Victorian electricity rates

A Victorian electricity plan charges you in two ways, and you pay both:

• A daily supply charge — a fixed amount for every day you are connected, whether you use any power or not. It is quoted in cents or dollars per day, and it is the part of the bill you cannot reduce by using less.
• A usage rate — cents for every kilowatt-hour (kWh) you use. On a single-rate plan this is one number. On a time-of-use plan it changes through the day.

Both are quoted GST-inclusive on this page, which is how they appear on your bill. The CDR feed publishes them exclusive of GST, so every figure here has been grossed up by 10%.

In every Victorian distribution zone, the plan with the lowest daily supply charge and the plan with the lowest single rate are two different plans. Each one beats the other on one of the two charges and loses on the other, so neither is simply “the cheapest plan”. The table below shows both, side by side, in every zone.

Which of them costs you less depends entirely on how much power you use. A low supply charge suits a small flat or a holiday house, because the fixed part of the bill dominates when there is little usage to spread it over. A low usage rate suits a big household, where usage dominates instead. Somewhere between the two is a crossover, and where it falls is a fact about your household rather than about the plans.

That is the whole reason Nemity asks for your meter data rather than a rate table. It applies each plan’s actual rates to your actual usage, half hour by half hour, and ranks by the total. The figures below are useful for knowing what the market looks like; they cannot tell you which plan is cheapest for you.

Compare plans on your own usage →

Every cell shows the plan’s daily supply charge and its usage rate together, because one without the other says nothing about what you would pay.

Supply charges count every kind of residential plan (1,216 plan-and-zone combinations), because every plan has one. Beside them is the plan’s usage rate, or the range of its rates when it charges more than one. Usage rates count only plans that charge one flat rate all year (393), the only kind a single figure can describe. Time-of-use, stepped, seasonal and free-window plans are left out of those, because quoting one number for them would be quoting a rate nobody is charged. Plans only some households can join are left out of both, and so are plans whose filed rate is not the price you pay — a wholesale pass-through rate, or one modelled on a particular household. All of them are in the comparison itself, priced properly against real usage.

“Middle of the market” is the middle filed rate, taken separately for each of the two charges from its own set of plans above — so it describes the market rather than any one plan. Where there is an even number of plans it is the lower of the two middle values, which keeps it a rate some plan actually charges.

Network charges — the cost of the poles, wires and substations that carry power to your address — are the largest single component of a Victorian bill. The Essential Services Commission puts them at around 38%, or $603/year, of a representative annual flat-rate household bill in its Victorian Default Offer 2026–27 decision (averaged across the five zones, at 4,000 kWh/year).

Those charges are approved per distribution zone by the Australian Energy Regulator and passed through, not set by your retailer — and they differ because the networks differ. A sparse rural network costs more per customer to run than a dense inner-city one.

So a retailer selling the same product across Victoria files a different price in each zone. Your zone depends on your address, not on who you buy from, and you cannot change it by switching retailer.

Find your distribution zone — each zone page lists the postcodes it serves and how to get your meter data from that distributor.

The Essential Services Commission sets the Victorian Default Offer each year — a capped price for customers who never choose a plan. It is a useful yardstick: most market offers are priced below it, and a plan that is not is worth a second look. Nemity prices the VDO for your own usage alongside every market offer, so you can see where it lands in your ranking.

The table above is generated from the same weekly snapshot the comparison tool runs on: the official AER Consumer Data Right (CDR) feed, the source that also powers Victorian Energy Compare. Nothing here is typed in by hand. When a retailer changes its rates, this page changes with the next refresh.

Rates change, and a retailer can re-file at any time. The figures on this page are exactly as current as the date at the top of it, and no more — the comparison itself always loads the latest plan data, so a figure there can be newer than one here. Confirm with the retailer before you switch.

How Nemity calculates cost · Time-of-use vs single rate · Electricity glossary