Octopus Saving Sessions explained: get paid to use less

Octopus Saving Sessions pay you in bill credit for cutting your electricity use during short, pre-announced windows on winter evenings, when the national grid is under strain. To take part you need to be an Octopus customer with a working smart meter, opt in to each session in the app, then use a little less power than usual during the window — the more you can shift, the more you earn. This guide explains exactly how it works, how the earnings are calculated and what you can realistically expect, then how you can also pick up a one-off £50 welcome credit when you switch.

Octopus Saving Sessions pay you in bill credit for cutting your electricity use during short, pre-announced windows on winter evenings, when the national grid is under strain. To take part you need to be an Octopus customer with a working smart meter, opt in to each session in the app, then use a little less power than usual during the window — the more you can shift, the more you earn. This guide explains exactly how it works, how the earnings are calculated and what you can realistically expect, then how you can also pick up a one-off £50 welcome credit when you switch.

What Saving Sessions actually are

Saving Sessions are a reward that lives inside Octoplus, Octopus Energy's free loyalty scheme, and they run during the colder months when electricity demand across Great Britain peaks. The idea is straightforward: at times when the national grid is under strain — typically early winter evenings — Octopus announces a short window, usually a day or so in advance, and invites customers to use less electricity than they normally would during that slot. If you opt in and then ease off your usage, Octopus pays you for the energy you avoided. Sessions tend to last around an hour, though some run longer or come in pairs on a busy day, and they only happen when the grid actually needs the help, so there is no fixed calendar. Taking part is voluntary every single time: you choose whether to join each session, there is no penalty for sitting one out, and nothing about it changes how your supply works — it is simply an optional chance to earn a bit of credit for shifting your habits by an hour.

What you need to take part

Two things unlock Saving Sessions: being an Octopus customer on supply, and having a working smart meter that sends half-hourly readings. The smart meter is non-negotiable, because the whole scheme depends on Octopus being able to measure exactly how much electricity you used during the window and compare it with your normal pattern — without half-hourly data there is nothing to reward. If you do not have a smart meter yet, Octopus will fit one free of charge; just bear in mind it needs to be installed and reliably sending half-hourly readings before you can join a session. Beyond that, you opt in to each session through the Octopus app or your online account, usually after it is announced and before it begins. Saving Sessions sit on top of whatever tariff you are on, so you do not have to switch plans to take part, and they focus purely on electricity — your gas use is not part of the calculation.

How the earnings actually work

When a session runs, Octopus builds a baseline of how much electricity you would typically have used at that time of day, drawn from your recent half-hourly readings, and then looks at how much less you actually used during the window. You earn on the gap: the further you drop below your baseline, the more you are rewarded. Earnings accrue as points that convert into account credit — bill credit that reduces what you owe, not a cash payout to your bank — and they are added automatically once the session has been reconciled. We are deliberately not quoting a price per unit saved here, because the reward rate is set session by session and the amount you personally earn depends entirely on your own baseline and how much you cut. One honest detail worth knowing: because the baseline is built from your usage on previous days, you cannot really game it by blasting the heating beforehand — the system is designed to reward a genuine reduction, not a manufactured spike.

Honest expectations: how much you can really make

This is where it pays to be realistic. If you live in a small, already-low-usage flat — no electric heating, no EV, not much running on a winter evening — there is only so much you can switch off, so your earnings across a whole winter are likely to be modest: a welcome few pounds of credit rather than anything that reshapes your bill. The households that genuinely clean up are the ones with big, shiftable electric loads: an EV they can choose not to charge for an hour, a heat pump or electric heating they can ease off, or a tumble dryer and dishwasher they can simply run later. Move those out of the window and the saving against your baseline can be substantial. It is also worth remembering that sessions only happen when the grid needs them, so some winters bring a healthy run of them and quieter years bring fewer, with no guarantee of how many you will be offered or what each will be worth. Saving Sessions reward engagement — you have to remember to opt in and actually act — and if your evenings have little flexibility, it is perfectly fair to treat them as a small bonus rather than a headline reason to choose a supplier.

Where Saving Sessions fit in the bigger picture

Saving Sessions are really one piece of a wider bet Octopus has made on rewarding flexibility rather than just selling units of energy. The same ecosystem includes the monthly Octoplus Wheel of Fortune spin and a set of smart tariffs — Intelligent Octopus Go for EV charging, Cosy Octopus for heat pumps, plus Agile and Tracker — that pay you to use power when it is cheapest and greenest. All of it is built around having a customer account and a working smart meter, which is why people tend to join Octopus first and then move onto a smart tariff for free once they are set up. That matters as a non-price reason to consider Octopus: even setting tariff rates aside — and you should always check the current numbers on octopus.energy, since prices vary by region and are set to move again with the energy price cap from July — the rewards-and-flexibility side is a genuine point of difference from many of the big legacy suppliers, which tend to keep most customers on a standard flat rate. Several large suppliers now run their own EV and smart tariffs too, so it is more a difference of emphasis and breadth than something only Octopus offers.

Join through a referral link for £50

Here is the practical catch with everything above: you can only take part in Saving Sessions, Octoplus or any smart tariff once you are actually an Octopus customer — none of it is open to non-customers. So if the rewards side has sold you on joining, the smart way to do it is through a referral link, because that is the one route that also lands you a one-off £50 welcome credit, paid as account credit rather than cash, and it arrives automatically once your switch completes and your first monthly Direct Debit clears — usually around four weeks, sometimes longer if your old supplier drags its feet. There is nothing to claim and no code to type; the link carries the credit for you. The one thing that kills the bonus is signing up through a price-comparison site such as Uswitch or reaching Octopus some other way that drops the link, because then Octopus pays that third party instead of crediting you. Octopus itself is about as safe a home for your account as the market offers — the UK's largest electricity supplier, used by roughly one in four homes, on 100% renewable electricity, a long-running Which? Recommended Provider with an 'Excellent' Trustpilot score of around 4.8 out of 5. If this guide helped, using the referral link on this page costs you nothing, keeps this independent site free, and gets you the full £50 credit at the same time.

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