How many households have cancelled the BBC TV licence fee since 2020?

Posts circulating on social media claim that “2.4 million households in Britain have cancelled their BBC TV licence fee since 2020”, and that this equates to a loss of £231 million.

These claims have been shared thousands of times across X, Facebook and Threads.

The BBC does not publish data specifically on cancellations, but the fall in the number of licences in force is often used in the media as a proxy for the number of cancellations. According to the most recent Television Licence Fee Trust Statement, the number of licences in force has fallen since 2020, but not by as much as 2.4 million.

Specifically, the statement published in July 2025 reports that 23.79 million TV licences were in force in 2024/25 (the latest period for which figures are available), compared with 25.28 million in 2020/21. That is a decrease of 1.49 million.

The data we have for 2019/2020 is not directly comparable—as the 2022 report notes, a new policy for over-75s’ licences was brought into force in August 2020 making direct comparisons year-on-year “more complex”. However, according to the BBC Group Annual Report and Accounts for 2019/20 there were 25.95 million licences in force that year, which is 2.16 million more than the Television Licence Fee Trust Statement says were in force in 2024/25, not 2.4 million.

It’s worth noting that the number of licences in force is different from the number of households with a licence, which is the precise term used in these posts. We’ve not seen figures for the number of households with a licence, though the BBC has said the number of licences in force is higher than the number of licensed households as some households (for example, student accommodation) may require more than one licence.

The change in the number of licences doesn’t tell us how many people bought new licences that year, so it is theoretically possible that there were 2.4 million cancellations offset by a large number of new licences.

On the other hand, not everyone who stopped having a TV licence will have actively cancelled it. As a TV Licensing statement says: “TV Licensing cancellations information data does not differentiate between licences cancelled by customers themselves and licences cancelled by TV Licensing, for various reasons including payment failure. Consequently, TV Licensing is unable to identify the number of licences solely cancelled by customers.”

It’s not clear how the claim that cancelled licences have cost the BBC £231 million has been calculated. Overall TV licence income has actually increased in cash terms, from £3.75 billion in 2020/21 to £3.84 billion in 2024/25.

Licence fee evasion and households not purchasing a licence—not cancellation—did cost the BBC over £1.1 billion in potential lost income in 2024/25, according to the Public Accounts Committee.

The BBC told Full Fact it does not recognise the figures circulating in these posts, and confirmed that it does not publish information on TV Licence cancellations. It said the correct information on income and licences in force could be found in the 2024/25 Licence Fee Trust Statement, which we’ve cited above.

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