How Much Does a Leased Line Cost in the UK? 2026 Price Guide

If you only want the short answer: in 2026 a 100Mbps business leased line in the UK typically costs somewhere between £150 and £300 a month, a 1Gbps line between £300 and £800, and a 10Gbps line from around £1,000 a month upwards. Installation is usually £500 to £2,000 as a one-off, and is often waived on a 36-month contract.

Those are market ranges drawn from the published 2026 UK price guides, not an HGC price. Every leased line is quoted per site, because the biggest single factor in the price is where your building is and how close the fibre already runs. The rest of this guide explains what sits behind those numbers, what can push a quote well outside them, and how to bring the cost down without giving up the things that made you want a leased line in the first place.

What you are actually paying for

A leased line is a dedicated fibre connection between your premises and the carrier's network. Nobody else shares it, which is what "uncontended" means on a quote. The speed you buy is the speed you get, at 9am on a Monday and at midnight, in both directions.

That last point matters more than most people realise. Broadband and even full-fibre products are usually asymmetric: fast downloads, much slower uploads. A leased line is symmetric, so a 100Mbps line gives you 100Mbps up as well as down. If your business pushes large files to the cloud, runs backups off site overnight, hosts anything on the premises or has a lot of people on video calls at once, upload speed is the number that was quietly holding you back.

The monthly rental also buys a service level agreement with teeth. A proper leased line comes with an uptime commitment, a target time to fix faults, and service credits if the provider misses it. Static IP addresses and a managed router are normally included. You are paying for a connection that is treated as business infrastructure rather than a utility, and the price reflects that.

Typical UK leased line prices in 2026

Prices vary by provider and, above all, by postcode. The figures below are the ranges that recur across the 2026 guides published by UK comparison sites such as Compare Your Business Costs and Amvia, and they line up with what we see in quotes for businesses in Dorset and further afield.

• 100Mbps: roughly £150 to £300 a month for a typical business site. Headline "from" prices as low as £69 a month do exist, but only in well-served urban postcodes where fibre is already in the building.
• 200Mbps to 500Mbps: roughly £250 to £600 a month. This is the sweet spot for a lot of growing businesses, because the jump from 100Mbps is often smaller than you would expect.
• 1Gbps: roughly £300 to £800 a month, with "from" prices around £129 in the best-served city locations. In many areas a 1Gbps line now costs only modestly more than 500Mbps, because the carrier's cost is mostly in the fibre, not the speed.
• 10Gbps: from around £1,000 a month, rising to £2,000 or more outside the major cities. This is enterprise territory and most businesses under 250 staff will not need it.

Two things are worth noticing in those ranges. First, the spread within a tier is bigger than the gap between tiers, which is another way of saying location beats speed as a cost driver. Second, London and the big cities sit at the bottom of every range and rural sites sit at the top. A business on a Dorset industrial estate should expect to be nearer the upper figure than a business in central Manchester, and should plan on that rather than the "from" price.

One-off costs: installation and excess construction charges

The monthly rental is the number everyone compares. The one-off costs are where quotes go wrong.

Installation. A standard install, where fibre already reaches your building or the road outside, typically costs £500 to £2,000. Most carriers will waive this on a 36-month term, and some on 24 months. On a 12-month term you will almost always pay it in full, and the monthly rental will be higher too. If a quote shows free installation, check what term it is tied to.

Excess construction charges. These are the ones to watch. When you order a leased line, the carrier surveys the route from its nearest fibre to your premises. If that route needs new ducting, a road or pavement crossing, or a wayleave from a landowner whose ground the fibre has to cross, the carrier bills the extra work as excess construction charges, usually shortened to ECCs. Published ranges run from £500 to £10,000 and beyond. Road crossings alone can run to several thousand pounds each, and new duct is priced by the metre.

Most installations do not attract ECCs. They apply in a sizeable minority of cases, and they are more likely on rural sites, business parks with private roads, and older buildings with no existing duct. The important protections are these: you should not be committed to the contract until the survey result is known, you should be able to walk away if the ECCs are unaffordable, and a good provider will tell you how much construction allowance is already built into the quote. Ask all three questions before you sign anything.

Lead time. A leased line is a physical build. Expect 45 to 90 working days from order to live service, and longer if there is construction or a wayleave involved. If your current contract ends in six weeks, a leased line will not be ready in time and you will need an interim connection.

What drives the price up or down

• Location and distance to fibre. The single biggest factor. "On-net" buildings, where the carrier already has fibre installed, are cheap and quick. Everything else costs more in proportion to how far the fibre has to travel.
• The carrier. Openreach reaches almost everywhere, but in many towns there are alternative networks such as CityFibre and regional fibre builders whose pricing can be sharply lower where they have coverage. A provider that can quote across several carriers will find the best price for your postcode; one tied to a single carrier cannot.
• Bearer size. The bearer is the physical capacity of the circuit, typically 100Mbps, 1Gbps or 10Gbps. The bandwidth is what you pay to use. A 200Mbps service on a 1Gbps bearer costs a little more per month than the same speed on a 100Mbps bearer, but you can upgrade later without a new install. For a growing business that is usually the better buy.
• Contract term. 36 months is the norm and gets you the lowest monthly rental and the installation waiver. 60 months shaves a little more off. 12 months is possible but expensive on both counts.
• Service level. A standard SLA is included. A premium SLA with faster fix targets and a higher uptime commitment typically adds 10 to 15 percent to the rental. Most businesses do not need it.
• Resilience. A second, diverse circuit or a 4G or 5G failover adds cost but removes the single point of failure. If the business genuinely stops when the internet stops, this is where the money is best spent, not on a faster headline speed.
• What is bundled. Managed router, static IPs, monitoring and a firewall are sometimes included and sometimes line items. Compare the total, not the headline.

Leased line or full fibre: is the difference worth paying?

Full-fibre broadband, sold as FTTP, has changed this decision. In many areas you can now get a symmetric 1Gbps FTTP business connection for a fraction of a leased line's rental, and installation in a few weeks rather than a few months.

So why would anyone pay for a leased line? Three reasons, and they are all in the contract rather than the speed.

First, the SLA. Business broadband faults are fixed on a best-effort basis, often measured in days. A leased line fault has a target fix time measured in hours, backed by service credits. Second, contention. FTTP is still a shared network. It is very fast most of the time, and slower when your neighbours are busy. A leased line is yours alone. Third, symmetry and consistency at the top end. If you need a guaranteed 500Mbps or more in both directions all day, every day, FTTP cannot promise it and a leased line can.

The honest guide is this. If your business could cope with a day offline and mostly consumes the internet rather than serving from it, FTTP with a 4G or 5G backup is probably the right answer and will save you a lot of money. If an hour offline costs you real revenue, if you run phones, cloud applications and remote workers over the connection, or if you have several sites to join together, a leased line is the connection built for that job. Plenty of businesses land in the middle, and we have covered what network redundancy looks like in practice if you want to think about the failover side properly.

How to read a leased line quote

Two quotes for "a 1Gbps leased line" can differ by hundreds of pounds a month and still be for the same thing. Before you compare prices, line up the details:

1. Bearer and bandwidth. Is it 1Gbps on a 1Gbps bearer, or 1Gbps burst on something smaller? What does an upgrade cost later?
2. Term and what changes at the end. 36 months is normal. Check whether the rental rises after the initial term and whether there is an annual price increase clause, often CPI plus a percentage.
3. Installation and construction. What is included, what allowance is built in for ECCs, is there a cap, and can you cancel without penalty if the survey comes back with a large ECC?
4. The SLA in numbers. Uptime percentage, fault response time, target fix time, and how service credits are calculated and claimed. An SLA with no credits is a target, not a guarantee.
5. What is managed. Router, monitoring, firewall, static IPs. Who owns the fault when something in the chain fails, and who you phone at 8am on a Monday.
6. Lead time and interim cover. When will it actually be live, and what happens to your connection in the meantime?

If a provider will not answer any of those in writing, that is the answer.

Ways to bring the cost down

• Sign for 36 months. It is the single biggest lever on both the rental and the install charge. Just make sure the SLA and the exit terms are right before you commit.
• Buy the bearer you will grow into, and the bandwidth you need now. A 200Mbps service on a 1Gbps bearer is cheaper than paying for 1Gbps you are not using, and the upgrade later is a phone call rather than a new install.
• Get the quote run across more than one carrier. Alternative networks can be markedly cheaper where they have coverage, and the only way to know is to check your postcode against all of them.
• Do not over-buy the SLA. The standard SLA on a leased line is already far beyond what broadband offers. Premium tiers are for businesses with genuine round-the-clock dependency.
• Spend the saving on resilience instead. A cheaper line with a 4G or 5G failover often serves a business better than a more expensive line on its own.
• Bundle your phones. If you are moving your phone system to the cloud at the same time, running business VoIP over a properly managed connection removes a separate line rental and gives you one provider to call when something goes wrong.

What we do

We provide business leased lines and managed internet for businesses across the UK, from a Dorset base. The process starts with a free connectivity assessment: we check what broadband, full-fibre and leased line options are actually available at your postcode, across the carriers that serve it, and tell you honestly whether a leased line is worth the difference for how your business works. If it is, you get a quote for your site, with the construction position and lead time spelled out up front, and a connection that comes with monitoring, a business-grade firewall and a UK-based team that owns the problem if anything goes wrong.

If you have a leased line quote in front of you and want a second opinion, or you are trying to work out whether you need one at all, get in touch and we will give you a straight answer.