If your restaurant still takes bookings by phone, the restaurant landline 2027 switch-off should already be on your radar. The UK’s analogue telephone network is being permanently shut down on 31 January 2027 – and the price of staying on it is already rising sharply, right now, in 2026.

This is not a distant deadline. It is a hard cutover with a confirmed date, staged costs hitting quarterly between now and then, and no extensions planned. Restaurants that leave it too late will face an unplanned phone outage at exactly the wrong moment.

Here is what is happening, what it means for venues specifically, and what you can do about it.

What the restaurant landline 2027 deadline actually means

The Public Switched Telephone Network – PSTN – is the old copper wire infrastructure that traditional analogue landlines run on. Openreach stopped selling new PSTN lines in September 2023 and has confirmed the full network will be switched off on 31 January 2027. That date will not move again – it was already delayed once from 2025.

On 1 February 2027, any business still on an analogue line gets silence. No dial tone, no incoming calls, no outgoing calls. If a customer tries to ring your restaurant to book a table, nothing happens.

Around 2.4 million UK businesses are still on legacy lines. Openreach has flagged that more than 500,000 business lines remain unmigrated as of early 2026. A significant number of those will be restaurants, pubs and hospitality venues that have not yet started thinking about it.

The costs are rising before it even switches off

The 2027 deadline is the hard stop, but the financial pressure is already building. Openreach confirmed staged price rises on copper line rental throughout 2026:

• 20% rise from 1 April 2026 – already in effect
• 40% rise from 1 July 2026
• A further 40% rise from 1 October 2026

By autumn 2026, the cost of keeping an analogue line will have roughly doubled compared to the start of the year. That is not a migration incentive – it is a penalty for inaction. Restaurants paying for a line they are not migrating away from are spending significantly more for a service that is going to disappear anyway.

It is not just the phone on the bar

This is the part most restaurant owners have not thought through yet. The PSTN switch-off does not just affect the handset your front-of-house team answers. It affects anything running over a traditional copper telephone line – and in a typical hospitality venue, that can include:

• Card payment terminals – older EPOS and PDQ machines that dial out over a phone line for payment authorisation will stop working
• Alarm systems – many commercial intruder alarms and fire alarm monitoring systems use a phone line connection to notify a monitoring centre
• ADSL broadband – if your internet connection comes via ADSL (broadband that runs over a copper phone line), that goes too
• Fax and ISDN lines – less common now, but still present in some venues

A venue audit is worth doing sooner rather than later. Check with your card terminal provider, your alarm company and your broadband provider whether any of your current services ride on a copper line.

What to do – and how to keep your number

The replacement for a PSTN line is VoIP – Voice over Internet Protocol. Calls are made and received over your internet connection rather than a copper wire. For most restaurants, the switch is straightforward and VoIP providers typically charge £10-30 per user per month.

The good news on phone numbers: you do not have to lose yours. Number porting lets you transfer your existing landline number to a VoIP provider. The process is governed by Ofcom and typically takes 5 to 10 working days. The risk is leaving it too late – after the January 2027 cutover, there is no guarantee of recovering a number that was not ported in time.

Starting the migration process now, rather than in December 2026, also means you can test and troubleshoot at your own pace rather than under pressure.

The bigger question: should you be taking bookings by phone at all?

The PSTN switch-off is a useful moment to ask a more fundamental question. Phone bookings require someone to answer. They are limited to your opening hours. They generate no data, no confirmation trail and no customer record unless someone manually enters it. And they are about to get more expensive before they stop working entirely.

Online bookings through Togo’s booking system work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Guests book at midnight if that is when they decide. Every booking automatically adds the customer to your database. Confirmations and reminders go out automatically. No phone calls, no missed reservations, no one covering the bar and the booking line at the same time.

That does not mean abandoning a phone line entirely – many guests still want to call, and a VoIP line keeps that option open. But for restaurants where a significant number of bookings still come in by phone, the 2027 deadline is a practical prompt to rebalance that split. Moving more of your bookings online now reduces your exposure to any disruption during the migration and sets you up better for the long term.

Togo’s built-in marketing platform also means that once guests have booked online, you have their data – and you can reach them by email or SMS next time, without a phone involved at all.

To see how Togo’s online booking system works and how it fits alongside your existing setup, book a free demo with the team.