Revealed: The true cost of watching the BBC

Telegraph

4 hours ago

The cost of watching the BBC has shot up by three-quarters in the last decade, Telegraph analysis has found.
Licence fee income in England rose to just over £3.2bn over the 2024/25 financial year, thanks to an increase in the standard rate to £169.50 per household. It has since been raised further to £174.50.
While this also funds the BBC's radio output and online journalism, the majority of total spending nationwide was on television production, to the tune of just under £1.4bn – up 12.4 per cent on 2023/24.
Dividing this total by the 30-million-odd consistent weekly viewers aged over 16 in the country, and again by the time these people spend in front of the television or iPlayer, the cost works out to 14p per hour.
Wind the clock back to the year of the Brexit vote – when the corporation's reach was up at 82 per cent – and the comparable figure was just 8p. That equates to a 73 per cent increase in nine years.
Even when adjusting television spending for inflation, the change remains a significant 29 per cent.
A record low of 63 per cent of adults in England regularly tuned in to BBC television channels over the past year, translating to an estimated loss of some 6.5 million viewers over the past nine years.
The average time spent watching its programming in a given week also plummeted from just over eight and a half hours to below six and a half.
The dismal audience figures come from the same annual report that this week revealed the bumper pay rises handed out to the public broadcaster's leading talent, with Laura Kuenssberg and Nick Robinson pocketing an extra £70,000 and £65,000 in 2024/25, respectively.
The dwindling reach comes amid a storm of controversy for the corporation. On Monday, the internal review into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone – which featured a young narrator who was the son of a Hamas official – concluded that it had breached the BBC's editorial guidelines.
Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, said the report had identified a ' significant failing in relation to accuracy '.
MasterChef, the broadcaster's flagship cooking competition programme, has also lost both of its lead presenters over the past fortnight.
Gregg Wallace has been banned from the BBC after claims of inappropriate behaviour, while John Torode's time with the show has ended following an allegation that he used an ' extremely offensive racist term '.
The spotlight has also been trained on the salaries of the BBC's stars.
The broadcaster's disclosure of the pay bands for the 67 presenters and journalists earning over £178,000 during the year was once again topped by Gary Lineker. His £1,350,000 to £1,354,999 earnings alone are equivalent to one per cent of television spending in England.
You can use our calculator below to see how much value-for-money you are getting from the taxpayer-funded media giant based on your viewing and listening habits – and how the licence fee might change if just these areas were accounted for.
Meanwhile, more people than ever are turning elsewhere for their news and entertainment.
Barb, the industry's ratings and audience measurement organisation, found that 67.5 per cent of UK homes had access to at least one subscription service in the first three months of 2025.
A BBC spokesman said: 'These figures are misleading. Our audited figures show that the average cost of each hour of BBC content consumed by audiences across the UK has risen in line with inflation since the start of the current charter.
'Our audiences are at the heart of everything we do, so we are prioritising high-impact content to deliver maximum value for licence fee payers.
'Digital consumption of BBC content has significantly increased this year, with nearly 10 per cent more requests on BBC iPlayer and total time viewing the platform rising to 4.5 billion hours.'