We asked UW recruiters one simple question. They all blocked us.
My girlfriend has a guilty pleasure: watching Utility Warehouse Partners on TikTok. You’ll have seen the videos. Someone stood in their kitchen telling you they made £550 in their first week, that this is their “why”, that they’re building a life of financial freedom by helping people save money on their bills. And, of course, that you can too. Just drop them a DM.
So we started dropping them a comment or a DM. Same question every time, asked politely:
“Can you send me the income disclosure showing what a typical Partner actually earns?”
Only one of them answered it. Nearly every single one blocked us.
That told us everything we needed to know, but we went and did the homework anyway. Here’s what we found.
The document they can’t send you
Here’s the first thing worth knowing: that income disclosure doesn’t exist.
In the US, the FTC leans on MLMs to publish income disclosure statements showing what typical participants earn, broken down properly. The UK has no equivalent law. Nothing in the Trading Schemes Act, nothing in consumer protection regs, forces a British MLM to tell recruits what the average person actually makes.
UW has never voluntarily published one either. In 20-odd years as a listed company, the closest they’ve come is a single cherry-picked figure, which we’ll get to. So when a recruiter blocks you for asking, they’re not just being rude. They genuinely cannot send you a document their own company has chosen never to produce.
Ask yourself why a company whose entire pitch is “extra income” would choose not to show you the income.
The numbers they’d rather you didn’t do
UW is owned by Telecom Plus plc, a FTSE-listed company, which means the accounts are public. And the accounts are brutal.
In the year to March 2026, Telecom Plus spent about £48m on “distribution expenses”. That line covers all commission and incentives paid to Partners, plus other customer acquisition costs. At the year end there were roughly 77,000 registered Partners.
Do the maths: £48m across 77,000 people is about £620 per Partner per year. Roughly £12 a week. Before expenses. And that’s the generous version, because the £48m also includes costs that never reach a Partner’s pocket at all.
This isn’t a new finding. The Guardian ran the same calculation back in 2017 and got £505 a year. Nearly a decade later, nothing has changed except the number of people at the bottom of the triangle.
UW’s counter is a stat on their own website: active Partners averaged £488 a month. Sounds decent, until you clock the word “active”. UW defines an active Partner as one who signed up at least one customer or Partner that month. In other words, they take the whole network, quietly remove the majority who earned little or nothing, then average the rest. The company has itself admitted most registered Partners are unlikely to be active in any given month.
That’s not an income disclosure. That’s a magic trick.
Meanwhile, on TikTok
Set those numbers against what the recruiters post. “£550 in my first week.” “Over £2,000 in your first month.” “Life changing.”
The advertising rules are actually really clear on this. CAP’s guidance for MLMs says earnings claims in recruitment ads must reflect what the average person can earn, advises against quoting specific figures at all, and warns against averages skewed by a handful of top performers. It also says individual Partners posting this stuff count as advertisers themselves, personally on the hook for their own posts.
The ASA has already upheld complaints against other MLMs, like FM World, for exactly this kind of first-month earnings claim. In my view a lot of UW Partner content on TikTok is sailing extremely close to the same wind. If you see a specific income claim in a recruitment post, you can report it to the ASA yourself in about five minutes. I’d encourage it.
So where does all the commission money come from?
This is the question that unlocks the whole model. If Partners are being paid bonuses of up to £300 per household, how is UW still pitching itself as a way to save money?
Because the Partner network isn’t a bonus scheme. It’s the marketing department, and it’s a cheap one.
UW barely advertises. No big TV campaigns, no stadium sponsorships. Instead, 77,000 self-employed people do the selling, and they only get paid when a real, bill-paying customer lands. No salaries, no risk, and clawbacks take the commission back if the customer cancels. Total spend on all of it: around 2 to 3 percent of revenue, which is similar to or less than what a normal supplier burns on advertising and acquisition. The fact that most Partners earn almost nothing isn’t a bug. It’s exactly what makes the model affordable.
The other half of the answer is the bundle. Energy is price-capped and thin-margin for everyone. The real money is in the broadband, the mobile and the insurance that Partners are incentivised to bolt on. A four-service customer earns the Partner £300 up front; a one-service customer earns £50. Bundled customers also barely ever leave, so each one is worth years of margin.
And is it actually cheaper? Usually not, if you’re willing to shop around. Money-saving sites have said for years that picking the best individual supplier for each service typically beats the UW bundle. The savings pitch leans on convenience and perks, not on being the cheapest at anything.
So follow the money and the loop closes: customers pay a bit more than they need to for the convenience of one bill, and a slice of that goes down a chain of Partners, almost all of whom earn pennies, so that a small group at the top can be flown to the Maldives. Which genuinely happened, by the way. In 2023 UW sent around 100 of its top promoters on an all-expenses trip to a Maldives resort where rooms start around £430 a night. During a cost-of-living crisis. While the average Partner was on £12 a week.
The bits the recruiters definitely won’t mention
A quick tour of the public record, all of it documented:
- Ofgem made UW pay £1.5m after finding it failed to consistently treat customers in payment difficulty fairly between 2013 and 2019, including unnecessarily forcing prepayment meters on people under warrant.
- A separate £650,000 Ofgem package over Warm Home Discount customers who were overcharged.
- ASA rulings against UW advertising, including a ruling that its “UK’s best value mobile” claim was misleading.
- A UW Partner was convicted in 2018 after stealing £12,500 from a recently bereaved customer whose account he’d set up. Not the company’s crime, but a reminder that this model puts commission-hungry amateurs in charge of vulnerable people’s bank details.
- The Which? problem. UW kept topping Which? customer satisfaction surveys, which sounds great until you remember tens of thousands of Partners are financially motivated to vote in them. When challenged, Which? admitted it couldn’t tell whether Partners were filling in the survey. In the most recent rankings UW sits mid-table.
The bit where I’m fair to them
Let me be precise, because it matters. Utility Warehouse is not a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are illegal in the UK because the money comes from recruitment fees for a worthless product. UW sells real, regulated utility services that customers use whether anyone recruits anyone or not. Joining costs a tenner plus £3 a month, not thousands in stock you’ll never shift. As MLMs go, the downside is genuinely capped.
But “not illegal” is a hell of a bar to clear. What the public numbers show is a perfectly lawful scheme whose earnings are stacked steeply towards the top, marketed on social media with income claims that the average person will never see, by a company that has chosen never to publish what typical recruits really earn.
If you’re thinking of signing up
Ask your recruiter one question before you hand over anything: “What does the average registered Partner earn per year, including the inactive ones?”
If they answer honestly, the number is a few hundred quid. If they dodge, deflect or block you, well. Now you know why.
All figures from Telecom Plus plc published accounts, Ofgem, the ASA, and press reporting. Happy to be corrected on anything: if UW would like to publish a full income disclosure covering every registered Partner, I’ll write about that too.