Production runs from £100 to £1 million and airtime from £3,000 to £6 million. Here is what UK TV advertising actually costs in 2026, with every figure sourced and dated, plus a worked £60,000 budget.
How much does a TV advert cost in the UK? There are two bills, and the honest answer to both is a range. Making the film runs from a few hundred pounds for a shop owner with a phone to around £1 million for a John Lewis Christmas production. Airing it runs from about £3,000 for a targeted Sky AdSmart test to £400,000 for a Love Island package on ITV, and past £6 million for a national Christmas campaign.
The number that matters more than any spot price is the cost per thousand, which is how UK airtime is actually traded. Thinkbox, the commercial TV marketing body, puts a broad all-adult audience at roughly £6 per thousand viewers and a narrow young audience at roughly £30, and in its June 2026 value analysis argues TV is around eight times cheaper than social video once you count only completed views. In 2025, by Thinkbox’s count, 598 advertisers spent less than £50,000 on TV and 114 spent under £5,000. This piece sets out what each part costs, with the sources and their dates, and ends with a worked budget.
Production is the part with no rate card, so the useful thing is to know the bands and what buys the jump between them. At the bottom sits the self-made spot. Hafod Hardware in Rhayader, Powys, made its 2019 Christmas film starring the owner’s two-year-old son for about £100, and the Independent ran it next to the John Lewis film as if the two were competing. They were not, but it aired, it was watched, and it cost less than a tank of petrol.
The next band is the simple professional spot, which media buyers’ published guides price at around £3,000 to £10,000: one location, no named talent, library music, a 30 second edit and the Clearcast paperwork. Sky Media’s toolkit for small advertisers, launched on 28 January 2026, generates 10, 15 or 30 second ads from a company’s website and routes them through clearance, and the point of it is to push this band towards zero so the money goes on airtime instead.
Above that, production companies are candid about their pricing. Square Elephant’s February 2026 guide gives £10,000 to £25,000 for a low budget shoot, £25,000 to £75,000 for a mid range one with cast and locations, and £75,000 to £250,000 and up at the top. Toast TV, updated August 2026, starts at £40,000 for an animated commercial and runs to £320,000 and beyond for a film with stars and a famous track. What buys the jump is always the same list: a director with a reel, a crew of forty rather than four, a celebrity, a licensed song and visual effects.
Then there is Christmas. John Lewis’s 2015 film Man on the Moon cost around £1 million to make, with a further £6 million going on airtime and other media, according to the Telegraph, and Marketing Week confirmed the £7 million total on launch day, 6 November 2015. Cadbury’s relaunch under VCCP in January 2018 was reported by Campaign as a £12 million campaign. We covered how those films get commissioned in the Christmas ad playbook, and reviewed Man on the Moon itself.
UK airtime is sold on cost per thousand, or CPT, which is the price of a thousand people in your target audience seeing a 30 second spot. Sales houses publish a station average price for each channel and month, and your CPT moves up or down from it depending on how narrow your audience is. Thinkbox’s planning guide, published August 2023, gives the two ends: all adults at roughly £6 per thousand, women aged 16 to 34 at roughly £30. The broader the audience, the cheaper each viewer.
Three other things move the price. Time length is indexed to the 30 second spot, so a 10 second ad costs a fraction and a 60 second one costs roughly double. Season matters enormously: January is the cheapest month and September to November the dearest, because every retailer in the country wants the same six weeks. And region matters, with London the most expensive ITV1 area and the smaller regions a fraction of the price.
Spot prices, which is what most people mean when they ask about ITV advertising cost, are simply CPT multiplied by audience. One Day Agency’s December 2025 buying guide puts a regional or off-peak slot on ITV2 at £1,000 to £3,000, a national daytime ITV1 spot at £3,500 to £5,000 and a national peak ITV1 spot at £15,000 to £40,000 or more. Toast’s August 2026 figures are similar: ITV peak at £10,700 to £35,000, Channel 4 peak at £3,200 to £5,400, a Sky channel in peak at £660 to £1,250 and small digital channels at £180 to £370.
The top of the market is on the record. ITV’s own rate card for Love Island Summer 2026, released on 31 March 2026, sold 30 second packages at £65,000 to £150,000 and £150,001 to £400,000 on a fixed CPT of £20, with 20 second copy at £17 and 10 second copy at £10. In June 2021 Campaign reported ITV charging £100,000 per ad in the show. Coronation Street, the big Saturday entertainment finals and England tournament football sit in the same tier.
Addressable TV is where the entry price has fallen. Sky AdSmart serves different ads to different households within the same break, and charges per impression, with a view only counted if at least 75 per cent of the ad plays at normal speed. Sky does not publish a minimum, but buyers’ guides such as One Day Agency’s December 2025 primer consistently quote entry campaigns from around £3,000 and CPTs of £30 to £60 depending on how tightly you target. Tighter is dearer, which is the same rule as linear, just with postcodes and life stage instead of daypart.
ITVX inventory is bought through ITV’s Planet V platform and Channel 4’s streaming inventory through Channel 4 Sales, at CPTs that buyers put in the same £30 to £60 band. Since 23 June 2026 there has also been a single front door: Comcast’s Universal Ads launched in the UK with Channel 4, ITV and Sky as a self-serve marketplace where a small business can set a budget, pick an audience, upload a film and buy across all three sales houses from one screen. It is the first time the three have sold together.
The money is following. The AA/WARC Expenditure Report published on 30 April 2026 put total UK TV investment at £5.216 billion in 2025, down 1.2 per cent, while the addressable portion inside it grew 37 per cent to £1.839 billion. TV was 11.2 per cent of a £46.7 billion market. Linear is shrinking slowly and the targeted, self-serve end is growing fast, and pricing is moving with it.
Every UK TV ad must be cleared against the BCAP Code by Clearcast before it airs. The surprising part is the price. Clearcast’s own FAQ states that standard clearance is paid for by its stakeholders, the broadcasters, provided the ad will run on a channel it clears for and is under five minutes long. For a normal commercial, the advertiser does not receive a clearance invoice.
What costs money is being late. Clearcast charges for late or provisional clearance, for a fast track service that guarantees feedback within one working day, and for edit-to-clear help with technical delivery. The process is three stages, script, rough cut and final clocked ad, and Clearcast asks for two to three weeks in total, with script feedback in about three working days and script approval averaging two weeks. Build it into the schedule and it is free; forget it and it is a fee plus a delayed launch.
| Item | Typical cost | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Self-made spot (phone, staff, no talent) | Under £1,000 | Hafod Hardware, about £100, December 2019 |
| Simple professional 30 second spot | £3,000 to £10,000 | One Day Agency guide, December 2025 |
| Mid range shoot with cast and locations | £25,000 to £75,000 | Square Elephant guide, February 2026 |
| High end film with director, talent and music | £75,000 to £320,000+ | Square Elephant, February 2026; Toast TV, August 2026 |
| Christmas blockbuster production | Around £1 million | John Lewis Man on the Moon, Telegraph, November 2015 |
| Clearcast standard clearance | Paid by broadcasters; fees for late or fast track | Clearcast FAQ, 2026 |
| Airtime CPT, all adults | Roughly £6 per thousand | Thinkbox, August 2023 |
| Airtime CPT, women 16 to 34 | Roughly £30 per thousand | Thinkbox, August 2023 |
| Addressable CPT (AdSmart, ITVX, Channel 4) | £30 to £60 per thousand | Buyers’ guides, December 2025 |
| Sky AdSmart entry campaign | From around £3,000 | Buyers’ guides, December 2025 |
| ITV2 regional or off-peak spot | £1,000 to £3,000 | One Day Agency, December 2025 |
| ITV1 national daytime spot | £3,500 to £5,000 | One Day Agency, December 2025 |
| ITV1 national peak spot | £15,000 to £40,000+ | One Day Agency, December 2025 |
| Love Island 30 second package | £65,000 to £400,000 at £20 CPT | ITV Media rate card, March 2026 |
| National Christmas campaign media | £6 million and up | John Lewis 2015, Telegraph and Marketing Week |
Take a regional service business, say a kitchen fitter covering the north west, with £60,000 to spend on its first TV campaign in a quiet month. The first decision is the split, and the mistake most first timers make is to spend half of it on the film. Put £12,000 into a simple professional spot with one location, a voiceover and library music, and a 10 second cut down for cheap frequency. Allow three weeks for Clearcast and pay nothing for it.
That leaves £48,000 for airtime, which we would split £30,000 to regional ITV1 and £18,000 to Sky AdSmart targeted at homeowners in the right postcodes. Against a broad all-adult audience in the ITV Granada region at a CPT of £8 to £10, the linear money buys three to four million adult impacts, enough for a typical viewer in the region to see the ad several times over a four week burst. The AdSmart money, at a CPT of around £40 for a tight homeowner audience, buys roughly 450,000 targeted views, each counted only when three quarters of the ad plays.
Two costs sit outside the headline numbers. If you want a recognisable song rather than library music, licensing is a separate negotiation and we have set out what it costs in our guide to music in advertising. And if the ad uses actors, their fees usually cover a fixed period of use, so a spot you want to run for two years costs more than one you run for six weeks. Ask about both before the shoot, not after.
Buyers’ guides from late 2025 put a national daytime ITV1 spot at £3,500 to £5,000 and a national peak spot at £15,000 to £40,000 or more, with regional and ITV2 slots from about £1,000. The biggest programmes are dearer still: ITV’s 2026 Love Island packages ran from £65,000 to £400,000 at a £20 CPT.
A standard spot on a Sky channel in peak costs a few hundred to around £1,250 according to production and buying guides from 2026. Sky AdSmart, the targeted product, is charged per impression at roughly £30 to £60 per thousand, and buyers quote entry campaigns from around £3,000.
There is no formal minimum on most channels any more, and the self-serve routes start at a few thousand pounds. Thinkbox’s data for 2025 shows 223 advertisers spending under £10,000 on TV and 114 under £5,000, most of them testing regionally or on addressable before scaling up.
The best documented year is 2015, when Man on the Moon cost around £1 million to make and a further £6 million to run, a £7 million total confirmed by Marketing Week at launch. John Lewis has never published later budgets, and larger figures reported for subsequent years are estimates.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
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