
I still come across people who think that owning a TV automatically means you need a TV Licence. Or that if you never watch the BBC, that automatically means you DON’T need a TV Licence. But both are inaccurate.
You need a TV licence if you watch or record ANY live television from any broadcaster – not just the BBC.
That includes ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky News and even international channels… anything broadcast live, whether you’re watching via an aerial, satellite dish, or streaming it online.
You also need a licence if you use BBC iPlayer, even just for catch-up programmes that aren’t live.
The licence covers your household, meaning everyone living at your address. It doesn’t matter what device you use – television, computer, tablet, smartphone – if you’re watching live TV or iPlayer, you need to be covered by a licence.
However, you don’t need a licence if you only watch on-demand content from services like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon’s Prime Video, or catch-up services like ITVX and Channel 4 (as long as you’re not watching their live feeds).
In recent years, services like Netflix and Disney+ started streaming live events – mainly sports (or, in Netflix’s case, a man climbing a really high tower). If you watch any of those live streams – then, again, you need a TV Licence.
Over-75s who receive Pension Credit get free licences. Blind or severely sight-impaired individuals pay 50% of the fee. Everyone else pays the full amount.
If you don’t pay when you should, it’s a criminal offence with fines of up to £1,000 or, in rare cases where fines go unpaid, even jail time.
For a more detailed breakdown of who needs to pay, check out our complete guide to the TV Licence fee.
A Funding Model In Freefall
This year’s £5.50 increase in the TV Licence fee might seem modest, but it comes as the BBC faces a funding crisis of unprecedented scale.
As we’ve reported extensively over the past year, the numbers paint a dire picture. Licence fee evasion now stands at a record 12.52% – that’s roughly one in eight households who should be paying but aren’t, costing the BBC around £550 million annually.
But that’s just part of the story. Another 3.6 million households have legally declared they don’t need a licence because they don’t watch live TV from any broadcaster and don’t use BBC iPlayer.
If all those households were paying, it would generate an additional £617 million for the corporation.
Combined, that’s over £1.1 billion in lost annual revenue – more than a quarter of the BBC’s total £3.8 billion licence fee income. And the trend is getting worse, not better.
The total number of TV licences in force has fallen to just 23.8 million, down 300,000 from the previous year and a drop of 2.4 million since the peak in 2017/18.
When Knocking On Doors Stops Working
Part of the BBC’s response to the crisis has been to dramatically ramp up enforcement. TV Licensing officers conducted nearly 2 million visits to unlicensed households in 2024/25 – a staggering 50% increase compared to the previous year.
They hired more visiting officers, increased the frequency of visits, and tightened the screws on “No Licence Needed” declarations by requiring people to reconfirm after one year instead of two.
But it hasn’t worked. Despite this massive surge in doorstep enforcement, prosecutions for licence fee evasion fell 17% year-on-year, continuing a steady decline since 2017.
As Shirley Cameron, the BBC’s Director of Revenue Management, told MPs back in September: “It can be harder to get an answer these days than, say, five years ago.”
People simply aren’t opening their doors anymore.
The cost of all this enforcement isn’t cheap either. Collection and enforcement expenses jumped to £166 million in 2024/25, up from £143 million the previous year, driven largely by soaring postal costs (which rose 14.4% in a single year) and the expense of maintaining an army of visiting officers.
Around 40% of TV licences are still issued on paper by default, which the BBC has no target to reduce – a decision that looks increasingly bizarre in 2026.
Digital Tracking: Coming Soon?
Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee delivered a damning verdict on the BBC’s enforcement approach last November, explicitly demanding the corporation “modernise licence fee collection and enforcement by developing and implementing approaches suited to monitoring online viewing.”
In other words: start tracking who’s watching iPlayer.
Currently, when you access iPlayer, you’re asked to confirm you have a TV licence.
But there’s no verification – the BBC can’t match iPlayer accounts with licence fee payers because, as Cameron told MPs, “the licence is based on a household and an address, and a BBC account is a different form of information without an address.”
This digital blind spot is particularly glaring given that BBC iPlayer was the UK’s fastest-growing long-form video-on-demand platform in 2024/25, with nearly 10% more requests than the previous year.
The committee wants this fixed, and recent reports suggest the BBC is now actively working on ways to verify TV licence status through iPlayer logins – potentially blocking access for non-payers, just like Netflix or Disney+ do.
Whether this happens before or after the Charter Review concludes remains to be seen, but the direction of travel is clear: digital enforcement is coming.
Everything’s On The Table
The April increase arrives in the middle of the most significant review of BBC funding since the licence fee’s introduction in 1946.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy launched the Charter Review Green Paper in December, and the options being considered range from modest tweaks to revolutionary changes that would fundamentally reshape what the BBC is and how you pay for it.
The consultation document, which runs until 10 March 2026, lays out proposals including:
Advertising on BBC services – from limited ads on certain online platforms to full advertising across all BBC output, which the government acknowledges “would likely be accompanied by a reduction in the cost of the licence fee.”
Subscription paywalls – where entertainment content like dramas and major sporting events could sit behind a paywall, with only news, current affairs and children’s programming remaining universally available.
Licence fee reform – potentially “requiring more households to pay but with each paying less,” which likely means widening the definition of what requires a licence (perhaps to include all BBC online services, not just iPlayer) while reducing the annual cost.
Technology-driven enforcement – requiring households to verify their TV licence to access BBC iPlayer, similar to how streaming services check subscriptions.
The government has explicitly ruled out replacing the licence fee with general taxation (which Nandy says would compromise BBC independence) or introducing a levy on streaming services.
But pretty much everything else appears to be in play.
The consultation has already received significant public engagement – the BBC’s own “Our BBC, Our Future” survey earlier this year attracted 872,701 responses, suggesting strong public interest in shaping the broadcaster’s future.
A White Paper later in 2026 will set out the government’s actual proposals, followed by a draft Charter for Parliamentary debate before the current one expires on 31 December 2027.
What You’re Actually Paying For
It’s worth remembering what the £180 annual fee actually covers – because it’s not just BBC television.
The licence fee also funds:
- All BBC television channels (BBC One, Two, Three, Four, News, Parliament, CBBC, CBeebies)
- Dozens of BBC radio stations (Radio 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Live, 6 Music, local stations, etc.)
- BBC Sounds (podcast and radio catch-up app)
- BBC News website and app
- BBC Sport website coverage
- Various BBC online services
Plus, a portion of the licence fee – approximately £100 million in 2026/27 – goes to S4C to support Welsh-language broadcasting and the Welsh creative industries.
How Does £180 Compare To Streaming Services?
Breaking down the annual £180 fee, you’re paying £15 per month for everything the BBC offers, plus the legal right to watch live TV from any broadcaster.
That’s roughly comparable to mid-tier streaming services. Netflix’s Standard plan (ad-free, HD quality, two simultaneous streams) currently costs £12.99 per month, while Disney+ Standard (also ad-free) is £9.99 per month.
If you want 4K quality and multiple streams, Netflix Premium costs £18.99 per month and Disney+ Premium is £14.99 per month.
However, there’s a big difference: Netflix and Disney+ are optional. If you don’t want them, you simply don’t subscribe. The TV licence is mandatory if you watch any live television from any broadcaster.
The cheapest streaming options – Netflix Standard with Ads at £5.99 per month and Disney+ Standard with Ads also at £5.99 – are significantly cheaper than the TV licence.
But they don’t include the breadth of BBC radio, news, sport and online services, nor do they give you legal access to live broadcasts from ITV, Channel 4, 5, or any other television channels.
Whether £15 per month represents good value depends entirely on how much BBC content you actually consume and whether you watch live TV from other broadcasters.
For those who regularly watch BBC programmes, listen to BBC radio, rely on BBC News, or watch live sport and events on ITV or Channel 4, it’s arguably decent value compared to paying for multiple streaming subscriptions.
Support For Those Struggling
The government is keen to emphasise support for households facing financial hardship.
The Simple Payment Plan, which spreads the £180 cost across smaller monthly instalments, was expanded in 2024 and uptake rose by more than 10% as of February 2025, now supporting around 287,000 households.
However, 53% of those households don’t keep up with their payments – suggesting many people genuinely struggle to afford the fee even with flexible payment options.
Free licences remain available for over-75s who receive Pension Credit, following the controversial removal of universal free licences for pensioners in 2020.
Reduced fees are also available for blind or severely sight-impaired individuals (50% discount) and care home residents.
What Happens Next?
For now, the £180 annual fee from April 1, 2026 is set in stone, with one more inflation-linked increase coming in April 2027 before the current Charter expires.
But the bigger questions remain unanswered. Will the BBC introduce advertising? Will dramas and entertainment move behind a subscription paywall? Will iPlayer access be restricted to verified licence fee payers? Will the definition of what requires a licence be widened?
The Charter Review consultation closes on March 10, 2026, with a White Paper expected later in the year setting out the government’s proposals. Those proposals will then be debated in Parliament before a new Royal Charter takes effect on January 1, 2028.
What’s increasingly clear is that the current system – a flat annual fee, struggling enforcement, and falling licence numbers – can’t survive much longer in its present form.
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One thing that needs to change is automatically calling people who don’t need a license and evader. Automatically making everyone who does sound like a criminal. The biggest problem is in the modern age having everyone else’s live channels locked behind the BBC’s paywall seems like an outdated system for many now as it should be because no other public broadcasters or channels on Freeview benefit from it. I say this as someone who does pay it too because I watch plenty of live sport but still feel the license in and if itself is outdated.
Referring to lawful non-Licence holders as “evaders” is misleading. There is no legal obligation to submit a “No Licence Needed” declaration, and implying guilt for not doing so is baseless.