Indexed or fixed electricity for your restaurant? What to check now that power is at its yearly high

There are two ways to pay for energy:

• Indexed: you pay whatever the market sets each hour, plus the supplier’s margin. If the market rises, your bill rises.
• Fixed: you pay the same price per kWh for the whole contract, usually a year.

Pick up your last bill. If the kWh price changes from month to month, or it says “indexed” or “OMIE”, you are on an indexed tariff.

If your kitchen has cold rooms, an oven and an extractor hood, you almost certainly have more than 15 kW contracted. That means you are not on the government’s regulated tariff, which only exists up to 10 kW: you are in the free market, on whatever you signed.

The catch first. Nobody is going to sell you a fixed rate this autumn at August’s price.

Suppliers set the fixed price from what the market thinks power will cost in the coming months. Right now it thinks winter will be expensive: October-to-December power was being bought forward at €132 in early September, and by mid-month it was already around €145.

So a fixed rate is not a discount. It is insurance: you pay a high price, but you know what it is.

And there is a second catch. If you sign for a year, you also pay that price in spring, when the market expects power to fall. Part of December’s shock you would pay in May.

The day’s average price is not the one you pay.

In August, power came out at €26 in the sunny hours and €164 the rest of the day. On 6 October, the most expensive hour was around nine at night.

A breakfast-and-lunch bar uses power when it is cheapest. A dinner restaurant turns on the oven and hood right in the most expensive hours.

On an indexed tariff, the place that serves dinners pays more than the average in the headlines.

Our example, with round numbers: a restaurant with a full kitchen using 4,000 kWh of electricity a month. We only count the rise in the energy price; the rest of the bill is separate.

Today a bar or restaurant keeps between 3% and 4% of what it sells, according to sector associations. On €300,000 of yearly sales, that is between €9,000 and €12,000 of profit.

Those three months of electricity take about a tenth of the year’s profit. Without selling a single dish less.

It is money you do not see in the day’s till and do see in what you actually have left at the end of the year.

Look at a fixed rate if:

• You are on an indexed tariff and your contract has no lock-in, or little of it left.
• Your strong business is in the afternoon and at night.
• An extra three hundred euros a month throws you off and you would rather know what you will pay.

Stay as you are if:

• Your contract has a lock-in with a penalty. Put that figure next to the saving before you decide.
• You work mostly during the day.
• You can ride out an expensive winter in exchange for paying less in spring, if the market is right.

And if you sign a fixed rate, make it truly fixed: no clauses that let them raise the price mid-contract.

1. Your contract: whether it is indexed or fixed, when it ends and whether it has a lock-in.
2. Your last three bills: how many kWh you used and in which time bands.
3. What you paid on average per kWh on those three bills. That is the number you compare any offer with, not the price in the headlines.

Nobody knows how long it will last. What the market expects today for winter has risen from €91 to €145 between May and September, and it depends on gas. That is why we do not give a reference fixed price: the only comparison that counts is a real offer, with a date.

November’s tax cut almost does not reach you. The Royal Decree-law 25/2026 cuts VAT on electricity to 10% only for capacities up to 10 kW. The electricity tax cut could reach you, but it depends on an INE price figure that is not out yet.

Our example is only that. A bar without a kitchen may use half as much, and a grill house with cold rooms, twice as much.

If you are on an indexed tariff and do not know whether switching pays off, send us your last three bills and we will review them with a professional energy broker we work with. If staying as you are is better, we will tell you that too.

If you do it with Tipi, there is a double return. If you switch contract through that broker, you save month to month on the bill —if the offer justifies it— and the commission the electricity company pays reaches you as credit to use Tipi for free. Tipi does not keep that commission. We do not sell electricity, and the decision is yours.

November’s bill already has this October inside it. Better to look at the current one first.