Leased line cost UK, explained properly.
Real pricing ranges from £200/month to £2,500+/month. The factors that drive cost. Honest comparison vs full fibre broadband. Plus when a leased line genuinely isn't worth it for your business.
- 📏 Bandwidth tier
- 📍 Postcode & fibre proximity
- 📋 Contract length
- 🌐 Carrier choice
- 🛡 Resilience tier (single vs diverse)
- 🏗️ Civil engineering required
- 📡 Existing on-site fibre
- ⏰ Lead time vs urgency
What real leased lines actually cost.
Indicative pricing for standard business deployments. All prices ex-VAT, monthly recurring (install fees separate). Specific quotes depend on postcode, contract length and carrier mix.
100 Mbps symmetric
City-centre postcode: typically £220-£380 per month on a 36-month contract.
Suburban/light-industrial: typically £280-£480 per month.
Rural/civil-engineering needed: typically £400-£750 per month.
Install fee: typically £500-£2,000.
1 Gbps symmetric
City-centre postcode: typically £450-£800 per month on a 36-month contract.
Suburban/light-industrial: typically £600-£1,100 per month.
Rural/civil-engineering needed: typically £900-£1,800 per month.
Install fee: typically £700-£3,000.
10 Gbps symmetric
City-centre postcode: typically £1,200-£2,200 per month on a 36-month contract.
Suburban/light-industrial: typically £1,500-£2,800 per month.
Rural deployments: Project-based; bespoke quotes typical.
Install fee: typically £1,500-£8,000+.
Why two leased lines at the same speed can cost wildly different amounts.
Distance from fibre
The single biggest cost driver. If fibre is already in the street outside your building, install is straightforward — typically £500-1,500. If fibre needs to be brought a few hundred metres requiring trenching and reinstatement, costs jump to £3,000-10,000+. Rural sites with no nearby fibre infrastructure can need bespoke build projects costing £15,000-£50,000 in extreme cases.
Contract length
Carriers offer significant discounts for longer commitments because they recover the install cost over more months. Typical pattern: 12-month contract is the baseline price, 24-month contract is ~15-20% cheaper, 36-month contract is ~25-35% cheaper. Beyond 36 months, marginal additional discount is small. Most UK SMEs sign 36-month contracts to maximise the discount.
Carrier choice
Openreach Ethernet is UK-wide but carries Openreach pricing. CityFibre (in 80+ UK cities) is often 10-25% cheaper for equivalent speeds in their coverage areas. Virgin Media Business has separate infrastructure with its own pricing. Telexico procures the best-fit carrier per postcode — this often saves 15-30% vs being locked to a single carrier.
Resilience tier
Single-carrier leased line is the standard product. Adding diverse-path resilience (a secondary leased line from a different carrier, taking a physically separate path into your building) roughly doubles the monthly cost — typically £500-1,000+/month extra. Worth it for operations where downtime has measurable cost; over-spec for most SMEs who can use 4G/5G failover instead.
Lead time / urgency
Standard installs follow normal carrier timelines (60-120 days). Expedited installs are available from some carriers at additional cost (typically 25-50% premium on the monthly rate or specific expedite fees). If you have time, normal pace is much cheaper. If you have a hard deadline (lease expiry, contract penalty avoidance), expedite is available but expensive.
Internal cabling complexity
Listed buildings, multi-tenant offices with restricted riser access, sites requiring extensive internal Cat6/fibre runs from the building entry point to the comms room — all add to the install cost. Telexico's pre-survey identifies these costs upfront so the quote you get is the cost you pay.
Do you actually need a leased line?
For most UK SMEs, the honest answer is: probably not. High-tier FTTP business broadband at 500Mbps-1Gbps with proper 4G/5G failover delivers near-leased-line reliability at a fraction of the cost — typically £40-80/month for FTTP plus £20-40/month for failover, vs £250-500+ for a comparable leased line.
When a leased line genuinely is the right answer:
- Symmetric bandwidth needs. Operations uploading large volumes — video broadcast, design studios sending design files, CCTV streaming to cloud, SaaS hosting from your premises. FTTP upload speeds (typically 100-300Mbps even on gigabit packages) may not be enough.
- Contractual or regulatory uptime requirements. Healthcare during clinical hours. Financial services with FCA-driven obligations. Manufacturing with statutory continuity requirements. Where 99.95% uptime is a legal or contractual must.
- Multi-site MPLS or SD-WAN networks. Leased lines are the foundation for private inter-site networking. If you have 5+ sites linked as one network, leased line infrastructure is usually the right base.
- Production environments where downtime has measurable cost. Manufacturing during production hours. Multi-site retail where central EPOS outage stops trade across every store. Industrial control systems with real-time cloud dependencies.
- Areas where FTTP isn't available. Some industrial estates, rural sites, and city-centre business premises don't have FTTP. Leased line is sometimes the only way to get business-grade bandwidth at all.
If you're outside those categories — typical office, retail, hospitality, professional services with under 50 staff in a single site — FTTP plus failover is usually the better answer. The free Telexico audit looks at your operation honestly and recommends the right architecture, not the highest-margin product.
Carrier-agnostic. UK engineering. Honest scope.
Leased line procurement is one of those areas where carrier choice matters more than brand. Telexico is carrier-agnostic across Openreach, CityFibre, Virgin Media Business and other UK carriers — meaning we procure the carrier that delivers the right price-performance at your specific postcode rather than pushing a single supplier.
The leased line itself rides whichever carrier infrastructure works best for you. What Telexico adds on top is engineering-led configuration (QoS, failover, monitoring integrated from day one), UK-based support team with named contacts, plain contracts with no mid-contract price rises, and the ability to layer on the wider business connectivity and communications stack — hosted VoIP, managed WiFi, SD-WAN multi-site networking — over the same leased line foundation.
The leased line quote we provide includes carrier costs (which are largely fixed by Openreach / CityFibre / Virgin pricing), the install fee from the survey, and Telexico's engineering and management fee. No hidden line items. The audit is genuinely free — if a leased line isn't right for your operation, we'll tell you, including the cases where staying with your current provider after renegotiation is the right answer.
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Not ready to switch yet? Send us your current contracts, bills, or photos of your existing equipment. We'll review what you have, what you're paying, and where you could simplify, consolidate or improve — without any pressure to buy anything from us.
We benchmark your existing broadband, phones, mobile and IT against current UK market pricing and what your business actually needs.
Real engineer review of your current connectivity, voice setup, WiFi, security and continuity — strengths, gaps, and where you're overpaying or underprotected.
We tell you honestly what's available at your postcode — FTTP, leased line, alt-net carriers — and which makes commercial sense for your operation.
For businesses still on ISDN or aging on-premises PBX — an honest cost-and-feature comparison before the 2027 BT switch-off forces a rushed decision.
No hard sell. No fixed package pressure. If we're not a better fit, we'll tell you straight — and recommend what is.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a leased line cost in the UK?
Leased line prices in the UK typically range from £250-£500 per month for a 100Mbps symmetric circuit at a city-centre business postcode, up to £1,200-£2,500+ per month for a 1Gbps symmetric circuit in a more remote location requiring civil engineering works. The biggest cost drivers are: bandwidth (100Mbps vs 1Gbps), location (proximity to fibre infrastructure), contract length (12-month vs 36-month), and install complexity (excavation requirements). Install fees are typically £500-£3,000+ depending on the build required.
Why are leased lines so expensive vs business broadband?
You're paying for fundamentally different infrastructure. Business broadband uses shared fibre — your circuit's capacity is shared at aggregation points with neighbouring businesses, which keeps unit cost low. A leased line is a dedicated point-to-point fibre connection with no contention — yours alone end-to-end. You also get contractual SLAs (typically 99.95%+ uptime with 4-8 hour fix windows backed by service credits), proactive monitoring, and engineering-grade installation. The difference in price reflects the difference in service guarantees.
What affects leased line pricing most?
Five major factors: (1) Bandwidth — 100Mbps vs 1Gbps vs 10Gbps. The bandwidth tier doubles or triples cost. (2) Location — distance from the nearest fibre Point of Presence (POP). Urban city-centre postcodes are cheaper; rural sites or industrial estates with no existing fibre need civil engineering. (3) Contract length — 36-month contracts typically 20-30% cheaper than 12-month equivalents. (4) Carrier choice — Openreach vs CityFibre vs Virgin Media Business prices vary by region. (5) Resilience tier — single carrier vs diverse-path dual carrier roughly doubles the cost but provides true uptime resilience.
What is the install fee for a leased line?
Install fees in the UK typically range from £500 for a simple install where fibre is already adjacent to your building, up to £3,000+ for installs requiring excavation, mole work, road crossings or duct construction. In rare cases requiring extensive civil engineering (rural sites, listed buildings, complex internal cabling), install fees can exceed £10,000. The install fee is one-off; the monthly fee is the recurring cost over the contract. Most carriers will quote install cost as part of the survey process — Openreach typically takes 7-14 days to survey and quote.
How long does a leased line install take?
Typical leased line install timelines: 60-90 working days for a standard Openreach Ethernet install where fibre is already nearby. 90-120 working days where some local cable work is needed. 120-180+ working days where significant civil engineering is required (road crossings, dig works in council-controlled land etc.). Compare this with FTTP business broadband which typically installs in 7-14 days. The long install timeline is the main reason businesses commonly start the leased line process well before the date they actually need it live.
Is a leased line worth it vs full fibre broadband?
For most UK SMEs, no — high-tier FTTP business broadband with proper 4G/5G failover delivers near-leased-line reliability at a fraction of the cost. A leased line is genuinely the right answer when: you need symmetric bandwidth above what FTTP delivers; you have contractual or regulatory uptime requirements with measurable downtime cost; you're running multi-site operations where MPLS/SD-WAN between sites is needed; you need uncontended bandwidth for production workloads (video broadcast, large CCTV uploads, real-time financial systems); or you're operating from a postcode where FTTP isn't yet available and only leased line provides the speed required.
Can Telexico provide leased lines across the UK?
Yes — Telexico is carrier-agnostic across Openreach (UK-wide), CityFibre (80+ UK cities), Virgin Media Business and other regional carriers. We can deliver leased line infrastructure to any UK postcode, with West Midlands installs handled by our own Wolverhampton engineering team and UK-wide installs via vetted partner engineers working to the same standard. Telexico procures the carrier that delivers the right price-performance ratio at your specific postcode, rather than pushing a single carrier regardless of fit.
How do I get an accurate leased line quote?
Three pieces of information needed: (1) postcode of the install address, (2) bandwidth required (100Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, 10Gbps), (3) preferred contract length (12, 24, 36 months). With those, a carrier-side feasibility check returns indicative pricing within 1-3 working days, including any specific civil engineering costs at your postcode. The free Telexico audit also looks at whether high-tier FTTP would meet your needs at lower cost — sometimes the honest answer is 'you don't actually need a leased line for what you're doing.'
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