NYROX Household Benchmarks: September 2026 Averages

NYROX published its household benchmark set on 18 September 2026. Each benchmark is an arithmetic mean of figures collected from publicly available sources — regulators, official statistics and comparison publishers — and reviewed by an administrator before publication.

A word on what these numbers are and are not. They are indicative averages for a set period. They are not live prices, they are not rates you can be sure of obtaining, and they are not a verdict on whether any individual bill is fair. They are reference points: a way of seeing roughly where the middle of the market is at when the data was collected, so you can hold your own paperwork up against it and decide whether you want to look more closely.

This is the first publication of the series. No previous-period averages were recorded for any metric, so nothing here can be described as having risen or fallen. Where you see no trend, that is because there is no trend to report yet, not because the market stood still.

Energy

The electricity unit price benchmark is 26.32 p/kWh. The electricity standing charge benchmark is 54.83 p/day. Both were collected without a geography label, so read them as general figures rather than as region-specific ones. Each was compiled several times during the period; the highest-confidence version of each draws on six sources, which makes them among the better-supported numbers in the set.

A standing charge is the part of an energy bill that does not move with usage. At 54.83 p/day, the arithmetic over a 365-day year comes to roughly £200 before a single kilowatt-hour is counted. That is worth knowing because it explains a common frustration: a household that cuts consumption hard can still see a bill that feels stubborn. The fixed component simply does not respond.

To check your own position, take a recent bill and find the standing charge in pence per day and the unit rate in pence per kilowatt-hour. They are usually printed separately, sometimes on the second page. Compare each against the benchmark on its own — comparing a total bill against a unit rate tells you nothing, because totals are driven by how much you use and how cold your home is.

If your rate sits well away from the benchmark, the next question is usually what kind of tariff you are on and whether it is a promotional rate with an end date. That is where a contract switching window and its exit fee become the relevant facts rather than the headline price, because the date a promotional rate reverts matters as much as the rate itself.

Water

The water figures are the least settled in the set, and should be read with care.

Three separate water standing charge benchmarks were recorded: £123.71/year, £60.76/year and £639/year. Two water unit rate benchmarks were recorded: £1.4706/m³ and £2.3506/m³. Every one of these is based on a single source and carries medium confidence, so each is indicative only. The spread almost certainly reflects genuine differences in how water charges are structured and reported rather than a single national average, and we are publishing them as collected rather than blending them into one number that would imply a precision we do not have.

For a household, the practical use is narrow but real. If you are metered, your bill will separate a fixed standing charge from a volumetric rate per cubic metre. Finding those two components on your own bill and noting them somewhere durable is useful in itself, because water charges are among the outflows people are least able to recall from memory. A structured household bill audit is usually where that gap surfaces.

Transport fuel

The unleaded petrol benchmark is 152.555 p/litre for the United Kingdom, drawn from four sources at high confidence. The diesel benchmark is 165.845 p/litre for the United Kingdom, also from four sources, at medium confidence.

Fuel prices move daily and vary by forecourt, so treat both as a snapshot of the middle rather than a price you should expect to see. The gap between the two — diesel sitting above petrol in this collection — is the sort of thing worth noting if you are budgeting for a vehicle rather than reacting to a single week's pump price.

Insurance

Home insurance premiums produced the widest spread of any category. Benchmarks recorded for the United Kingdom, in £/year, were:

• £383, £375, £379, £321 (recorded four times), £303.75 and £132

Of these, £303.75 (four sources), £379 (four sources) and £132 (three sources) carry high confidence. The remainder rest on one or two sources and are indicative only. The very wide range is a reminder that "home insurance" covers quite different products — buildings, contents, or both — and that averages across different product definitions are not directly comparable with each other.

Car insurance premiums came in at £589/year for the United Kingdom in both recorded benchmarks, one based on a single source and one on four sources at high confidence. The agreement between the two is mildly reassuring, though it does not make £589 a price anyone should expect to be quoted.

The useful exercise here is not comparison but recall. Most households cannot say from memory what they pay for home cover, when the policy renews, or whether it auto-renews. Writing the premium, the renewal date and the cover type down in one place is the step that makes any later comparison possible — the same discipline that applies to tracking renewals before they roll over automatically.

Borrowing

The 2-year fixed mortgage rate benchmark is 5.5417%, from six sources at medium confidence. The 5-year fixed rate benchmark is 5.508%, from five sources at high confidence. Both are United Kingdom figures.

The two sit close together — a difference of a few hundredths of a percentage point in this collection. In principle, a difference in interest rate changes the cost of borrowing over the life of a fixed term, and the longer the term and larger the balance, the more a given difference compounds. We are not going to translate that into a monthly payment, because that depends on your balance, term and lender's arithmetic, none of which we have.

The credit card APR benchmark is 35.7%, from three sources at high confidence. That figure is worth reading alongside the mortgage benchmarks simply as a matter of scale: revolving credit carried month to month is priced at a different order of magnitude from secured borrowing.

None of this constitutes advice on what to do. If a fixed term has an end date, the fact worth recording is the date.

What to do with these numbers

The honest answer is: file them, then look at your own paperwork. A benchmark is only useful if you have something to hold it against, and most households do not have their own figures written down in a form they can find in under a minute.

That is the problem NYROX was built for — a local-first record of bills, contracts, renewal dates and tariff details that stays encrypted on your own device, with no bank connection and no email access. The benchmarks give you the market's rough middle; your own records give you the only figure that actually applies to you.

We intend to publish this set again. When there is a previous period to compare against, you will see the comparison here.

---

This article is general information and does not constitute financial, tax, investment, or legal advice.