Community Fibre drops mid-contract price rises for new customers

Community Fibre is promising no mid-contract price rises for new customers who sign up before 2 February 2026.

Monthly prices will be fixed for the full length of the contract, with full-fibre broadband deals available to London customers on terms of up to 24 months.

The move comes amid ongoing scrutiny of mid-contract price rises, which have pushed up bills for customers already locked into broadband contracts.

Prices locked

Community Fibre says new customers who take out a broadband contract on or before 2 February 2026 will not face any mid-contract price increases.

The monthly price agreed at sign-up is fixed for the full minimum term of the contract, which can run for up to 24 months depending on the deal chosen.

That means Community Fibre's usual £2-per-month April price rise will not be applied during the contract period, including for customers whose contracts run through April 2026 or 2027.

The offer is available to new residential customers in London - where Community Fibre says it covers over 1.3 million homes - as well as parts of Surrey and Sussex, areas previously served by Box Broadband.

Standard pricing applies once the minimum contract period ends.

How the deal stacks up

The guarantee applies to customers choosing from Community Fibre's current range of broadband deals.

Under the new offer, Community Fibre's headline monthly prices are £17.99 for its 150Mb package, £20 for 500Mb, and £25 for its 1Gb service.

Those prices are higher than some recent promotional rates, but broadly in line with Community Fibre's longer-term pricing before temporary discounts were applied.

Under the previous pricing model, customers could sign up at lower introductory prices but would then see their monthly bill increase by £2 each April during the contract.

The current structure reverses that approach, starting at a higher headline price but removing mid-contract increases entirely.

Over a full 24-month contract, a customer starting on a £15-a-month 150Mb deal and facing two April price rises would have paid around £424 in total.

By comparison, paying a fixed £17.99 a month for 24 months comes to £431.76.

In cash terms, that means the locked-price deal costs slightly more than the lowest promotional pricing it replaces, but avoids price rises during the contract and fixes the total monthly cost upfront.

Hikes on, hikes off

What's more noticeable, however, is what this says about how mid-contract price rises are now being used - and how optional they appear to have become.

By offering fixed prices for the length of the contract, Community Fibre removes a practice many customers dislike and positions itself as fairer and more transparent, even if the overall cost outcome is similar.

What stands out is how easily those price rises can be switched on and off. Fixed pricing is being used as a promotional lever, rather than reflecting a permanent change in how broadband is priced.

This is not the first time Community Fibre has taken this approach. The provider ran a similar fixed-price promotion in 2024, using price certainty as a time-limited offer rather than a permanent shift in pricing.

That matters because providers have long argued that annual price rises are a necessary part of broadband contracts. The ability to remove them when it suits marketing or positioning weakens that claim.

Community Fibre is not alone in this. Fixed-price offers, waived April rises, and time-limited guarantees have become common ways for providers to respond to customer frustration without abandoning mid-contract increases altogether.

The fact that providers can switch mid-contract price rises on and off as part of promotional offers also calls into question how necessary those annual increases are in the first place.

This adds another dimension to why mid-contract price rises remain under scrutiny, with Ofcom being pushed to reconsider whether current rules are working - even as the government has ruled out banning the practice outright.

Community Fibre has typically positioned itself as a fairer alternative to larger broadband providers, and its pricing has often reflected that. In this case, however, scepticism is reasonable.

This offer removes an unpopular pricing mechanic, but does not materially lower what most customers would have paid compared with earlier deals.

For customers, the result is clearer pricing on specific offers, but more uncertainty about what pricing rules really apply.

When price rises can be removed on some contracts but not others, they start to look like a choice rather than a necessity - which makes their continued use harder to defend.