How do I get paid my feed-in tariff?

You give generation meter readings to your FIT licensee and they pay you against those readings. Ofgem guidance says you should receive your first payment within 90 days of the date you provide the readings to your licensee.

How often is the feed-in tariff paid?

The scheme sets the 90 day deadline for the first payment and leaves the ongoing frequency to your agreement with the licensee. Quarterly is the common arrangement. The frequency that applies to you is in your statement of terms.

Is my export payment based on a real meter reading?

For most installations, no. Deemed export assumes a fixed proportion of what you generate is exported, whatever actually happens, so only the generation reading is measured.

What do I do if a feed-in tariff payment is wrong or missing?

Raise it with your FIT licensee through its complaints process. If it is still unresolved after eight weeks you can take the complaint to the Energy Ombudsman.

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How the payments actually reach you

The rate gets all the attention. The mechanics are where the money is actually won or lost, and they rest on one number you are responsible for supplying.

The short answer. You send generation meter readings, the licensee pays against them. The scheme sets one hard deadline, your first payment within 90 days of the date you provide the readings, and leaves the rest to your statement of terms. If you do not send readings, the process does not start.

The reading is your job

Payments are calculated from the generation meter, and the reading generally reaches the licensee because you sent it. This is the single most common reason a payment is late: not a dispute, just a reading that was never submitted. Diarise it against whatever cycle your licensee works to and photograph the meter each time, with the display and the serial number both legible.

Keep the photographs. A reading you can evidence is the difference between a correction and an argument, particularly across a change of licensee or a replaced meter.

The 90 day rule

Ofgem's guidance sets the expectation for the start of the relationship: you should receive your first payment within 90 days of the date you provide the readings to your licensee. After that the frequency is a matter for your agreement rather than for the scheme, and quarterly is the usual arrangement. Your statement of terms is the document that says which, and it is worth finding out rather than assuming, because an expectation of monthly payments against a quarterly agreement produces a complaint where there is no fault.

Most of your export payment is not measured

This surprises people who have looked closely at their statement and found only one meter reading on it. 780,554 installations, 90 per cent of the 869,807 on the register, are paid deemed export: a fixed proportion of generation is assumed to have been exported, whatever actually happened on the day. Only 62,711 are on the standard metered export tariff where the exported units are read.

So for most households the generation reading drives both payments, and there is nothing else to submit. It also means self-consumption does not reduce the export payment, which is the whole reason a battery does not cost you money on this scheme. That has its own guide: will a battery affect my feed-in tariff?, and exporting compares the deemed and metered arrangements.

Check which export status you are on before you draw any conclusion from your statement. It changes what the numbers on it mean, and it is recorded against your installation rather than being something you can infer from the payment alone.

When a payment looks wrong

Work through it in this order, because most of the cases that feel like an error are one of the first three.

Was a reading submitted, and was it right? Compare against your own photograph.

Is the rate the one you expect? Rates are index-linked and revised every financial year, so a figure that has changed is not necessarily a figure that is wrong. See why your rate changes every April, and the 2026-27 table.

Is the period what you think it is? A quarterly payment covering a dark quarter is smaller for reasons that have nothing to do with the licensee.

Still wrong? The licensee's complaints process, and then the Energy Ombudsman if it is unresolved after eight weeks.

We cannot see your account, your readings or your payments, and nobody who has not seen your paperwork can tell you whether a particular payment is correct. What this site can do is tell you what the rate should be for your band and year, which is the figure the rest of the calculation is built on: the rate finder does that.

Payment timescale and licensee obligations as published by Ofgem in its Feed-in Tariffs guidance for generators. Export status counts from the Ofgem Feed-in Tariff installation report of 2025-12-31. Information only, and not financial advice.