Posts shared thousands of times on social media claim to show a comparison of “annual energy bills around the world”, where the figure for Poland is supposedly as low as £150 compared to £2,325 in the UK.
While it’s not clear where these specific figures come from, it appears likely that they conflate wholesale prices with consumer energy bills.
We’ve fact checked posts with broadly similar figures claiming UK energy bills are substantially higher than those in other countries several times before. But these were actually based on wholesale electricity prices on a specific day in 2022, and did not reflect the prices paid by consumers. While the figures in these more recent posts don’t exactly match those we’ve written about before, it appears likely that they conflate prices in a similar way.
The version currently circulating online, and shared by a councillor in Cardiff, lists nine countries in Europe and the Middle East alongside prices in pounds. The prices range from £150 for Poland and £485 for France, up to £590 in Israel, but the UK is listed with a much higher price at £2,325. The text above the list says: “Annual energy bills around the world”.
We’ve previously fact checked similar figures claiming average energy costs are €174 in Poland, €650 in France and €2,960 in the UK. As well as listing different prices, these earlier posts did not include Israel, and included some different countries such as Denmark and “Holland”.
What do the figures show?
When we looked at these similar claims in 2023, we spoke to Epex Spot, also known as the European Power Exchange, which is used by more than 450 companies across Europe to buy and sell electricity at short notice to meet demand. They told us that those figures corresponded to day-ahead prices per megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity, for delivery on 12 December 2022, specifically for hour 19 (between 6pm and 7pm).
These prices are not what consumers pay for energy, or an annual cost. They are how much companies in those countries paid for electricity delivery in one specific hour on 12 December 2022.
When we asked Epex Spot about new figures being shared, it told us that while these new figures do not correspond to the Day-Ahead wholesale electricity prices for 12 December 2022, they do “appear to be another example of wholesale electricity market data being presented incorrectly as consumer energy bills or average national energy costs”.
Epex Spot said: “It is important to note that wholesale electricity prices and final consumer energy bills are fundamentally different metrics. Wholesale prices reflect the outcome of electricity trading between market participants for specific delivery periods and can vary significantly from hour to hour. Final energy bills paid by households and businesses also include network charges, taxes, levies, supplier costs, and other components, and therefore cannot be equated with wholesale market prices.”
It’s not clear whether these most recent figures may have been sourced from another platform, or based on a different day, however Epex Spot told us that 12 December 2022 was the only day it could find on which Day-Ahead prices for the UK exceeded £2,000 per MWh.
Using the July 2026 Ofgem price cap rates, the average annual energy cost for the average British household paying by Direct Debit, is currently £1,663 a year. This is far lower than the £2,325 figure being shared online. However, energy prices did peak at an average of £2,380 under the Energy Price Guarantee from October 2022 to June 2023.
The Household Energy Price Index, a study funded by the Austrian and Hungarian energy regulators, measures consumer energy prices in the capital cities of 33 European countries.
In June 2026, out of the countries in the post, electricity cost the most in Belgium at 38 cents per kilowatt hour, followed by Germany, where it was 37c€. In the UK it was 36c€ (approximately 31p) while the European average was 25c€.
