Smart meter performance has always mattered, but from early 2026, it will matter in an entirely different way. The introduction of new Guaranteed Standards of Performance rules for smart meters will turn what were previously frustrating customer experiences into immediate, automatic financial liabilities.
For an industry already contending with rising costs, shrinking margins and relentless regulatory pressure, the implications are serious. GSOP will expose weaknesses that many suppliers know exist but have never been compelled to fix. Now, every gap in the smart journey, whether booking delays, installation failures, slow rectification or prolonged non-communication, becomes a cost line. Across the market, those costs are expected to exceed £100m a year.
Below, we set out a few immediate, practical considerations for suppliers looking to manage the risk.
What’s changing
In early 2026, a new GSOP regime specifically targeting smart meter performance comes into force. The rules require suppliers to compensate customers automatically when they fail at key moments in the smart meter journey.
Suppliers will owe compensation when they fail to:
- Offer a smart meter installation appointment within six weeks of a customer request.
- Resolve a failed installation when the cause sits within supplier control.
- Provide a resolution plan within five working days when a customer reports a smart meter issue.
- Ensure a smart meter operates in smart mode – if it remains in non-smart mode for 90 days, compensation becomes due.
These requirements span the entire lifecycle: booking, installation, issue triage, rectification and ongoing operation. Customers won’t need to complain or escalate. Compensation applies automatically, and failures repeat until fixed.
Why suppliers may struggle
Even well-run smart operations struggle with the demands of these standards today. GSOP now turns those weaknesses into daily, measurable cost.
Visibility and control
Many suppliers still lack integrated visibility of their end-to-end journeys. No real-time view of where each customer sits, poor tracking of failures, fragmented systems that don’t talk to each other and limited ability to intervene proactively when journeys stall - whether that is a failed install, a loss of meter comms, or simply notifying the customer there is a problem and what the action plan is to fix it. Under the new rules, these gaps become drivers of automatic compensation.
Installation challenges
Smart installations fail for predictable, often preventable reasons: lack of WAN/HAN coverage, wrong meters or comms hubs, outdated asset data or incomplete site notes. These failures drive revisit costs today, and under GSOP, they trigger compensation for both installation failure and delays before rectification.
The smart rollout has lost density; engineers may complete only two to three jobs a day in the most impacted areas. Job mix is harder, more complex and more geographically dispersed, meaning completing five jobs per day is unrealistic without rethinking routing, job clustering and skills deployment.
Customer engagement issues
Customer engagement failures matter too: missed appointments, last-minute cancellations, disengagement after long wait times, or slow responses when an issue requires a fix. The new need to provide a resolution plan within 5 days mean these service problems will now come at an additional cost – even if the underlying issue isn’t a Supplier fault, the way you handle it matters.
Data quality
Then there’s data quality. Wrong meter location or asset details, registration mismatches and missing technical details block commissioning and prevent smart mode recovery. If suppliers cannot find a meter - literally or digitally - they cannot commission it, fix it or keep it in smart mode. GSOP turns these failures into a daily cost.
The economics have shifted
What used to be a poor experience will now be automatic compensation instead of discretionary goodwill, recurring cost for every day a failure persists, and margin impact from avoidable operational failures.
This flips the economics of Smart. The cost of underperformance rises sharply.
A £100m impact from direct compensation alone
Based on public data and conservative assumptions, a reasonable mid-point estimate suggests the industry could face in excess of £96m per year in direct GSOP compensation payments.
Importantly, this estimate does not include repeat payments, rework or additional field visits, operational overhead such as improved diagnostics or field force tooling, costs associated with scheduling inefficiency or workforce uplift, reputational damage or customer churn, or lost commercial upside from net-zero product sales, smart-enabled tariffs and MHHS settlement flexibility.
In other words, £100m is the floor, not the ceiling.
Wider considerations suppliers cannot ignore
Smart meter performance now sits at the heart of bigger strategic challenges.
Market-Wide Half-Hourly Settlement requires reliable half-hourly smart reads or, at minimum, working meters capable of four-monthly reads. Weak smart performance risks both regulatory non-compliance and commercial disadvantage in flexibility markets.
Smart meters underpin nearly every modern energy product: EV chargers, heat pumps, home batteries and time-of-use tariffs. If a supplier cannot guarantee functional smart meters, customers may buy low-carbon solutions from competitors, or lose trust entirely.
Smart failures also drive core business-as-usual risks: complaints, inaccurate bills, bad debt and uncollectable balances. Smart performance is no longer a programme issue, but a critical infrastructure for the entire retail business.
Immediate targeted action is required to mitigate financial risk
Suppliers need to be taking action now to prevent and mitigate their inherent risk. Key elements to consider are:
Controls
- Is your MI sufficient to highlight all GSOP break point?
- Do you have a solid understanding of your processes and your true root cause failure points?
- Do you have sufficient controls in place and the right workflow and operating model to enable efficient and effective resolution? Clearing these down within the needed timeframe will be key to minimising financial impact.
Data Quality
- Do you know your current level of portfolio health?
- What are your key data items that drive downstream failures that lead to GSOP?
- What is your confidence level that data faults will be resolved before they cause GSOP liabilities?
Workforce Planning
- Do you understand how the new GSOP demands change your priorities for Field resource deployment?
- How can you optimise job allocation and reduce fall out and on the day aborts to maximise field productivity?
Customer Engagement
- Are customers fully prepared for what’s required on the day?
- Are the expectations on customers made clear to them ahead of the visit?
- How optimised is your current engagement and what is the GSOP cost exposure attached to that drop?
The bottom line
The new GSOP rules don’t introduce new problems. They introduce new consequences.
Smart meter performance will now directly affect cost base, regulatory compliance, net-zero strategy, customer trust and operational resilience.
Suppliers that invest early in journey insight, data quality, field force optimisation and customer engagement will avoid the cost shock and gain a competitive advantage. Those who wait will pay for it daily.
We’re working with several suppliers to model their GSOP exposure and build targeted mitigation plans. If you’d like to explore what this looks like for your business, contact Jon Vincent.
