What happens if I use up all my emergency credit?

If you use up all your emergency credit in either your gas or electricity meter, it will shut off your gas or electricity so you’re ‘off supply’.

If that happens, you need to get to a PayPoint and add credit as soon as possible. Make sure you buy enough credit to:

  • Repay all the emergency credit you’ve used.
  • Repay the standing charge debt you’ve built up while you’ve been in emergency credit or off supply.
  • Pay for the gas or electricity you’ll need until you can top up again.
  • Cover any existing debt repayments that you may pay from your meter.

You may notice that your meter balance goes below £0 and the word ‘owed’ appears beside your balance. That’s because your meter is effectively lending you any emergency credit you use, and any standing charges that aren’t paid while you’re out of credit. The amount owed will continue to grow until you top up enough to pay it off.

Here’s an example of why this might happen:
If you didn’t use your gas heating all summer, you might not have needed to top up your gas meter during that time, so you wouldn’t have added any credit to the meter. However, you’d still need to pay standing charges over the summer, so these would build up as a debt balance in your meter.