The UK’s cheapest business line rental — guaranteed

Rated 5 stars by 271 business customers on Trustpilot.

Business line rental is the easiest bill in your business to cut, because the thing you're paying for is identical wherever you buy it. Your line is an Openreach line. The engineer who fixes it works for Openreach. The only real difference between one provider's line rental and another's is the margin added on top — and at the big retailers, that margin is doing a lot of quiet work. UK Wholesale has supplied business phone lines at wholesale rates since 2005: the same line you have now, at £13.99 a month, backed by a promise that if you find cheaper business line rental anywhere in the UK, we'll beat it and give you a month free on top.

What you pay vs what retailers charge

Retail prices vary by provider and contract, which is why we quote them as a typical range rather than cherry-picking one number — but the pattern holds: business line rental from the major retailers typically costs twice as much or more than the wholesale rate for exactly the same line. That gap is the retail margin, and it's the whole reason this company exists.

The same line, priced three ways

• Analogue: BT retail £38.78 → £13.99 with us (63.9% off)
• ISDN2 per channel: £38.65 → £13.99 (63.8% off)
• ISDN30 per channel: £35.53 → £13.99 (60.6% off)
• Pay monthly, or pre-pay 12 months and forget line rental bills exist

One flat rate whatever flavour of line you run. If you're on multi-channel ISDN, the per-channel arithmetic is where the saving gets serious — every channel on the bill drops to £13.99.

Wholesale pricing, plainly explained

There's no catch to find, so here's the whole mechanism. Almost every phone line in the UK — whoever sends the bill — runs over the Openreach network. Providers buy access to that network at wholesale rates. The retailers then add their margin: the brand advertising, the high-street overhead, the call centres, the shareholder dividend. You pay for all of it, every month, on every line.

We skip that layer. UK Wholesale buys at the same wholesale rates the big companies pay and passes the price through with a modest, honest markup instead of a retail one. That's it. That's the entire trick.

Twenty-one years of doing it this way, and the model hasn't needed changing once. Curious how deep the wholesale difference goes? Here's how our lines compare with BT retail, feature for feature.

What the saving looks like over a year

£13.99 a month is £167.88 a year, per line. Typical retail line rental at £25–£40+ a month is £300–£480+ a year for the same line. Line it up:

Illustrative figures, based on the typical £25–£40+ retail range — your own bill is the only comparison that matters, which is why we quote against it directly. Across the bills we take over, the typical saving on line rental is 42%. And that's one half of the bill: add wholesale call rates at up to 72% lower and the same bill shrinks twice. Nothing you buy for the office saves money this reliably — the line works exactly as it did yesterday, and the difference stays in your account every month, indefinitely.

What's included — and what retail bills quietly add

A headline price is only half a comparison; the other half is what happens further down the invoice. What £13.99 buys here is deliberately simple:

• The line, maintained. A business-grade Openreach line with faults handled by Openreach engineers — the same maintenance arrangement the retailers offer, without the retail price.
• Your number, kept. Switching billing doesn't touch your number. It stays yours, on the same line, with the same equipment plugged into it.
• Support from people who know your account. Call the office and you reach someone who can actually fix things — no ticket ping-pong, no being read a script.
• A price that means what it says. £13.99 a month, excluding VAT like every business telecoms price. What you see on this page is what lands on the bill.

Retail bills tend to grow in the other direction. The pattern varies by provider — which is exactly why we won't pin specifics on any of them — but it's familiar to anyone who's actually read one: line features switched on by default, care-level upgrades, billing and payment surcharges, prices that drift upward mid-contract. None of it changes the line; all of it changes the total. Our advice is the same whether you buy from us or not: compare the full year's bill, not the advertised headline. If you'd like to know which line features you actually need, ask us — we'll tell you honestly, including when the answer is "none".

Find it cheaper and we'll beat it — plus a month free

"Cheapest" is an easy word to type, so we back it with something that costs us if we're wrong. If you find business line rental cheaper than £13.99 anywhere in the UK, show us the offer: we'll beat the price you found, and give you a month free on top. Not match — beat.

There's no theatre to it. Send the offer over with your quote request or mention it on the phone, and we price against it. We can make that promise for the same reason we can charge £13.99 in the first place: when you start from wholesale rates, there's simply not much room underneath us for anyone to get to.

Five steps, most of them ours

Switching line rental provider sounds like the sort of job that eats a fortnight. It isn't — because the physical line isn't going anywhere. Nobody digs, nobody rewires. Here's the whole process:

1. Tell us about your lines. How many, who bills you now, roughly when your contract ends. Two minutes on the quote form or a phone call — no obligation, no hard sell.
2. We confirm your price. £13.99 a month per line — and if you've seen cheaper anywhere, this is the moment to say so. We beat it and add your free month.
3. We do the paperwork. The transfer runs between providers over the Openreach network. We handle the whole of it — you don't need to have an awkward conversation with your current supplier.
4. Nothing at your end changes. Same line, same number, same phones and kit plugged in exactly where they were. Here's exactly what changes (spoiler: just the price).
5. The bills get smaller. From the switch date your line rental is billed by us at the wholesale rate — and you've got a direct line to people in Poole and Hyde who know your account, on 0161 850 1288.

We make it easy because there's honestly not much to make hard. The one thing worth doing today rather than later: check when your current contract ends, so the switch lands the moment you're free to move.

Whatever shape your lines are in, the rate is the rate

• One line above the shop. The smallest businesses are the ones retail margins hit hardest, proportionally. A single line at £13.99 is the simplest switch there is.
• An office full of lines. Every line and every ISDN channel drops to the same rate, so the saving scales with the estate. Send us the bill and we'll price the whole of it in one pass.
• No line yet. Starting up, or opening a new site? We install new business phone lines too, and the rental lands at the same wholesale rate from day one.
• Still inside a contract. No problem — get the quote now, note your end date, and we'll time the switch for the day you're free. Cheap line rental is worth a diary entry, not an exit fee.
• Lines your business can't be without. Lifts, alarms, the number every customer knows — if a dead line means real trouble, ask us about priority business care when you get your quote.

Rental is half the story

Better still, our business broadband and phone deal wraps line, broadband and calls together from £11.47 a month. Or add our wholesale call rates — up to 72% lower — and the same bill shrinks twice. Here's exactly what changes (spoiler: just the price).

The call side follows the same logic as the rental side: the calls are carried the same way whoever bills them, so pay the wholesale rate. Calls to mobiles start from 8p a minute, and international rates get the same treatment. If your team rings mobiles all day, that half of the bill may shrink more than the rental half.

And if the line is due a broadband connection as well, the tidiest answer is one bill for the lot: our business broadband package bundles a phone line, FTTC fibre broadband and 500 minutes of calls for £28.95 a month, all in. For a small office that's the whole telecoms estate on one line of the accounts.

The 2027 landline switch off — and why it doesn't rush you

The industry is retiring analogue phone lines at the end of January 2027 (the PSTN switch off), and most providers are using that date to push businesses onto VoIP now, on the provider's schedule rather than yours. We're the exception: UK Wholesale can keep your copper line running until 2030 — same line, same number, same equipment. Alarms, card machines and fax keep working, and cheap line rental today doesn't lock you into anything tomorrow.

When you are ready to move, we'll do that at wholesale prices too — digital phone lines for a straight swap, or SIP trunks if you run a phone system. You move when it suits you. That's the point.

What switching to us is actually like