Tv licence cost

Sncjw

I’m shocked that if you want s new tv license that they will charge you the same price for 6 months that you would pay in a year if your going to do it by direct debit. I thought I would be able to just pay the £12 fee each month.


You’ll usually pay for your first licence over six months, at around £25.10 a month. If we have to spread the cost across less than six months, each payment may be slightly higher. After this, you pay for your next licence in 12 monthly instalments of around £12.56 – six payments before your licence is due to be renewed, and six after.

This is from the tv license.

giraffe69

Well you can always pay up front if you prefer.

poppasmurf_bewdley

I'm also shocked that when I bought my new TV, I had to pay up front for it as well!

kuratowski

Sncjw wrote: »

I’m shocked that if you want s new tv license that they will charge you the same price for 6 months that you would pay in a year if your going to do it by direct debit. I thought I would be able to just pay the £12 fee each month.

You misunderstood how it works. You pay for the FIRST licence in 6 monthly instalments, entirely in arrears. After that you pay for all subsequent licences in 12 monthly instalments, 6 months in advance and 6 months in arrears. That's why the regular payments are half as much after the first 6 months. It's a bit different from other utilities, I know, but not actually unfair at all. In the end you pay the same as if you had paid annually.

boliston

they would probably get far more people buying licences if they allowed a true monthly instalment plan rather than paying double for the 1st 6 months which could impact on someone with a low income.

Cornucopia

There is trial of a true monthly TVL DD scheme at the moment - I can see it being made generally available eventually.

To be clear about what is going on with the existing arrangement (because the wording used by BBC-TVL is, as usual, not great)...

When you start a monthly payment scheme for the TV Licence, you pay for your first YEAR's Licence over a period of six months. It doesn't cost more overall, but the payments are double because they require you to pay for it twice as quickly. Once you reach 6 months, the payments reduce to normal, and the credit you have built up remains on your account indefinitely. When you eventually cancel your TV Licence (could be when you reach 75) you will get the credit amount back.

MttJocy

Cornucopia wrote: »

Once you reach 6 months, the payments reduce to normal, and the credit you have built up remains on your account indefinitely. When you eventually cancel your TV Licence (could be when you reach 75) you will get the credit amount back.

They have got to be making a fortune with that little scheme, with some 25 million active licences even if we assume that they are only holding £40 per licence on average (To account for concessions and those that don't pay by DD). That would still leave them with a £1 billion deposit sitting around, a half decent money manager could return the better part of £100 million per year on that closer to £70-80 million when adjusted for inflation but still that is a lot of extra profit capita is generating for themselves on all the funds they collect early and don't have to fork out.

[Deleted User]

MttJocy wrote: »

They have got to be making a fortune with that little scheme, with some 25 million active licences even if we assume that they are only holding £40 per licence on average (To account for concessions and those that don't pay by DD). That would still leave them with a £1 billion deposit sitting around, a half decent money manager could return the better part of £100 million per year on that closer to £70-80 million when adjusted for inflation but still that is a lot of extra profit capita is generating for themselves on all the funds they collect early and don't have to fork out.

You'd also have to allow for the fact that a lot of those payers will have done so a long time ago when the fee was much lower, I wouldn't even hazard a guess as to when they introduced the "pay 6 months up front" bit.

They won't have it sitting around either as they wouldn't expect all 25 million people to cancel their licenses at the same time. A lot of it is already spent covering up for certain "celebrities" over the years.