How we compare electricity plans

Every electricity retailer in the national market is required to publish its current offers to a government plan register. We take our prices from that register directly - not from a retailer's marketing page, and not from a data reseller. Victoria runs its own separate scheme, and we cover that too.

The register is re-read and every plan re-costed overnight, seven days a week. What you see is built from that morning's data and reflects the offers available at your postcode on the day you search.

We keep every version of every plan we collect to build up a picture of how Australian energy prices are changing. However, when a retailer stops offering a plan, it drops out of the results set that we present - we won't rank something you can't sign up to.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory sit outside the national scheme and their retailers don't publish to the register, so their plans can't be compared here.

Retailers publish most of a plan's pricing as structured data, but not all of it. A feed-in tariff that applies between 10am and 2pm, a free two-hour window with a 10 kWh daily cap, a cheaper overnight rate for EV owners, a $100 welcome credit - these are often published as a sentence rather than a rate. We read these descriptions and turn them into prices.

Electricity plans are not sold nationally. Which offers you can actually take up depends on the network your home sits in, so your postcode decides the shortlist - every plan we rank is one that you can sign up to today.

It also sets the local reality behind the numbers: the distribution network and its charges, the feed-in tariffs offered where you live, and whether you fall inside one of the areas where a free midday electricity window is available.

If you use our estimator, your postcode does a second job. The regulator publishes typical household consumption by climate zone, state and household size, and your postcode is what places you in the right one - a home in tropical Queensland and a home in the Tasmanian highlands have very different heating and cooling patterns, and their rooftop solar generation differs greatly too. So the postcode sets both the plans you can buy and the starting point for what you are likely to use.

Whether you're on a single rate or time of use plan is a significant driver of your electricity costs - and often you can't move from one to the other. It works alongside your postcode to decide which plans we show you.

Single-rate plans are generally available to households with all electricity meter types. They charge one flat electricity rate 24/7 and can often be the best plans for heavy users who don't have solar or a battery.

Time-of-use plans are only available to households who have a smart meter, and they charge different rates at different times of day - peak (afternoon / evening) prices are often two or three times the overnight (off-peak) price. Generally, time of use plans work out well for households that can shift load into the cheaper hours - a battery, an EV charging overnight, hot water on a timer.

If you want to take advantage of the government-mandated free electricity windows in the middle of the day, these are only offered on time-of-use plans.

Thinking of moving off a single rate plan onto time of use? There's a catch: if you go through with it, many electricity distributors will not let you move back to a single rate plan.

Because this decision can be hard to reverse, we don't quietly make it for you. You choose which kind of plan to see, or compare both. What we can't tell you is whether your own meter and distributor will allow one type or another.

If you know your usage, enter it and we'll price it exactly. If you don't, we estimate it from a short set of questions.

The starting point is the regulator's published consumption benchmarks for your area and household size - the same reference data used across the industry - adjusted for the things that genuinely move a bill: gas versus all-electric, hot water, heating and cooling, a pool, an EV. Each one also lands at the hours it typically runs, so the estimate reflects when you use electricity as well as how much.

Solar and batteries get a full simulation. We model generation and household load hour by hour through the day, using real rooftop yield data for your location, and simulate the battery charging and discharging against it - so how much you import and how much you export are worked out from how your system would actually behave.

Every plan is costed the way your retailer would bill it. We build a picture of your electricity use across a full year - how it varies by season and across the hours of the day - then charge that use against each plan's own rate structure, right down to where a plan prices weekends differently from weekdays.

This matters because two plans with similar advertised rates can differ by hundreds of dollars a year once time-of-use bands, the daily supply charge and solar export are taken into account. Every figure we show includes GST and unconditional discounts, and covers a full year so plans are directly comparable.

Where a household has controlled load - a separately metered circuit for something like off-peak hot water - we cost it properly rather than conveniently. The network decides when that circuit runs, so solar, a battery and a plan's free window can't serve it, and we charge it at the plan's controlled load rate.

Retailers also publish the same offer many times over, under different plan codes. We show one and tell you how many near-identical versions sit behind it, so the ranking isn't ten copies of one deal.

• Usage rates, including time-of-use bands and tiered (stepped) rates
• The daily supply charge
• Solar feed-in credit, including tariffs that only apply at certain times, up to a daily limit, or that pay a different rate in summer than in winter
• Free-electricity windows, where a plan gives you part of the day at no charge
• Controlled load - a second, separately metered circuit such as off-peak hot water
• Percentage discounts that apply unconditionally
• Daytime usage credits, where a plan takes a set amount off each unit you use from the grid during certain hours
• Sign-up credits
• Frequent flyer points and bundled perks - valued, shown separately, and folded into a first-year figure only if you choose to include them

Some things can't be priced twelve months ahead with any honesty. Rather than put a confident-looking number against them, we leave those plans out of the ranking. If you enter your own usage figures rather than using the estimator, the advanced settings let you bring demand and wholesale tariffs back into view - though we still can't put a reliable price on them.

• Wholesale and Virtual Power Plant (VPP) plans. Their value depends on future electricity market prices and demand events which we cannot accurately predict, so they are excluded from our results. That isn't a judgement on the plans - for a household with a large solar and battery setup they can be very good value.
• Plans that need an electric vehicle. Some retailers sell plans only to EV owners, at an overnight rate far below an ordinary off-peak one. We leave them out unless you tell us you have an EV, because otherwise we would show you a price you can't be sold. Tell us and they are included and priced at those rates. Several also require EV or smart metering, so check the retailer's own terms.
• Demand charges. These bill you on your single highest half hour of the month, and your peak is a fact about your own household that no benchmark can supply. Plans with one are hidden by default; include them and they are listed without a total, below the plans we can price.
• Conditional discounts and rates. Pricing components like pay-on-time discounts depend on conditions we can't verify. These are shown in the plan details but not used by our costing engine.
• Optional extras. GreenPower you can choose to add to a plan, and separate metering charges, aren't included in the comparison figure. A plan sold as a GreenPower plan includes its GreenPower charge in the price.

An estimate is not a quote. Here is where our figure can differ from your real bill.

• If you use our estimator: the result is a well-informed model of a household like yours - not an exact measurement. An estimated profile also uses the same daily pattern for every day of the week, so a household whose weekends look very different will be modelled a little more smoothly than it really is.
• If you enter actual usage: even if you give it to us at the most detailed level, changes in weather, occupancy and new appliances still mean next year's usage won't match last year's exactly.
• Some charges depend on which network tariff your particular meter is assigned to. That assignment isn't published to the plan register, so no comparison built on it - ours included - can be certain of it.
• If you have controlled load, we work from the standard switching hours published for your area. Your own circuit may run to slightly different times, and how much goes through it is an estimate unless you told us the figure from your bill.
• Always check the retailer's own energy fact sheet before signing up. If a price here looks wrong, please tell us.