Buy With Confidence is supported by over 60 local authority Trading Standards services from Cornwall to Stirling. However, Buy With Confidence Trading Standards Approved status is now available to any businesses nationwide that can meet our vetting checks and entry criteria¹.

To find out if your local authority is directly involved in Buy With Confidence, click here.

Membership starts from £22.50 per month – that’s 74p a day to be able to reassure your customers with Trading Standards approval*

The cost to be a new Buy With Confidence member varies depending on the size of the business. The current fee schedule is (correct as of 01/04/23):

Buy With Confidence

Additional Premises: For businesses that operate from more than one premises, an additional £85 per premises per year fee may be charged (more info on when this applies is available on request)
Additional Trading Styles⁴: £135 pa per additional trading style

All prices +VAT at 20%. Local discounts may apply.

Criminal Record Checks
If your business does work in or around your customers’ private residences, during the application process you will be required to show us a recent Basic Disclosure Certificate (formerly known as a CRB/Criminal Records Bureau check, and sometimes referred to as a DBS check) for all employees or unsupervised subcontractors you work with, who visit people’s homes.

The cost of this (which cost around £18 per check) is not included in your application fee and you or your employees will need to source these certificates yourself. Please note that having a conviction revealed on a Disclosure Certificate does not automatically bar you or your business from Buy With Confidence membership, as each case is judged on its own merits. For more information about our Disclosure Certificate policy and how to apply for one, please click here.

1: If your local Trading Standards service does not directly run or support Buy With Confidence, membership can be offered either via a Regional Hub (a Trading Standards service that handles Buy With Confidence membership across multiple counties), or via the Central Hub (run by the Buy With Confidence Partnership). The same entry criteria will apply and your application will need to be approved by a Trading Standards service before membership (and therefore ‘Trading Standards Approved’ status) is granted.
2: No. Of Employees is judged on a full-time equivalent basis. E.g. Two part-time staff working 50% of full-time hours, would be classed as one employee for the purposes of judging fee levels.
3: The Application fee is a one-off fee paid during the application process to help cover the costs of the vetting procedure. After that, only the annual fee is due. The Application Fee is normally non-refundable except under specific circumstances – more information about this is available on this the Applications, Fees and Auditing page.
4: Trading Styles are where businesses are engaged in widely differing activities in terms of either what they trade in or how they trade. The Buy With Confidence scheme operator handling the application/membership will be the final arbiter of whether a business is engaged in multiple trading styles, and therefore whether Additional Trading Style fees apply.
*Annual fee (excluding VAT) equals £22.50 per month, or 74p per day for a business with a single premises and 0-5 Employees. Does not include cost of one-off application fee. Some scheme operators may only offer annual payment terms.