How to cancel BBC TV Licence legally before price goes up to £174.50

The BBC TV Licence fee is set to rise again, taking the new price to £174.50.

The Licence Fee, which funds BBC TV and radio programming as well as public interest broadcasting like Welsh channel S4C, will go up by £5 from April 2027, it has been confirmed today.

While many households gladly pay it to get their Strictly Come Dancing or Match of the Day fix, many others are realising that they don’t need to pay it any more for the types of content they watch and can legally reduce their bill to £0.

Services like Netflix, ITVX, YouTube, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime Video have seen the TV content landscape shift away from sitting down in front of a scheduled programme to simply hitting the button whenever you’re ready to watch something.

People have been cost cutting after another cost of living crisis hit us with high inflation, mortgage increases and ever spiralling bills – so it makes sense to check whether you really do need a TV Licence or not.

If you watch Match of The Day or Strictly Come Dancing then you’re out of luck – but there are many other scenarios where you can legally do away with it – and it’s not just applicable to students.

What can I legally watch without a TV Licence?

A common misconception is that TV Licences are only needed to watch BBC content. Many will comment saying things like ‘oh well I don’t watch anything on the BBC so I don’t need to pay’. This is a myth, and rules on streaming platforms were changed some years ago. But there are lots of ways you can watch TV without a TV Licence.

A TV Licence is a legal requirement if you do any of these:

• watch or record TV on any channel via any TV service (such as Sky, Virgin, Freeview, Freesat)
• watch live content on streaming services (e.g. ITVX, Channel 4, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Now, Sky Go)
• use BBC iPlayer at all

TV Licences are per house, not per person, though.

This means if you live in a house with multiple people, you don’t all need a TV Licence unless your rooms are counted as separate addresses.

Put simply, one shared address equals one licence, so a group of students all living under one roof can split the cost, but if you live in a separate flat with its own front door, even within a single house that’s been split into flats, you need your own Licence.

What you don’t need a TV Licence for:

• Watching DVDs or Blurays (yes, they still exist and according to recent reports, sales are up as people ditch expensive streamers to go back to building their own collections)
• Watching Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV as long as it’s NOT live content. E.g. you can watch Drive To Survive, Stranger Things, Ted Lasso or Clarkson’s Farm without a TV Licence, totally legally. But if you stray over to watching a live Premier League game on that same Amazon Prime sub, you’ll need a Licence.
• As the TV Licensing says: “You need to be covered by a TV Licence to watch programmes live on any online TV service – such as ITVX, Channel 4, Amazon Prime Video, Now or Sky Go. You don’t need a TV Licence if you only ever watch on-demand programmes on any TV service apart from BBC iPlayer.”
• LIVE is not just live as in a live match, but if you watch Coronation Street as it’s being broadcast ‘live’, you need a TV Licence. However, if you watch an ITV or Channel 4 show on catch-up later, you don’t need a licence for that.

When you decide that you don’t need a TV licence, you can’t just not buy one and call it a day. You have to declare to TV Licensing that you are exempt – for example if you know for sure you will only watch Netflix or non-live YouTube videos, or just play PS5 but not watch TV.

The infamous ‘TV Licence detection vans’ are thought to be a myth by many, but the TV Licensing website claims: “We have a fleet of detector vans that can detect the use of TV receiving equipment at specifically targeted addresses within minutes.”

It adds: “We have a database of approximately 31 million licensed and unlicensed addresses. This tells us if your address has a TV Licence.

“All our visiting officers have access to this database. This means they can check if you have a licence or not.

“If you tell us that you do not need a TV Licence, our officers may still visit you to confirm this.”

So it’s best to contact TV Licensing before they come and knock on your door.

To get rid of your TV Licence, if you definitely won’t watch live TV, go to the TV Licence website where you will need to make a declaration that you either don’t own a TV or don’t use it for any circumstances in which a TV Licence is required.

State pensioners can also apply for a free TV Licence if they are aged over 74 and receive Pension Credit, also reducing your bill to £0.