How do you pick my top tariffs?

We do a huge amount of work in the background. First of all, we take every tariff on the market, and assign it with a score based on the following:

• Price. For price, the most expensive gets the lowest score, the cheapest gets the highest score – all other tariffs come somewhere in between these two. We give slightly more value to the deals cheapest on the market in our calculations, just to help give you a more meaningful answer if you place a lot of points in your price preference.
  
  
• Customer service. Similar to price, the supplier with the best customer service results gets the highest score, the worst gets the lowest, with every other supplier coming in between these two – see how we rank suppliers' service.
  
  
• Green. We look at each tariff’s green credentials for both electricity and gas, and rank them on how ‘green’ we think they are:

  For electricity, anything with 100% renewable electricity, 90%+ renewable electricity or low carbon electricity gets full marks, everything else gets the lowest score.  We’re finessing how we rank tariffs in this category and are speaking to experts in the field to get a better breakdown of how green your electricity is, but for now, we’ve included a broad range in our definition of green electricity, which we think is a fair place to start.

  For gas, 100% anaerobic gas (which involves the breaking down of biodegradable material) is top, while no green gas gets the lowest score. There are points in between this for a mix of renewable gas and carbon offset gas, or 100% offset gas. 
  
  
• Fixed rate. If the deal is fixed, it gets top marks. If not, it gets the lowest score. We're looking at how to factor in the length of fixes into this, and we'll update when we do.
  
  
• Well-known supplier. For this, the big energy firms get top marks and the smallest suppliers get the worst. We grade all the medium-sized and well-established firms between these, based on customer numbers, brand recognition and length of time it has been supplying energy.
  
  
• No early exit fees. The best score is for deals with no exit fees, while the tariff with highest exit fees gets the worst score – everything else is graded in a range between these.

When you come to pick a tariff, we simply ask you to tell us which of the above categories are more important you.

We then use your preferences as 'weightings' – so that for each category, we'll multiply the tariff's score by different amounts depending on how you answered.

We then add up all the weighted scores for all categories and rank the tariffs for you, giving a percentage match for each.