Use your own rates, not a national average

This is the argument, run as arithmetic rather than made as a claim. Below is the same household, the same eight hot water systems, the same state — priced at three electricity rates: 22c, 33c and 45c per kilowatt hour. That span comfortably covers what Australian households actually pay, from a keen retail offer to an expensive distribution zone on a standing offer.

Change your state or your gas answer in My home and this table is rebuilt for that household. It is generated from the same model that produces every other figure on the site, so it cannot drift away from them.

Australian energy bills are not designed to make this easy. The headline is a dollar total; the rates are in a table on the second or third page, usually under a heading like Charge details, Your usage and charges or How we calculated your bill. There are four numbers worth finding, and you do not need all of them.

The usage rate — the one that matters most

Shown in cents per kilowatt hour, and labelled Usage, Consumption, General usage, Anytime or Peak depending on the retailer. This is the price of the electricity itself and it is the single number that moves most of what this site calculates. If you enter one figure, make it this one.

If you are on a time-of-use tariff you will see two or three of them — peak, shoulder and off-peak — with different rates and the hours each applies to. For a rough answer, use the peak rate. For a better one, use the rate that covers whenever the appliance in question actually runs: a hot water tank on a timer and a fridge running around the clock are not paying the same price for their electricity.

The daily supply charge

Cents per day, and charged whether you use anything or not — labelled Supply charge, Daily supply, Service to property or Fixed charge. Our fields take it in dollars per day, so a bill showing 166.2c per day is 1.66.

For electricity it does not change any comparison on this site, because you pay it no matter how you heat your water or your house. For gas it is the opposite: it is often the deciding number. If hot water is the only thing you use gas for, then dropping gas removes the supply charge as well as the fuel, and that is worth $300 to $350 a year before you have saved a cent on gas itself.

The controlled load or off-peak rate

A separate, cheaper rate for a circuit that only runs at certain hours — almost always an electric storage hot water tank, sometimes underfloor heating or a pool pump. On the bill it appears as its own line, labelled Controlled load 1 or 2, Off peak 1 or 2, Dedicated circuit, or in Queensland by its tariff number, Tariff 31 or Tariff 33.

If your bill has no such line, you are not on one, and an electric storage tank runs at the standard rate around the clock. Western Australia and the Northern Territory have no residential controlled load tariff at all, so nobody there has one.

The gas rate

Gas is billed by the megajoule, not the kilowatt hour, and typically runs 2c to 3c per MJ. Many gas bills are stepped: the first block of megajoules in the billing period is charged at one rate and everything after it at a lower one. If yours is, use the rate that applies to the block your usage actually lands in — for most households that is the first one.

GST

Residential energy bills in Australia normally quote rates including GST, which is what this site expects. If your bill shows an ex-GST figure — some do, in a summary panel — add 10% before entering it, or you will understate every gas and electricity cost on the site by that much.

Nothing here requires you to enter anything. Until you do, the site uses your state's published reference rate — the Default Market Offer set by the Australian Energy Regulator in New South Wales, south-east Queensland and South Australia, the Victorian Default Offer set by the Essential Services Commission, and the equivalent regulated or standing rate elsewhere. Every figure is dated and its source is named on the methodology page.

These are deliberately conservative choices. A reference rate is the price a retailer may charge a customer who has never shopped around, so it sits at or near the top of the market. If you have taken a market offer in the last couple of years you are almost certainly paying less than the figure this site starts with, which means the running costs it shows you are, if anything, too high.

Nothing. There is no server to send it to. Your rates and household settings are written to this browser's local storage, read back by the calculators, and that is the entire journey. There is no account to create, no email address collected, no lead passed to an installer and no quote request anywhere on this site.

The practical consequences are worth stating plainly, because they cut both ways. Your figures do not follow you to another device or another browser, and clearing your browsing data clears them. In exchange, nobody — including us — can see what you entered. Our privacy policy sets out what is and is not collected, and the disclosure page explains how the site is paid for.