giffgaff's phone contracts: the ins and outs of how they work

They offer great flexibility with their phone contracts

giffgaff offer lots of phones on their website, with phone contracts based around finance agreements (loans). These are split between one bill for your phone and another for your usage (mins, texts, data) plan.

The payment for your phone is actually managed by a third party called Klarna, not by giffgaff themselves. You can choose a 12, 24 or 36-month contract and pay off your entire loan whenever you want.

You can either choose a flexible 1-month deal that you can leave whenever you want, or an 18-month contract for better value per month. Both types of deal let you switch plans month to month.

Your separate bill dates should line up so that you have just one monthly payment, rather than having them separate. But giffgaff don’t offer over-the-phone service if you run into issues, so bear that in mind.

Useful link: giffgaff’s guide to their phone contracts

Other technical details that you’ll want to bear in mind

Unlike with their SIM only deals, you do have to pass a credit check to join a giffgaff phone contract. This is because the company managing your loan (Klarna) need to know you can reliably pay them back.

They will check your history of making payments and credit score. We don’t know exactly how strict these are, but if you’ve missed payments in the past then you’re less likely to be accepted.

If you’re on an 18-month usage contract and want to leave early you’ll have to pay an early termination fee (see how they calculate this here). But you don’t have to pay off the loan for your phone to do this.

Your phone will be delivered in 1 day if you order before midnight. There’s no extra cost for delivery either. That’s really flexible and means you don’t need to wait around for your phone (see their guide here).

Finally, if you’re switching to giffgaff from another network and want to keep your number you can request a PAC from your old network and send it to giffgaff whenever. They’ll port your number over for you.

Useful link: Read giffgaff’s guide to their credit checks

Excellent coverage and 5G signal on good value deals

giffgaff use O2’s network for call (2G/3G) and data (4G/5G) signal. That’s definitely a good thing as their hosts have the joint-largest network for calls and also provide widespread 4G data signal.

You’ll get 5G in a long list of over 2000 UK towns and cities on giffgaff. Coverage in these locations tends to be quite good, but it’s still only on a street-by-street basis so check your local area here.

Their speeds are a bit of a downside. Opensignal measured typical 4G data speeds of 19.3 Mbps over giffgaff’s hosts. For 5G, Opensignal and Speedtest’s results show typical speeds between 75.0 Mbps - 78.88 Mbps.

Still, we think most users can be happy with those speeds. giffgaff are missing key network features like WiFi calling but they do now offer eSIMs. But overall their main draw seems to be their great value deals.

Useful link: Read our full review of giffgaff