A landline number roughly halves the rate a prison call is charged at, which sounds decisive until you look at the size of the numbers. In England and Wales the difference is about three pence a minute. That is real money over a year, but it means a monthly subscription only pays for itself above a certain amount of talking.
Here is that arithmetic, including the part the adverts leave out.
What a prison call costs now
Calls from prison phones in England and Wales are charged per minute, and the rate depends on what kind of number is being rung. The figures below took effect on 1 April 2025 and were released by the Ministry of Justice under a Freedom of Information request from Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners, after the department initially declined to publish them on commercial confidentiality grounds. They represent a 20% reduction on the rates that came before, negotiated with the supplier, BT. These are the charges for England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate systems on separate contracts, and the arithmetic on this page does not apply to them.
| Number called | Monday to Friday | Weekend |
|---|---|---|
| UK mobile (07) | 5.5p per minute | 3.6p per minute |
| UK landline (01/02) | 2.48p per minute | 2.2p per minute |
The person in prison pays this from their own phone credit. You cannot top that credit up directly; money goes to their private cash account and they move it across themselves.
Where the saving actually comes from
A landline number that forwards to your mobile does one thing: it changes which of those two rows applies. The call arrives on the same handset either way, so from your side nothing is different at all — the phone in your pocket rings, and you answer it. What has changed is the row the prison bills against. That means the saving per minute is simply the gap between the two rows: on a weekday, 3.02p; at the weekend, 1.4p, because the mobile rate falls further than the landline rate does. Every claim made about services like this one — ours included — reduces to that gap, multiplied by however many minutes actually get spoken, minus whatever the number costs each month. There is no other term in the equation, which is why a percentage on its own tells you nothing useful.
Two things follow, and neither is in anybody's advertising. The first is that the saving belongs, in the first instance, to the person paying for the call — the person in prison, whose credit now stretches roughly twice as far. The second is that if you are paying a monthly fee for the number, that fee comes out of the household's money, not theirs. The household is buying the other person more talking time. That is a perfectly good reason to do it. It is just not the same as the household saving money, and the two get run together constantly.
The number that decides it
If you pay a monthly subscription, the question is simple: how many minutes does it take before the per-minute saving covers the fee?
Divide the monthly cost by the saving per minute. At 3.02p a minute on weekdays, that works out as follows.
| Monthly cost of the number | Weekday minutes to break even | Weekend minutes to break even |
|---|---|---|
| £10 | about 331 | about 714 |
| £13 | about 430 | about 928 |
| £17 | about 563 | about 1,214 |
| £29 | about 960 | about 2,071 |
Those are not our prices — they are a ready-reckoner you can use against any provider, including us. Our current plans are on the pricing page.
Read the table honestly and it says something uncomfortable for this industry. A number costing around £13 a month needs roughly 430 minutes of weekday calls — a little over seven hours — before the household is level. If your calls happen mainly at weekends, the same number needs closer to 930 minutes, which most people will never reach.
If your own total is above that line, the plans are worth a look.
So who is it actually for?
It works, in pure money terms, for people who talk a lot on weekdays. Daily calls of twenty minutes or more, on ordinary working days, clear the bar comfortably. It also works where the constraint is not your money but their credit — where the calls keep getting cut short because the credit has run out, doubling the minutes their money buys is the whole point, and the monthly fee is what you are paying to make that happen.
It does not work, financially, for occasional calls, for weekend-only contact, or where somebody is on remand for a short period. If a service tells you otherwise, ask them to show you the sum.
There is a version of this decision that has nothing to do with arithmetic, and it is worth saying plainly. Some households decide that longer, less rushed conversations are worth paying for whether or not the spreadsheet agrees. That is a legitimate choice. It is simply a different choice from "this will save me money", and you should know which one you are making.
The other half of the sum: how much credit there is
Break-even assumes you will actually use the minutes, and that assumption is where a lot of these subscriptions quietly fail. The minutes are only usable if there is credit to spend on them.
Prison pay has published minimums of £2.50 a week for someone not working and £4.00 a week for someone in a job, last revised in January 2020, with governors setting the actual rates. At 2.48p a minute, £4.00 buys about 161 minutes of landline calls in a week — comfortably more than the same money buys at the mobile rate, but still a ceiling. Most phone credit therefore comes from families, sent to the private cash account and transferred across by the person in prison, which adds a delay of its own.
So there are two limits stacked on top of each other, and a cheaper rate only moves one of them. If the calls are short because there is no money on the account, halving the rate doubles the talking; if they are short because the wing phone is busy or the regime is restricted, it changes nothing at all. Working out which of the two you are dealing with is worth more than any comparison of providers.
The break-even depends on the plan, so it is worth comparing them against your own minutes.
Why the percentages you see are wrong
Search for prison call costs and you will find "save up to 80%" on a lot of sites, along with per-minute figures of 8p, 18p, 25p and worse.
Those numbers were true once. In October 2010 the Prison Reform Trust welcomed a BT reduction that took landline calls to 10p a minute and mobile calls to 37.5p; at the time, half of all prison calls lasted under three minutes because of the cost. Fifteen years and several contracts later, the rates are a fraction of that — but a great deal of website copy never caught up.
The proportional gap is genuine: at 2.48p against 5.5p, calling a landline is about 55% cheaper per minute than calling a mobile. What has changed is the size of the thing being halved. Fifty-five per cent of a small number is a small number, and a percentage with no pence attached to it is not a saving, it is a headline.
What to check before you sign up
Work out roughly how many minutes a month you actually talk, and when. Add up a normal week and multiply by four; most people overestimate.
Then check three things about any service. Whether the number is a genuine geographic 01 or 02 landline, since that is what determines which rate the prison charges. What happens if the prison refuses the number, which is a real possibility rather than a formality — the questions families ask before signing up covers how we handle it. And whether you can cancel without a notice period if the sums do not work out.
One more thing that is easy to miss: the rates above are for England and Wales. Scotland runs a different system through the Scottish Prison Service, which provides 200 free call minutes a month, and Northern Ireland is separate again. If the person you are calling is not in an English or Welsh prison, none of the arithmetic on this page applies to you.
Frequently asked questions
The questions that come up most, answered with the same figures.
How much does a 20-minute call from prison cost?
On a weekday, about £1.10 to a mobile and about 50p to a landline, at the rates in force since April 2025. At the weekend it is about 72p and 44p. The person in prison pays it from their credit.
Does the area code of the landline change the price?
No. The prison's charge depends on whether the number is a landline or a mobile, not on which part of the country it is in. Any 01 or 02 number is charged at the landline rate.
Can I put money on their phone credit myself?
Not directly. You send money to their private cash account and they transfer it to their phone credit. That is why the credit, rather than your bank balance, is usually what limits the length of calls.
Is the saving bigger at weekends?
No — smaller. The mobile rate drops to 3.6p at weekends while the landline rate only drops to 2.2p, so the gap narrows from 3.02p to 1.4p a minute.
The honest summary is that this is a service with a clear breaking point, and that point is measured in minutes rather than promises. If you know roughly how much you talk, you already know whether it is for you.
If it looks like it is, the current plans and what each one includes are set out on our pricing page, and how the number works explains the rest.
If the sums work for how much you actually talk, the current plans are here.