Ofcom and the spectrum you are already using

Posted on 6 2026

Most people who build things with LoRa hardware have a vague awareness that there are regulations somewhere, that you are supposed to use the EU_868 frequency plan in the UK, and that something called a duty cycle applies. Most people have not read the actual regulatory documents. I had not either, until I decided I should, and it turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

This piece is about the UK spectrum regulatory landscape as it applies to LoRa, LoRaWAN, MeshCore, Meshtastic, and the broader category of licence-exempt radio equipment that most of us in the hobbyist and IoT space are quietly operating. It is not legal advice. It is an honest attempt to read the primary documents and explain what they actually say in language that does not require a telecommunications law degree.

The legal foundation

The Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006 requires that no radio equipment is installed or used in the UK except under the authority of a licence granted by or otherwise exempted by regulations made by Ofcom. This sounds alarming until you read the second half of that sentence. The exemption is where almost everyone operating LoRa hardware sits.

Ofcom publishes a document called the Interface Requirement 2030, known as IR 2030. This is the document that specifies which categories of Short Range Devices are licence-exempt in the UK and under what technical conditions. The current version was published in March 2023, with a draft update published in December 2025 and open for consultation into 2026.

Short Range Devices is a broad category. It includes everything from your home WiFi router to your car’s tyre pressure monitoring system to a LoRaWAN gateway on a rooftop in Manchester. What they share is that they operate on licence-exempt spectrum under defined technical conditions, and those conditions are what IR 2030 specifies.

The 868MHz band

LoRa in the UK and Europe operates in the 868MHz band. This is sometimes called the EU_868 band in firmware settings, and this is what you set when you configure a Meshtastic node, a MeshCore device, or a LoRaWAN gateway for UK operation. The specific sub-bands and their conditions vary, but the ones relevant to LoRaWAN and personal mesh networks are in the 863-870MHz range.

The key parameters for the main LoRaWAN channels (868.1, 868.3, 868.5MHz and the additional channels at 867.1-867.9MHz):

Maximum transmit power: 25mW ERP (approximately 14 dBm)
Duty cycle: 1% per hour per sub-band
Channel bandwidth: 125kHz for standard LoRaWAN channels

The 1% duty cycle is the constraint that shapes how LoRa networks are designed. It means a device can transmit for a maximum of 36 seconds in any given hour. This is not a LoRa limitation: it is a regulatory requirement that applies to all licence-exempt devices in this sub-band. It exists to ensure that licence-exempt devices sharing a finite radio resource do not monopolise it.

In practice, for a LoRaWAN sensor sending a temperature reading every ten minutes, the duty cycle limit is comfortably within bounds. A packet from a typical sensor takes a fraction of a second to transmit. You would need to transmit very frequently, or with very high spreading factors that produce long on-air times, to approach the 1% limit.

Duty cycle in practice

The duty cycle calculation is worth understanding rather than just accepting as a number.

1% per hour means 36 seconds of transmit time per hour. A LoRaWAN uplink at SF12 on 125kHz bandwidth (the slowest, longest-range setting) takes approximately 1.5 seconds. At 1%, you can send about 24 such packets per hour. At SF7 (fastest, shortest range), a packet takes around 50 milliseconds. You could send several hundred packets per hour well within the duty cycle limit.

The duty cycle applies per sub-band, not per device. Multiple devices sharing the same sub-band contribute to the aggregate duty cycle usage on that frequency, though enforcement at the individual device level is effectively non-existent for low-power IoT deployments. The duty cycle requirement exists to manage shared spectrum access in aggregate across all users, not to police individual transmissions.

MeshCore’s structured routing model, where companion devices do not relay traffic for others, is meaningfully more conservative with airtime than Meshtastic’s flood routing. This is one of several reasons MeshCore makes more sense as a deployment philosophy in the UK, where the duty cycle constraint is real.

The 433MHz band

There is another LoRa band worth knowing about: 433MHz. Some LoRa hardware supports this band, and it offers even better range than 868MHz due to the lower frequency. The regulatory situation is more complex.

433MHz devices are permitted under IR 2030 but with a maximum power of 10mW ERP rather than 25mW, and a duty cycle of 10% rather than 1%. The 10% duty cycle sounds more permissive, and it is, but the 433MHz band is considerably more congested in the UK: it is shared with a huge number of existing devices including remote controls, weather stations, car key fobs, and various other consumer devices. In practice, 868MHz is the better choice for LoRa deployments.

What about gateways

A LoRaWAN gateway is a receiver as well as a transmitter. The receive function has no regulatory constraints: you can listen on any frequency you like. The transmit function is what the duty cycle applies to.

A LoRaWAN gateway transmits downlinks: messages from the network server back to devices. For a private network with relatively few end devices, downlink traffic is light and duty cycle rarely becomes a concern. For a public gateway on The Things Network with many active devices, downlink pressure can become meaningful and gateway firmware handles this by queuing or dropping downlinks that would cause the duty cycle to be exceeded.

For a self-hosted gateway as part of a private LoRaWAN deployment, this is not a practical concern in most scenarios.

The regulatory picture post-Brexit

Before Brexit, the UK aligned with the European ETSI harmonisation standards that underpin the 868MHz licence exemption framework. After Brexit, Ofcom took responsibility for maintaining these standards domestically. In practice, Ofcom has been actively updating IR 2030 to align with current CEPT (European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations) recommendations, meaning the technical parameters remain closely harmonised with Europe even if the regulatory basis is now domestic rather than EU-derived.

This matters for practical reasons: hardware sold for EU use operates on EU_868 frequency plans that are compatible with UK IR 2030 requirements. The frequency plan, power limits, and duty cycle values are effectively the same. Setting your LoRa hardware to EU_868 is the correct choice for UK deployment.

The honest regulatory picture

The honest answer to “do I need a licence to operate a LoRa gateway or sensor in the UK” is: no, if you comply with the technical conditions in IR 2030. Specifically, if you use EU_868 frequency settings, stay within 25mW ERP transmit power, and observe the 1% duty cycle, you are operating within the licence-exempt framework.

For personal mesh networks using Meshtastic or MeshCore, the same framework applies. These devices use the same 868MHz band under the same licence-exempt conditions. The firmware’s EU_868 regional setting sets the correct frequencies and respects the transmit power limits. Duty cycle management varies by implementation, but the MeshCore architecture’s lower per-device transmission overhead keeps it comfortably within bounds for typical usage.

What Ofcom does not regulate, and what IR 2030 does not address, is the content of transmissions or what you do with the data. It is purely a technical framework for spectrum access.

What to watch

The draft updated IR 2030 published in December 2025 is the document to watch for anyone operating LoRa infrastructure in the UK. Ofcom periodically updates these requirements to align with technology developments and European harmonisation. The substance of the EU_868 parameters has been stable for years, but it is worth checking for updates before any significant deployment.

The Ofcom website publishes all current interface requirements at no charge. IR 2030 is the primary document for anyone operating Short Range Devices in the UK, and it is readable by a technically curious non-lawyer. Recommended.