Prison pay has published minimums, and they are small. Under PSO 4460, someone not working gets at least £2.50 a week and someone in a prison job at least £4.00 a week. Governors set the actual rates and many pay more, but those floors explain a great deal about why calls home are short.
If you have ever had a conversation end abruptly and wondered whether something was wrong, this is usually the answer.
What the published rates actually are
PSO 4460, the Prison Service Order covering prisoners' pay, sets out minimum weekly rates. The current version was re-issued in January 2020.
| Situation | Published minimum |
|---|---|
| Not employed | £2.50 a week (50p a day, five-day week) |
| In a prison job | £4.00 a week |
| Short-term sickness | £2.50 a week |
| Long-term sick or of retirement age | £3.25 a week |
| Maternity leave or full-time care of a child | £3.25 a week |
Two qualifications matter and both get lost in headlines. These are minimums, not typical earnings: responsibility for pay is devolved to governors and directors, who set the rates for their own establishment, and better-paid work exists in many prisons — kitchens, workshops, wing jobs and education roles are not all paid the same, and someone in full-time work may earn several times the floor. They are also the rates as last revised in January 2020, which is its own quiet fact about how this money has kept pace with everything else in the years since. So nobody should read the table above as "what prisoners earn". What it gives you is the floor beneath the whole system, and a floor is enough to explain why phone calls are short: whatever someone actually earns, it is being spent by the minute.
What that buys in phone minutes
Calls from prison are charged per minute, and the rate depends on the type of number being rung. Since 1 April 2025 the charges in England and Wales have been 5.5p a minute to a mobile on weekdays and 2.48p a minute to a landline, falling to 3.6p and 2.2p at weekends. Those figures were released by the Ministry of Justice under a Freedom of Information request from Inside Time.
Put the two sets of numbers together and the week looks like this. The minimum employed wage of £4.00 buys around 73 minutes of weekday calls to a mobile, or around 161 minutes to a landline. On the £2.50 unemployment rate it is roughly 45 minutes to a mobile, or 100 minutes to a landline.
That is the entire week, and only if none of the money goes anywhere else. It does, of course: the same account has to cover canteen — the weekly shop for toiletries, stamps, phone credit and everything else that makes a week bearable. Nobody spends their whole wage on the phone.
Seen from that side, a ten-minute call to a mobile costs 55p on a weekday. Against a £4.00 wage, that is not a small purchase. It is an eighth of the week's income for one conversation.
What else the same money has to cover
Phone credit is not competing with nothing. The same account pays for canteen — the weekly order that covers toiletries, stamps, writing paper, extra food and everything else that makes a week in prison marginally more bearable. Every minute on the phone is a decision not to buy something on that list.
That is worth holding on to if you have ever felt the length of a call as a measure of how much someone wants to talk to you. It is far more often a measure of what else had to come out of the same few pounds that week.
It also explains something families notice and misread: calls that get shorter towards the end of the week, or that stop entirely for a few days and then resume. That is usually the shape of money running out and being topped up, not a change of heart.
Against a wage that size, the rate charged per minute is the whole game.
The direction of travel, in two dates
There is a useful comparison hiding in the archive. In October 2010, the Prison Reform Trust welcomed a reduction that took prison calls to 10p a minute for landlines and 37.5p for mobiles — and noted that half of all prison calls at the time lasted under three minutes because of what they cost.
Fifteen years later, calls cost a fraction of that. The published minimum wage rates, meanwhile, were last revised in January 2020. Call costs have fallen a long way; the floor under prison pay has not moved in the same period. Both facts are true at once, and together they are most of the reason phone credit is still the binding constraint on how long families get to talk.
Where the rest of the money comes from
Most phone credit does not come from prison wages at all. It comes from families.
The route is indirect, and it catches people out. You cannot top up someone's phone credit yourself. Money is sent to their private cash account, and the person in prison then transfers it across to their phone account themselves. The Prison Reform Trust's advice guide sets out the same process. So there is always a gap between you sending money and them being able to ring, and if they have not moved it across, the phone will not work no matter how much you have sent.
This is also why "just send more money" is not always the answer families think it is. The money has to be sent, received, transferred, and then spent at a per-minute rate — and it is competing with everything else on the canteen sheet.
The same credit buys roughly twice as many minutes when the number rung is a landline.
Why the credit runs out mid-conversation
The system does not warn you. From your side the call simply ends, which is why it so often gets read as a row cut short or something wrong at their end.
There are three ordinary explanations, and they account for most cases. The credit ran out. The phone access period ended — under PSI 49/2011 prisoners should normally have access to the phones for no less than two hours a day, but the phones run to the prison's schedule, not the conversation's. Or someone else was waiting for the handset.
There is no way to ring back in. The prison phone system does not accept incoming calls at all, so if the line goes dead the next move is always theirs.
What actually changes the arithmetic
Only two things move this. More credit, or a cheaper destination.
More credit is the direct route and it comes out of the household's money in the end. The other lever is the type of number being rung: at 2.48p against 5.5p, the same credit buys roughly twice as many minutes to a landline as it does to a mobile. That is the whole basis of the landline-forwarding services you will have seen advertised, ours included — it does not make anything free, it changes which rate applies.
Whether paying a monthly fee for that is worth it depends on how much you actually talk, and there is a point below which it is not. We have set out that arithmetic in full, including where it stops paying, rather than quote a percentage.
None of this changes the rules. The number still has to be on their approved contact list, the prison still decides whether to add it, and the call is still recorded and monitored in the usual way. What changes is the rate the call is charged at.
Frequently asked questions
The questions families ask most about prison money and phone credit.
Do prisoners get free phone calls?
Not as a general allowance in England and Wales, though there are specific situations where calls are funded publicly — a call on first reception, and urgent legal or compassionate calls at a manager's discretion. Scotland is different: the Scottish Prison Service provides 200 free minutes a month.
Can I put money straight onto their phone credit?
No. Money goes to their private cash account and they transfer it to phone credit themselves. Until they do, the credit does not change.
Why is the call so short?
Usually credit, the phone access period ending, or someone waiting for the handset. There is no way to call back in — the prison system does not take incoming calls.
Do all prisoners get the same pay?
No. PSO 4460 sets minimums; governors set the actual rates for their establishment, and some jobs pay considerably more than the floor.
The gap between a £4.00 weekly minimum and a 5.5p per-minute charge is the whole story of why prison calls are short, and it is not a story about anyone being careless with money.
If halving the per-minute rate would make a practical difference to how long you get to talk, how the landline number works explains it, and the plans are on the pricing page. It is also worth reading the questions families ask first.
If stretching their credit further would help, the plans are here.