BICS: What UK Manufacturers Need to Know Before the 1st October Window

From 1st October 2026, UK manufacturers can apply for one of the most significant reductions in industrial electricity costs introduced in recent years. The window closes on 30th November, and for the first year of the scheme there is no late route.

The British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme (BICS) is expected to reduce electricity bills by up to 25% for over 10,000 eligible manufacturing businesses from April 2027. Government estimates the benefit at around £35-£40 per megawatt hour. For a manufacturer importing 5 GWh a year, that is in the region of £175,000 to £200,000 annually.

BICS is designed to reach considerably further into the manufacturing base than the existing British Industry Supercharger, which supports a few hundred of the most energy-intensive industrial sites. If you have looked at industrial energy support before and concluded your business was too small to qualify, BICS is worth reassessing.

In this guide, we cover what BICS is, who qualifies, what it is worth, the dates that matter, and the site-level energy evidence you will need to support an application.

What is BICS?

BICS was announced in the June 2025 Industrial Strategy and confirmed through two consultations during 2026. Government published its response on eligibility in April 2026 and its response on regulatory changes and scheme delivery in July 2026, with applicant guidance now available on GOV.UK. The scheme is administered by the Department for Business, Science, Innovation and Trade (BIST, formerly DBT), and implementing legislation was due before Parliament in autumn 2026.

The mechanism is relatively straightforward. A significant proportion of a UK business electricity bill is made up of policy levies, costs added to fund renewable generation and security of supply, and collected through suppliers rather than through general taxation. BICS exempts eligible manufacturers from three of them:

• The Renewables Obligation (RO)
• Feed-in Tariffs (FiT)
• The Capacity Market (CM), from October 2027

Government expects these exemptions to be worth around £35-£40/MWh, and has described the effect as reducing electricity bills by up to 25% for eligible manufacturers. The scheme is expected to cost around £600 million a year on average.

The cost is not simply being redistributed to other bill payers. Government has said BICS will be funded through a combination of changes within the energy system, including moving RO and FiT indexation from RPI to CPI, the removal of Carbon Price Support from April 2028, and Exchequer funding, with no increase in domestic or non-domestic bills expected.

Who qualifies for BICS?

Eligibility rests on two tests, and a business must pass both.

• The sector test – Your business must fall within one of the eligible Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. Government selected these codes based on the electricity intensity of each sector as a whole, rather than assessing individual businesses. Manufacturing “frontier” sectors, such as automotive and aerospace, needed a sector-wide electricity intensity above 0.9%. Manufacturing “foundational” sectors, such as chemicals, needed to be above 2.7%.
• The product test – Your business must manufacture at least one eligible product, identified by Harmonized System (HS) code.

Only businesses with both an eligible SIC code and an eligible HS code will qualify. Government has confirmed the final list of eligible activities and does not intend to make further changes for 2027.

This sector-level approach differs meaningfully from the Supercharger, which requires businesses to demonstrate that their own electricity costs amount to 20% or more of gross value added. Under BICS, if your sector and your product qualify, you are in scope regardless of how electricity-intensive your individual operation is.

How relief works on mixed-product sites

Many manufacturers produce a combination of eligible and ineligible products at the same site. In those cases, the exemption is pro-rated using banded thresholds, based on the proportion of grid-supplied electricity at the site used to make eligible products:

The bands are deliberately broad, which means the boundaries matter. A site at exactly 25% receives nothing, while a site just above that threshold halves its policy costs. Where a meter is shared between occupiers, the exemption is further scaled to reflect the applicant’s share of that meter.

Key dates

• 1st October 2026 – Year one application window opens.
• 30th November 2026 – Year one window closes.
• January 2027 – Eligibility decisions issued. BIST aims to confirm all eligible businesses by 8 January, extending to the end of January for a small number of complex cases.
• April 2027 – RO and FiT exemptions begin, alongside a one-off payment covering the period back to April 2026.
• October 2027 – Capacity Market exemption begins.
• 2030 – Scheme review, which will also consider updating eligibility to SIC 2026 codes.
• 2035 – Scheme currently proposed to run until this point.

Successful applicants receive a five-year eligibility period, with a full reassessment at the year two mid-point and an annual declaration in the intervening years, submitted online between December and the end of January. Declarations capture material changes, such as a shift in production mix, that could affect the level of relief.

What happens if you miss the window?

Year one is a fixed window. Applications cannot be amended after submission, there is no late route, and missing the deadline is not grounds for appeal.

Businesses that miss it are not excluded permanently. From year two there is a longer annual application window with a published cut-off date. However, there is no mid-year entry: a later applicant joins at the start of the next delivery year, which is April for RO and FiT and October for the Capacity Market. In practice, missing the October 2026 window means waiting until the April 2028 delivery year.

The one-off backdating payment

Businesses confirmed as eligible in year one will also receive a one-off additional payment, calculated as though BICS had been running from April 2026. It will be delivered as a lump-sum bill credit through your electricity supplier and funded by the Exchequer, with exact timing still to be confirmed.

This payment is only available to businesses identified as eligible in the year one window, which is a further reason not to defer an application to a later year.

BICS and the British Industry Supercharger

The two schemes can co-exist, but relief cannot be claimed twice for the same activity.

Businesses receiving support through the British Industry Supercharger may still apply for BICS if they meet the eligibility criteria. Where a meter already carries a Supercharger exemption, BICS applies only to the portion not already exempted. Where an activity qualifies under both, the Supercharger generally provides the higher level of support: full exemption from Contracts for Difference, Renewables Obligation, Feed-in Tariff and Capacity Market levies, plus network charging compensation which rose to cover up to 90% of network costs from April 2026.

Switching between schemes requires terminating one before joining the other, which is likely to create a gap in support. It is worth modelling both positions before deciding.

What evidence will you need?

The eligibility criteria are published and reasonably clear. The practical challenge is evidencing your position, particularly on a mixed-product site.

Six consecutive months of grid electricity evidence per site, drawn from the previous twelve months, is a mandatory part of an application. Beyond that, the guidance takes a proportionate approach to how you allocate consumption between eligible and ineligible production:

• Where you hold sub-metering or monitoring data, you must use it, covering six consecutive months, and confirm in your application that you have done so.
• Where you do not, you may set out an estimation approach instead, such as machine-level averages or production data used as a proxy.
• Underlying evidence is generally requested during post-application checks rather than at the point of submission.

In other words, sub-metering is not a barrier to applying. But if you have monitoring data, you are required to use it, and a claim built on measured consumption is considerably more robust under scrutiny than one built on estimates, particularly where your site sits close to one of the banding thresholds.

There is also a commercial point worth checking. Government does not currently require suppliers to pass the exemption through in any specific way, though a clear line-item approach is encouraged. It is sensible to confirm how policy costs are itemised in your supply contract, and how an exemption would be reflected in your billing, particularly on long-dated contracts or shared-meter sites.

How energy monitoring supports your application

The businesses that will find the October window manageable are those with continuous visibility of their consumption. Those reconstructing a year of data from invoices in November will find it considerably harder.

Enerlytic gives you the evidence base a BICS application needs:

• Continuous consumption data for every site and meter, rather than figures reconstructed from bills at short notice.
• Sub-meter level breakdowns, allowing you to allocate consumption to specific processes, lines or buildings, the basis of an accurate pro-rating claim.
• Half-hourly data reflecting how plant is actually operated, not how it was assumed to run.
• Multi-site reporting, so a group can quickly assess which entities and sites may be in scope.
• Ongoing monitoring to support your annual declarations and the year two reassessment, when your production mix may have changed.
• Cost reporting to model what the exemption is worth to your business before you commit resource to an application.

If you already use energy monitoring for ESOS or SECR, much of the data required for BICS is data you are collecting already.

Summary: BICS action checklist

• Check your SIC and HS codes: map every legal entity and manufacturing site against the published eligible lists before the window opens.
• Review your position against the Supercharger: you can hold both, but not for the same activity, and the Supercharger is usually more generous.
• Gather six months of grid electricity evidence per site from within the last twelve months. This is mandatory.
• Assess your product mix per site: which band do you fall into? If you are close to the 25% or 50% boundary, better data may be worth a substantial sum.
• Use your monitoring data if you have it – the guidance requires it, and it produces a stronger claim than an estimate.
• Check your supply contract: how are policy costs itemised, and how would an exemption be passed through?
• Set an internal deadline: align finance, operations and energy procurement so submissions can be made consistently across all sites well before 30th November.

The window is eight weeks long. For a manufacturer with meaningful grid import, it is one of the highest-value items on the 2026 energy calendar, and missing it means waiting until 2028.

Preparing a BICS application? Enerlytic can handle the application on your behalf, from checking your eligibility to pulling together the site-level energy evidence you need to support it. Get in touch at www.enerlytic.co.uk and we’ll take it from there.