Bill Checker

Methodology

Bill Checker uses published regulator data and shows its age and limitations. This page sets out which figures come from where, how the comparison is worked out, and where it is weakest.

Electricity use: the comparison we trust

Household usage benchmarks come from Residential energy consumption benchmarks, prepared by Frontier Economics, for the Australian Energy Regulator and published on 9 December 2020. This was the final national set produced under the former electricity-consumption benchmark program.

The data gives a figure in kilowatt hours for every combination of state, climate zone, household size from one to five-or-more, and season. We look up the figure that matches you and compare it with what you used.

In August 2023, the Australian Energy Market Commission removed the AER's obligation to develop and update the benchmarks. The Better Bills Guideline also stopped requiring retailers to put them on bills from 30 September 2023. No newer national set was published, so these figures are official but dated: they describe the 2020 study, not household use in 2026. Where the source repeats the same figure across several household sizes, that is in the original data and reflects a sample too small to separate those groups, not an error in transcription.

How the seasonal weighting works

The source publishes one figure per season, and a season is a quarter. Real bills rarely line up with a quarter, so we convert each seasonal figure to a daily rate, count how many days of your bill fell in each season, and add them up. A bill running from 15 May to 14 August gets 17 days of the autumn benchmark and 75 days of the winter one.

This matters more than it sounds. In Melbourne, the winter benchmark is about a third higher than the summer one. Comparing a winter bill against an annual average would put an ordinary household well above the line for no reason at all.

Why we do not quote percentiles

You will not see "you are in the 82nd percentile" anywhere on this site. The benchmark data supports a comparison against the average for a similar household, which is enough to say you used 28% more or less than the benchmark. It does not contain the distribution you would need to place you against every other household, and we are not going to imply a precision we do not have.

Matching your postcode to an area

The benchmark areas are the Australian Building Codes Board climate zones, plus ten localised zones in South Australia that the state government asked for. The original study matched survey respondents to a zone through postcode, then local government area, then zone, using census dwelling counts to settle postcodes that straddled a boundary.

The AER's Simple electricity and gas benchmarks — postcode mapping workbook includes the postcode correspondence used here. We transcribe its June 2021 "Postcode mapping" sheet directly instead of inferring zones from broad postcode ranges. The sheet gives 316 South Australian postcodes a localised SA zone. For the 24 SA postcodes listed only in the climate-zone columns, we use that published climate-zone match.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory are outside the study altogether. Rather than hand someone in Perth a benchmark built from Adelaide households, we say we do not have the data.

Dollar estimates: the weaker half

Where we show an estimated cost, it is built from a regulated safety-net price: the Default Market Offer set by the Australian Energy Regulator for New South Wales, South-East Queensland and South Australia, and the Victorian Default Offer set by the Essential Services Commission for Victoria.

Each regulator publishes an annual price against an assumed annual consumption. We divide one by the other to get a reference rate per kilowatt hour.

The regulators set these prices by electricity distribution network, while the usage benchmarks divide the country into climate zones. Those boundaries do not match. For New South Wales, we use a combined Ausgrid and Endeavour figure for the warm and mild temperate zones and the Essential Energy figure for the other zones. In Queensland, we only show the Energex figure for the South-East Queensland part of the climate zone that contains Brisbane. We switch it off for the clearly regional postcodes in that zone. Postcodes and network boundaries can still overlap near an edge, so your bill's named distributor is more reliable than our postcode estimate.

Reference prices in use, and the rate derived from each
Area Reference rateWorked out from
Sydney, the Illawarra, the Central Coast and the Hunter 48.0cAusgrid ($1,899 over 3,900 kWh) and Endeavour ($2,328 over 4,900 kWh) combined. Those two networks cover the corridor between Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong.
regional New South Wales 56.6cEssential Energy flat rate: $2,604 over 4,600 kWh.
South-East Queensland (Energex) 43.2cEnergex flat rate: $1,988 over 4,600 kWh.
South Australia (SA Power Networks) 58.4cSA Power Networks flat rate: $2,334 over 4,000 kWh.
Victoria 39.8cAverage residential price across the five Victorian networks: $1,591 over 4,000 kWh.

What that rate is not

It is not the price you pay. Dividing an annual price by an annual usage folds the fixed daily supply charge into the per-kilowatt-hour figure, which is only right for a household using about that much. Use much more or much less and the rate is off.

It is also a safety-net price rather than a typical market offer. A plan may cost more or less, so a real bill can sit on either side of our estimate without showing unusual electricity use.

This is why the usage comparison leads every result and the dollar figure follows it. If you can find a kWh figure on your bill, the comparison stops being an estimate.

Why two houses in one street pay different amounts

Retail electricity prices vary with the retailer, the particular plan, the distribution network, whether the tariff is flat or time-of-use, whether there is a controlled load for hot water, whether there are solar panels exporting to the grid, and whatever discount was in place when the contract was signed. Two identical houses side by side, using identical amounts of electricity, can receive different bills.

Any site that tells you the average bill for a postcode without saying this is telling you something close to meaningless.

When we switch the dollar estimate off

Regulated prices apply for a fixed period, normally one financial year. Once ours passes its end date we stop quoting dollars rather than serve a rate we know is stale. The usage comparison keeps working. The ACT and Tasmania set prices through different bodies that we do not yet track, so results there show usage only.

What we do not do

Bill Checker does not compare retailers, rank plans, or recommend switching. We have no commercial relationship with any electricity retailer and nobody pays us to show you a particular result. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on the page where it applies.

For plan comparison, the regulator runs a free and independent service at Energy Made Easy, and Victoria runs Victorian Energy Compare. Both are government services with no commission in the loop.

Sources