Does call forwarding cost money in the UK?

A forwarded call has two legs. The caller pays for the leg from them to your number, exactly as they always did — forwarding does not change what they are charged, and they will not know it happened. You pay for the second leg, from your number to wherever you sent the call.

That second leg is treated as an outbound call from your line. If your plan includes unlimited UK minutes, a divert to a UK mobile or landline normally uses those minutes rather than adding a charge. If you are on a pay-as-you-go tariff or a small bundle, it comes off the same allowance an ordinary call would.

This is set by your network, not by whatever you are diverting to. Two people on the same divert with different tariffs can be charged differently for it.

Diverting to a non-geographic number. 084, 087 and 09 numbers are charged at their own rates and are not usually included in bundles, so a divert pointed at one can be genuinely costly. Diverting to an ordinary 01, 02 or 07 number is the cheap case.

Diverting internationally. The second leg is an international call from your line, at your network's international rates, and is almost never in a bundle.

Leaving an all-calls divert on. **21* forwards everything immediately, so every single call generates a charged leg whether you would have answered it or not. The no-answer divert only generates one when a call actually rings out.

Long forwarded calls. The second leg is billed for its duration like any other call, so a divert to a number where someone answers and talks for twenty minutes bills you for twenty minutes.

A divert to a service that rejects the call rather than answering it is the cheapest thing you can do with forwarding, because there is nothing to bill for the duration of. The second leg exists for a moment and then ends.

That is how TextTheCaller works, and it is a deliberate design choice rather than a happy accident. We never answer the forwarded call — we reject it the instant it arrives and send your text — so there is no conversation, no hold music and no minutes to consume. The alternative design, where a service answers the call and speaks to your customer, keeps the second leg open for as long as it talks.

Your tariff terms are the authority, and every network publishes call-forwarding charges somewhere in its pricing guide rather than in its how-to pages. If you cannot find it, ask on live chat and get the answer in writing.

The practical test is cheaper: set the divert, make one unanswered test call, and look at your next itemised bill or your usage screen. One call tells you what a thousand will cost.