Business electricity plans, compared on your actual bill

Upload a recent business electricity bill and we read the usage, tariff structure and rates printed on it, then project the published plans available at your site onto those numbers and rank them by what you would pay across a year. You get a projected annual cost for each plan, on your own consumption, without a phone call, a callback, or a salesperson standing between you and the figure.

That is the whole offer, and it takes about a minute. Upload your bill and read the list. The rest of this page covers what changes when the bill is a business bill rather than a household one, because a fair amount does.

How much should a small business be paying for electricity?

There is no national figure worth quoting, and any site that gives you one is quoting an average of businesses that are not yours. A café behind one distribution network on a demand tariff and an office behind another on a flat rate can burn identical kilowatt hours in a year and pay very different amounts for them, because the tariff structure and the network are doing as much work as the consumption is.

Four things set what you pay: how much you use, when in the day you use it, which network your site sits behind, and how long ago somebody last looked at your plan. The last one is usually the expensive one. A plan signed three years ago and never revisited is not a plan any more, it is a habit.

So the only number that answers the question for your business is your own projected annual cost, on your own usage, across the plans you can actually buy at your address. That is the number the engine returns, and it shows the arithmetic that produced it.

A small customer threshold is the annual consumption limit set in energy retail law, below which a site buys published retail plans and above which it is treated as a large customer and buys on a negotiated contract instead. Most small businesses sit well under it. Your retailer's terms state which side of it your site falls on, and the limit itself is published by the regulator for your jurisdiction. Fix Your Bill is built for the sites under that threshold, which is the large majority of them.

What is the difference between a business electricity plan and a residential one?

Three real differences. Business plans are published as separate products with their own rates and their own terms, so a retailer's household pricing tells you nothing useful about what it will charge your shop. Business sites are more often placed on a network tariff that charges for demand as well as for usage, which is the difference that catches people out. And business rates are usually quoted without GST, because a registered business claims the GST back, so a business rate and a household rate are not directly comparable numbers even when they look like they are.

Two terms you will meet on every quote. A standing offer is the default contract a retailer must make available to any eligible customer, with prices set against a regulated benchmark, and it is almost always the most expensive way to buy electricity. A market offer is any other contract the retailer publishes, priced how it likes, and it is where the competitive rates live.

The other difference is protections. Consumer safeguards in energy retail law are written around small customers, and a site that grows past the small customer threshold loses some of them along with its access to published plans. Worth knowing before a site expands, rather than after.

How do I compare business electricity plans without a broker calling me?

Upload the bill and read the ranked list. There is no form asking for your best contact time, because there is nobody who needs to ring you.

The reason so much business energy comparison starts with a phone call is structural rather than sinister. When the business model is a commission paid on a signed contract, a phone call is the most reliable way to get one signed, so the call is the product and the comparison is the thing that gets you onto the call. Nothing about that is hidden. It is simply a different machine from this one, and it produces a different output: an offer somebody selected for you, at a time that suited them. How business energy brokers get paid sets out the mechanics properly.

What we return instead is the projected annual cost of each plan on your numbers, cheapest first, with the workings visible. If your current plan wins, the list says so and you close the tab.

Which retailers offer business electricity plans in my state?

More than the ones that advertise at you. What we compare is the business plans available at your site: the published plans of the retailers authorised to sell in your state, whether or not we have any commercial relationship with them.

We build the comparison from the Australian Government's Consumer Data Right register, the same source that powers Energy Made Easy, and we harvest retailers' published plan data straight from it. That matters because the alternative is a panel: a list of retailers that have an arrangement with the site showing it to you. A panel can be perfectly honest about being a panel and still cannot tell you what the cheapest available plan is, because the plans it cannot sell you are not in the comparison. Ours are, including the ones we earn nothing from.

What is on a business electricity bill that is not on a home bill?

Usually a demand or capacity line, network charges itemised rather than bundled, and rates stated without GST. Sometimes a metering or data charge, and on larger sites a power factor line.

The terms, one sentence each:

• A supply charge on a business bill is the fixed daily amount, in cents per day, that you pay for the connection whether or not you trade that day.
• A network charge is the portion of your bill that pays the distributor for the poles, wires and metering that deliver the electricity, set by a tariff the network assigns to your site rather than by your retailer.
• A time-of-use band is a defined window of the day, such as peak, shoulder or off-peak, within which a single usage rate applies.

The full walk through a business bill, line by line, is in how to read a business electricity bill. If you are unsure which tariff structure you are on, electricity tariffs explained covers all of them.

What are demand charges and do they apply to my business?

A demand charge is a charge for your highest rate of electricity use during a defined window, billed per kilowatt of that peak rather than per kilowatt hour consumed. A capacity charge is a related but different thing: a fixed charge for the capacity your connection is contracted to be able to deliver, whether or not you ever draw it.

Whether they apply to you is not a choice your retailer made. It is set by the network tariff assigned to your site, which usually follows from your connection size and your metering. Look for a line on your bill priced in kW or kVA rather than kWh. If there is one, you are paying for demand, and a plan comparison that ignores it is not comparing your bill.

Ours does not ignore it. Where a plan publishes a demand rate we price it against the kW your bill states, and where a plan's demand window differs from the one your current plan measured, we say the figure is an approximation rather than presenting it as exact. Where a demand plan cannot be priced from what your bill prints, it is flagged as incomplete and ranked below the plans that can be priced, because a plan nobody can price is a plan nobody can compare.

Demand charges explained is the full treatment, including how to reduce one.

Do I need a broker to get a business energy deal?

For a single site under the small customer threshold, no. Everything you would be brokered towards is published, and the arithmetic that picks between the published plans is arithmetic you can have for free in a minute.

For a genuinely large customer, sometimes yes, and pretending otherwise would be silly. Multi-site portfolios, sites above the threshold buying on negotiated contracts, and anything at commercial and industrial scale are bought through a tender or a broker for real reasons, and that is work this site does not do. How business energy brokers get paid is honest about where that line sits.

What about business gas?

Not yet, and here is the straight version. Business gas comparison is coming, it is not live today, and there is no business gas page on this site pretending otherwise.

It is worth saying who it is for when it arrives, because it is not an afterthought. If you run a commercial kitchen, a bakery, a pub or a laundry, gas is often the larger of your two energy bills and the one nobody has ever compared for you, because that market is reached by people ringing you rather than by you searching. Dual fuel is the normal shape of a hospitality site, and a comparison that only looks at the electricity is answering half the question. When business gas is ready it will be on the same basis as the electricity: your own bill, your own usage, the published contracts.

In the meantime, uploading the electricity bill is not wasted. It is the larger fixable number on plenty of sites, and it is available now.

How does Fix Your Bill make money if the comparison is free?

Where we have a direct arrangement with a retailer and you switch to it through us, that retailer pays us a fee. That fee is not an input to the ranking, cannot move a plan up or down the list, and where we have no arrangement we earn nothing from your switch and show the plan anyway.

The full version, including what happens if you take our answer and sign up direct, is on how we make money. It has its own page because how a comparison site gets paid is the thing that determines whether you can trust what it shows you.

Start with the bill

Upload your business electricity bill and the engine reads the usage, the tariff, the rates and the demand line, prices the published plans for your site against them, and ranks by projected annual cost with the workings shown. Estimates, not quotes.

Next, depending on what you are holding: how to read a business electricity bill if the bill itself is the puzzle, demand charges explained if there is a kW line on it, or how business energy brokers get paid if somebody has already rung you.