Checking a single number against the TPS costs nothing. Screening a business list costs from a few hundred pounds a year at 10,000 numbers to several thousand at a million, depending on the route: a DMA licence of your own (£3,300 a year for the full TPS and CTPS files, before you build anything), a bureau or pay-per-check service (roughly £0.40 to £30 per 1,000 numbers), a flat-rate account (about £150 to £200 a month), or a subscription inside your CRM. All prices in this piece are ex VAT and come from published price pages as of October 2026.
Checking one number: free
The TPS website (tpsonline.org.uk) is free for registering a number and for making a complaint. Its "Am I Registered?" page checks one number at a time against the TPS (not the CTPS); for businesses it publishes licence prices and a directory of licensed list cleaners instead.
Free checkers fill that gap for occasional use. Our free TPS check gives three checks a day without signing in and 25 a day on a free account, against the TPS and CTPS register files we hold under our DMA licence. Other free checkers allow a similar handful of checks a day or a month. They suit a sole trader checking a handful of numbers before a call. None of them is a screening programme: there is no record kept for your file and no re-check when the register changes.
Holding a DMA licence yourself
The TPS corporate site publishes its licence fees. A full annual TPS licence is £2,200 and a full annual CTPS licence is £1,100, so £3,300 a year for both registers. Each gives unlimited access to the full data file by website download, updated daily. There are cheaper options: partial licences covering chosen dialling codes (from £230 a year for 1% of the TPS file), and an ad-hoc TPS licence at £300 for a single download that stays valid for 28 days. Thirteen ad-hoc downloads a year cost £3,900 on the TPS alone, more than the annual licence.
The licence fee buys the files and nothing else. Loading a daily file, matching it against your numbers, re-checking every 28 days and keeping an audit record are yours to build and run, and that is usually the larger cost. I have set out the build side in build vs buy for a TPS check.
Bureau cleans: paying per 1,000 numbers
A bureau clean is the traditional route: you upload a file to a licensed list cleaner and download the verdicts. Prices are per 1,000 records, usually with a minimum order of £10 to £100. Across the published price lists in October 2026:
- Small orders (1,000 to 10,000 numbers) cost about £4 to £30 per 1,000 numbers.
- Large prepaid packs (a million checks or more) fall to about £0.40 to £2 per 1,000.
- One list-price service charges £5 per 1,000 per register, so £10 per 1,000 for both, with no published volume discount.
Read the unit carefully. Some vendors count one check per number for both registers; others count one check per register, so a TPS and CTPS check uses two credits and the effective price doubles. What the two registers cover, and why a B2B list needs both, is in TPS and CTPS suppression explained. For a one-off file, the bulk TPS check guide prices three routes at three volumes.
Pay-per-check APIs and flat-rate accounts
Most of the same vendors sell API access on the same credits, so the per-1,000 ranges above apply. The difference is that an API can be scheduled, so the 28-day re-screen runs without someone remembering to upload a file.
The alternative is a flat-rate account: about £150 to £200 a month for unlimited checking, before any annual discount. The bottom of that range covers the TPS only. "Unlimited" carries a fair-use limit; the one published limit I found was 12 million checks a year, which is 6 million numbers at two checks each.
Our own prepaid packs for the API and Zapier are £9 for 1,000 checks, £49 for 10,000 and £179 for 50,000, one credit per number for both registers, valid for 12 months. They cost more per check than the cheapest packs above. Each check carries an audit record, and the suppression list is included.
Screening inside your CRM
The CRM add-ins from other vendors that publish prices bill per check, at the rates in the sections above. Our plans are flat monthly subscriptions that screen each number when it is added or changed and re-check it before 28 days are up: Starter £95 a month for up to 2,500 numbers every 28 days, Standard £295 a month with 25,000 checks every 28 days, and Scale £795 a month with 250,000, with £15 per 1,000 checks beyond the allowance on Standard and Scale. Annual billing is 11 times the monthly price (Standard £3,245 a year). Larger volumes go on a Custom plan. Full details are on the pricing page.
The TPS royalty on top
Since 1 September 2026 the DMA charges a royalty of 10p per 1,000 records screened through list cleaners, capped at £3,300 per client per year; customers who hold their own licence are exempt on proof. Some vendors include it in their price and others add it, so ask. The background is in the TPS royalty fee.
What a year costs at 10,000, 100,000 and 1,000,000 numbers
The table assumes every number is screened 13 times a year, once per 28-day cycle, so 10,000 numbers means 130,000 checks a year. Ranges for other vendors run from the cheapest to the most expensive published price that covers both registers at that volume, buying a year's credits up front. Published prices, October 2026, ex VAT.
| Route | 10,000 numbers | 100,000 numbers | 1,000,000 numbers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Own annual TPS and CTPS licences | £3,300 plus build and running costs | £3,300 plus build and running costs | £3,300 plus build and running costs |
| Bureau or pay-per-check API (other vendors) | £255 to £1,300 | £950 to £13,000 | £4,800 to £130,000 |
| Flat-rate unlimited account (other vendors) | £2,160 to £2,400 | £2,160 to £2,400 | £2,160 to £2,400 where the fair-use limit allows 13 million number checks a year |
| TPSClear prepaid packs (API, Zapier) | £505 | £4,654 | £46,540 |
| TPSClear CRM plan | Standard, £3,245 a year | Scale, £8,745 a year | Custom plan, quoted |
| TPS royalty, where charged | £13 | £130 | £1,300 |
The low ends of the pay-per-check ranges assume a vendor that counts one credit per number for both registers; where a vendor counts per register, the same volume costs more. The CRM plan rows are the annual prices; monthly billing is £3,540 and £9,540 a year. The licence row is cheapest on paper at high volume and is the only one where the screening itself is still to be built.
The cost of not screening
Since 5 February 2026 the ICO can fine up to £17.5 million or 4% of global annual turnover for a PECR breach, up from £500,000. Against that ceiling, every route in the table above is a small line item. The cases, and what they cost the companies involved, are in ICO PECR fines and cases.
One-line answer
One number is free to check; a list costs roughly £0.40 to £30 per 1,000 numbers through a bureau or API, £150 to £200 a month on a flat-rate account, £3,300 a year for your own TPS and CTPS licences before build costs, or from £95 a month inside your CRM, plus the DMA royalty of 10p per 1,000 where it applies.