Is There a Power Cut in My Area? How to Check, and Who to Call
When the lights go out, almost everyone does the same three things. They look out of the window to see whether the neighbours still have power. They check the trip switch. Then they pick up a phone and try to work out who on earth to ring.
That third step is harder than it should be, and the reason is structural. The company you pay for electricity is almost certainly not the company that fixes a power cut. There are six different organisations that do the fixing, each covering a different part of the country, each with its own website and its own live outage map — and none of them covers Britain. Which is why the map above exists: it pulls all six together onto one screen, so you do not have to know which of the six is yours before you can find out what is happening.
This guide explains what you are looking at, what it can and cannot tell you, and what actually helps when your power is off.
If your power is off right now, call 105
Before anything else: 105 is free, it works from any UK landline or mobile, it is answered 24 hours a day, and it connects you automatically to the network operator for wherever you are calling from. You do not need to know who that operator is. You do not need an account number. You do not need to have reported anything before.
It was set up precisely because the "who do I ring?" problem was costing people time in the dark, and it is genuinely the fastest route to both information and action. If you can see a damaged power line, a fallen cable or a substation that looks wrong, call 105 immediately and stay well clear — or 999 if anyone appears to be in immediate danger.
The map above is updated once an hour. 105 is live. If those two ever disagree, 105 is right.
Your network operator is not your supplier
This is the single most useful thing to understand about power cuts, and it is not obvious.
Your supplier is the company that bills you: Octopus, British Gas, EDF, E.ON Next, OVO and so on. They buy electricity wholesale and sell it to you. You chose them, and you can switch to a different one whenever you like. In a power cut, they can do essentially nothing for you — they do not own any wires.
Your distribution network operator, or DNO, owns the physical infrastructure that brings electricity to your street: the poles, the underground cables, the local substations, the fuse in the box under your stairs. They are who sends an engineer when something breaks. You did not choose them and you cannot switch them. Which DNO you have is decided entirely by where your property is.
Great Britain is carved into 14 distribution licence areas, run by six operator groups:
| Where you live | Network operator |
|---|---|
| East Midlands, West Midlands, South Wales, South West England | National Grid Electricity Distribution |
| East of England, London, South East England | UK Power Networks |
| North East England, Yorkshire | Northern Powergrid |
| North Wales, Merseyside, Cheshire, and central and southern Scotland | SP Energy Networks |
| Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cumbria | Electricity North West |
| North Scotland, and central southern England from Hampshire to Dorset | Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) |
Northern Ireland is a separate system again, run by NIE Networks, and is not part of the Great Britain network at all — which is why it does not appear on this map.
The quickest way to find yours is to type your postcode into the checker at the top of this page: it will name your operator and link to them. Your electricity bill also usually carries your MPAN — the long supply number, sometimes labelled "Supply Number" — and its first two digits are your distribution area code.
What to do when the power goes off
Check whether it is only you. Look at your fuse box or consumer unit. If a trip switch has gone, the fault is inside your property and no network operator is coming — you need an electrician, and it is worth unplugging appliances one at a time to find the culprit before you call one. If your neighbours are dark too, it is a network fault.
Check the map, then report it anyway. Being absent from this map does not mean nothing is wrong. Network operators often find out about a fault because a customer told them, and their systems are automatic enough that a genuinely new fault may not be listed anywhere for some minutes. If you are off and unlisted, you may well be the first to know.
Turn off and unplug what matters. Ovens, hobs, heaters and anything that could cause a problem if it came back on unattended. Leave one light switched on so you can see when the power returns without walking round the house.
Keep the fridge and freezer shut. An unopened full freezer holds temperature for a surprisingly long time — well over a day in most cases. An opened one does not.
Use torches rather than candles. House fires during power cuts are overwhelmingly candle fires.
Look after the phone. Mobile signal usually survives a local power cut, but your handset battery is now your lifeline. If you have a cordless landline, note that it will not work without mains power — a cheap corded phone plugged into the socket will.
What an ETR is, and why it keeps moving
Every operator publishes an estimated time of restoration, or ETR, against most incidents, and it appears on this map wherever they have given one.
It is worth knowing exactly what that number is. It is the operator's best current guess, made from what they know at that moment, and it is revised as they learn more. A fault on an overhead line can often be found from a vehicle in minutes. A fault on an underground cable may need specialist equipment to locate, then a hole in the road, then a jointer, then backfilling — and none of that is knowable before someone has been out to look.
So an ETR that moves is normal. It is not a sign that anything has gone wrong or that anyone is being evasive; it usually means an engineer has arrived and now knows something they did not know an hour ago. Operators frequently restore many of the affected properties well before the published ETR by switching supply around the network, leaving a smaller group waiting for the actual repair. That is why the number of properties affected sometimes falls without the fault being fixed.
Every restoration time on this page is the operator's own figure. We do not calculate, adjust or predict them.
What "updated hourly" does and does not mean
We collect from all six operators once an hour. That is a deliberate choice: it is frequent enough to be genuinely useful during a storm and light enough to be a polite guest on other people's systems. But it has consequences you should know about.
A power cut that started in the last few minutes will not be here. It may not even be in your operator's own system yet.
An empty area means no reported power cut, not no power cut. Those are very different claims, and this page only ever makes the first one.
Locations are approximate. Operators publish a rough centre point for an incident, not the location of the fault. The area actually affected follows the cable network, which is why two neighbouring streets can be on completely different circuits and only one loses power. One operator, SP Energy Networks, publishes only the postcode district rather than individual postcodes, so its incidents appear on the map as a shaded area rather than a pin.
Not every operator publishes the same things. Where an operator does not publish a figure — the number of properties affected, for instance — we show a dash. We never show a zero in its place, because zero is a factual claim and a dash is an honest one.
If we cannot read an operator, we say so. Any network area we cannot currently see is shaded on the map and named underneath it, with a link to that operator's own site. We would much rather tell you that we have lost sight of your area than show you a reassuring empty space.
The Priority Services Register is worth ten minutes of your time
The Priority Services Register is a free service run by every network operator and supplier, and it is the single most useful thing most households can do before a power cut rather than during one.
You are generally eligible if anyone in the home relies on electricity for medical equipment, has a disability or long-term health condition, has additional communication needs, is of pensionable age, or if there are young children in the house. It is worth checking even if you are unsure — the criteria are broader than most people assume, and there is no cost.
Being on it means your operator knows you are there. In practice that means proactive contact during an outage rather than you having to chase, and priority for practical support during a long one — which can include hot meals, hot drinks, alternative accommodation and, for some medical needs, generator support. Register through your supplier or directly with your network operator; doing one does not automatically do the other, so it is worth doing both.
You may be owed compensation for a long power cut
Network operators work to Guaranteed Standards of Performance set by Ofgem. If your supply is not restored within a defined period, you are entitled to a fixed payment, with further payments for each additional period after that.
The thresholds and amounts depend on whether the outage happened in normal or severe weather, how many properties were affected, and whether you are a domestic or business customer — and Ofgem revises the figures periodically, which is why we do not quote a number here that might be out of date by the time you read it. Check Ofgem's current guidance or your operator's site for the figures that apply now.
Two practical points. Some operators pay automatically and some require a claim, so it is worth asking rather than waiting. And there are time limits for claiming, usually measured in months from the incident, so it is not something to leave until the next time you think of it.
This is not the same as the power cut schedule checker
We publish two power cut tools and they answer completely different questions.
This map shows real power cuts happening now — storms, faults, planned engineering work — reported by the network operators.
The power cut schedule checker answers a hypothetical: if the government ever had to switch off electricity across Britain in an organised rota during a declared national supply emergency, which of the 18 load blocks would your postcode be in, and when would it be off? No such emergency is in force, and none is expected. That tool describes a published plan, not an event.
If your power is off right now, this map is the one you want. If you have read a news story about rota disconnections and want to know where you would sit, that one is.
Where this data comes from
Everything on this page is published by the network operators themselves. National Grid Electricity Distribution, UK Power Networks, Northern Powergrid, SP Energy Networks, Electricity North West and SSEN each publish their live incidents; we read all six, normalise them into one format, and put them on one map. UK Power Networks publishes under a Creative Commons licence and is credited accordingly in the sources section at the foot of this page, along with every other operator.
We are not affiliated with any of them, and we do not present their data as ours. Every incident on this map links back to the operator's own page, which is always the definitive version — and always more current than we are.
If you would rather see what the grid as a whole is doing, our UK Grid Live tool shows Britain's live generation mix, demand and carbon intensity. And if a long outage has you thinking about your bills rather than your fuse box, our electricity comparison is the other side of the same vertical — though it is worth repeating that switching supplier changes nothing about who fixes your power cut.
