Every figure below is quoted word for word from the body that runs it — the NHS, GOV.UK, HMRC, Citizens Advice — with the date we read it. Where something is our own arithmetic we say so. If a figure has moved and we have not caught it, the page is wrong until we fix it, and we would rather you told us.
1. Council tax — the discounts you have to ask for
This is the biggest bill most households can actually reduce, and the reductions are not automatic. GOV.UK is explicit: you have to apply, even when you obviously qualify.
Living alone, or counted as living alone
"You'll get 25% off your bill if you pay Council Tax and either: you live on your own, everyone else in your home is disregarded".
That second half is the one people miss. You can be sharing a house with other adults and still get the single person discount, if those adults do not count.
The people who are invisible for council tax
GOV.UK calls them 'disregarded'. Several of these catch households completely by surprise, especially the carer one and the student one.
- Anyone under 18, and anyone "18 or 19 years old and in full-time education".
- Full-time students at college or university, student nurses, and people under 25 funded by the Education and Skills Funding Agency.
- Someone "severely mentally impaired".
- "a live-in carer for someone who is not your partner, spouse, or child under 18".
- Certain apprentices, if they will not be paid more than £195 a week and the training leads to an accredited qualification.
Dementia, a stroke or Parkinson's can wipe the bill entirely
This is the most valuable and least claimed discount in the English system. If someone qualifies as severely mentally impaired — which needs a certificate from a doctor and entitlement to certain benefits — the bill can go to nothing.
"You'll get a 100% discount if you qualify as severely mentally impaired and one of the following applies: you live on your own, any other adults in your household either qualify as severely mentally impaired or are full-time students".
And if you live with someone in that position: "You'll get a 25% discount if you live with someone who qualifies as severely mentally impaired" and there are no other counting adults.
An adapted home drops a band
"If you qualify, your bill will be reduced to the next lowest Council Tax band. For example, if your property is in Band D, you'll pay the Band C rate. If your home is already in the lowest band (Band A), you'll get a 17% discount on your Council Tax bill instead."
You need an extra bathroom, kitchen or room needed for the disabled person, or extra space indoors for a wheelchair. "The property must be the main home of at least 1 disabled person. This can be an adult or a child" — and it does not have to be whoever pays the bill.
None of it happens by itself
"You need to apply for a Council Tax discount or an exemption, even if you're disregarded."
One thing to be straight about: if you get a discount by mistake you have to tell the council, or you can be fined and asked to pay it back.
Checked against GOV.UK — How Council Tax works, read 12 September 2026.
2. Prescriptions — stop paying per item
England is the only part of these islands that still charges for prescriptions. If you pay for more than one item a month you are almost certainly paying too much.
The charge is per item, not per prescription
"The current prescription charge is £9.90 per item." And to be clear about what that means: "if your prescription has 3 medicines on it you will have to pay the prescription charge 3 times".
Prescriptions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are free. This is an England-only bill.
A prepayment certificate caps the year
"a 12-month PPC costs £114.50 and will save you money if you need more than 11 prescribed items in a year", and "a 3-month PPC costs £32.05 and will save you money if you need more than 3 prescribed items in 3 months".
There is a separate and much cheaper one for hormone replacement therapy: "a hormone replacement therapy (HRT) PPC costs £19.80 and will save you money if you need more than 2 prescribed qualifying HRT items in a year". It covers unlimited qualifying HRT for twelve months.
Ask for an FP57 the moment you pay
This is the tip almost nobody knows, and it has a hard deadline. If you pay for a prescription and then turn out to have been entitled to help, you can claim it back — but only with the right receipt, and you can only get that receipt at the till.
"Ask the pharmacist for an NHS receipt (FP57) when you collect your prescription so you can claim back the cost."
"Refund claims must be received within 3 months of the date on which you paid, or within 3 months of the date of your sight test." For dental, optical, travel and wigs it is an HC5 form instead.
The Low Income Scheme catches people benefits miss
The NHS Low Income Scheme covers prescriptions, dental, eyecare, travel to treatment and wigs. Savings and investments have to be under "£16,000 for everyone else", or £23,250 if you live permanently in a care home.
Here is why it is worth doing even if you have been turned down for benefits: "the assessment also takes into account council tax and housing costs, so you can get help with health costs even if your income is too high for a means-tested benefit".
Success gets you an HC2 for full help or an HC3 for partial. Certificates last between six months and five years.
Pension Credit gets you free prescriptions →Healthy Start, if you are pregnant or have a young child →
Checked against NHS — prescription charges, prepayment certificates and the Low Income Scheme, read 12 September 2026.
3. Tax — four years of Marriage Allowance in one claim
HMRC does not chase you with this. It is a five-minute online claim and it pays for every year you were eligible and did not ask.
How it works
"Marriage Allowance lets you transfer £1,260 of your Personal Allowance to your husband, wife or civil partner." The result is that "This reduces their tax by up to £252 in the tax year (6 April to 5 April the next year)."
One of you needs to be under the Personal Allowance, "usually £12,570", and the other needs to be a basic rate taxpayer, normally meaning "their income is between £12,571 and £50,270 before they receive Marriage Allowance".
Marriage Allowance, step by step →Work out what you would get →
The backdating is the real money
"You can backdate your claim to 6 April 2022 (the 2022 to 2023 tax year) for any years you were eligible for Marriage Allowance."
Claim once and you can pick up several years at the same time. The oldest year drops off every April, so this is worth doing now rather than at some point.
Two things that change the answer
It still works if either of you is drawing a pension, and it works if one of you lives abroad as long as you get a Personal Allowance. It does not work for couples who live together without being married or in a civil partnership.
"If you or your partner were born before 6 April 1935, you might benefit more as a couple by applying for Married Couple's Allowance instead." You cannot have both, so check which is worth more before claiming.
Checked against GOV.UK — Marriage Allowance, read 12 September 2026.
4. Energy — one date to put in the diary
The single biggest fixed discount on an English electricity bill has a window, and it is about to open.
Warm Home Discount reopens in October
"The Warm Home Discount Scheme is a one-off £150 discount off your electricity bill." It is taken off the bill rather than paid to you.
"The Warm Home Discount Scheme has closed. It will reopen in October 2026." That is weeks away, so this is the moment to check whether you qualify rather than in January when the bill lands.
It does not cancel anything else out
"The discount will not affect your Cold Weather Payment or Winter Fuel Payment." These are three separate things and you can have all three.
Prepayment meters are fine too: you still qualify, usually through a voucher to top up with. Park home residents apply by a different route.
The rest of the bill is a phone call
Energy, broadband, mobile, insurance and streaming all price the loyal customer worst. The fix is not clever, it is diarised: know the date your fixed term ends and act in the month before it.
Ask for the retention team by name. The first person who answers usually cannot authorise the better price.
Seven bills to never auto-renew →Estimate what switching is worth →Social tariffs →
Checked against GOV.UK — Warm Home Discount Scheme, read 12 September 2026.
5. When something you bought goes wrong
England has the strongest card protection on these islands and most people never use it, usually because they think the limits work differently than they do.
Section 75 is per item, not per order
"If you paid with a credit card or buy now, pay later, you should ask for your money back using Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act – as long as you paid more than £100 and no more than £30,000."
And the detail that decides most claims: "The limits are for a single item you want to get a refund for, not the whole order."
Citizens Advice's own worked example makes it concrete. A phone at £80 and headphones at £20 with £5 delivery comes to £105, but no single item is over £100, so Section 75 does not apply and chargeback does.
You can claim the damage, not just the item
Section 75 makes the card company equally liable with the trader, which is why the claim can be bigger than the price. Citizens Advice gives the example of a faulty washing machine that damaged a floor: "He can get money to repair his floor as well as money to repair or replace the washing machine."
Ask in writing, and ask for the full amount paid, money for poor quality or being misled, and the cost of repairing any damage the fault caused.
Chargeback covers everything Section 75 does not
"You should ask for your money back using 'chargeback' if you: paid with a debit card or charge card, paid with a credit card or buy now, pay later and you can't use Section 75".
Your bank may call it 'disputed transactions'. Ask for chargeback and they will know what you mean.
If you paid through PayPal, that has its own clock: "If you open a dispute on the PayPal website you have 180 days from when you paid to open a dispute – this is about 6 months."
The exception worth knowing before you buy
"You can't usually use Section 75 if you didn't buy directly from the trader - for example, if you bought from eBay."
For anything expensive, buying direct from the retailer on a credit card buys you a layer of protection that a marketplace purchase does not.
Checked against Citizens Advice — Getting your money back if you paid by card or PayPal, read 12 September 2026.
6. The weekly shop
Groceries are the bill you pay fifty-two times a year, which is why a few pence a line matters more here than on anything else.
Read the small number
Shrinkflation and fake multi-buys both survive on people reading the sticker price instead of the price per kilo or per litre underneath it. Glance at that instead and most of the tricks fall apart in the aisle.
The same applies to a crossed-out 'was' price. A reduction is only meaningful if the item actually sold at the higher price.
The tools, if you want to be precise about it
Photographing a receipt will tell you where you overpaid against the same items elsewhere, and a basket tracker will tell you whether the number at the till is normal for your household size.
Neither needs an account and neither costs anything.
Checked against NHS — Save money with a prescription prepayment certificate, read 12 September 2026.
7. The free help, and why it is genuinely free
If money is tight enough that this page feels beside the point, these exist for exactly that and none of them sells anything.
Citizens Advice
Free, independent and the source behind the consumer section above. They publish template letters you can copy, which settles most disputes without going any further.
StepChange and National Debtline do the same job for debt specifically, and both are free charities rather than commercial debt firms.
Check what you're owed in 60 seconds →Everything for England →
Check the benefits before you assume
Pension Credit is the one that unlocks others, and hundreds of thousands of people who qualify have never claimed it. Council Tax Reduction is separate from the discounts above and is worth checking alongside it.
Nobody on this site is paid by anyone. There are no adverts, no sponsors and no affiliate links, so there is nothing here we gain from you clicking.
Checked against GOV.UK — How Council Tax works: discounts for disabled people, read 12 September 2026.
Common questions
How much is a prescription in England in 2026?
£9.90 per item, and the charge is per item rather than per prescription, so three medicines on one form cost three charges. If you need more than eleven items a year a twelve-month prepayment certificate at £114.50 is cheaper, and there is a separate HRT certificate at £19.80.
Can I get a council tax discount if I live with other adults?
Sometimes. You get 25% off if everyone else in the home is 'disregarded', which includes full-time students, 18 and 19 year olds in full-time education, student nurses, people who are severely mentally impaired, and live-in carers who are not your partner, spouse or child under 18. You still have to apply for it.
Does dementia reduce your council tax?
It can remove it entirely. Someone certified as severely mentally impaired who lives alone, or only with other people who are severely mentally impaired or full-time students, gets a 100% discount. If you live with someone in that position and no other counting adults, you get 25% off. You need a certificate from a doctor and entitlement to certain benefits.
Can I claim back a prescription I already paid for?
Yes, but only with an FP57 receipt, and you have to ask the pharmacist for it at the moment you pay. Refund claims have to reach the NHS within three months of the date you paid. Dental, optical, travel and wig refunds use HC5 forms instead.
Is it worth applying to the NHS Low Income Scheme if I was refused benefits?
Often yes. The assessment takes council tax and housing costs into account as well as income, so you can qualify for help with health costs even when your income is too high for a means-tested benefit. Savings have to be under £16,000, or £23,250 if you live permanently in a care home.
When does the Warm Home Discount reopen?
October 2026. It is a one-off £150 discount taken off your electricity bill rather than paid to you, and it does not affect your Cold Weather Payment or Winter Fuel Payment. It is not available in Northern Ireland, where the Affordable Warmth Scheme runs instead.
Does Section 75 cover my whole order?
No. The £100 to £30,000 limits apply to a single item, not the order total. An order of £105 made up of an £80 phone and £20 headphones is not covered, because no single item is over £100. In that case you use chargeback instead.