Business electricity plans in NSW, compared on your actual bill

Upload a recent NSW business electricity bill and we read the usage, tariff structure and rates printed on it, then price the published plans available at your site against those numbers and rank them by projected annual cost. No phone call, no callback, no panel.

What follows is the part that is specific to New South Wales. Everything about how a business bill differs from a household one holds wherever you trade, and it is on business electricity plans.

Who sets the default electricity price for a NSW small business?

The Australian Energy Regulator, through the Default Market Offer. The DMO is an annual price cap on standing offers, and it covers residential and small business customers in New South Wales, South East Queensland and South Australia. A new determination takes effect each 1 July and runs to 30 June.

Two things follow from that, and they are the reason the DMO matters to you without being your price. It caps standing offers only, so if you have ever actively chosen a plan you are on a market offer and the cap does not apply to you. And it is a cap rather than a target, which means competitive market offers commonly sit below it. The DMO's real use to a NSW business is as a reference point: a price at or near it is a price nobody has shopped.

A standing offer is the default contract a retailer must make available to any eligible customer, priced against the regulated benchmark, and it is almost always the most expensive way to buy electricity.

Which electricity network is my NSW business behind?

One of three, and it is set by your address rather than by your retailer. Ausgrid covers inner, northern and eastern metropolitan Sydney and surrounds. Endeavour Energy covers southern and western metropolitan Sydney and surrounds, including the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra. Essential Energy covers country and regional New South Wales.

Which one you sit behind matters more than most businesses realise, because the network sets the tariff assigned to your site, and the tariff decides whether you are charged for demand, what your time-of-use windows are, and how your supply charge is structured. Two shops on the same retailer's plan, one in Parramatta and one in Dubbo, are on different network tariffs and can face genuinely different bills on identical usage.

Your bill names your distributor, usually near the top or beside the tariff code.

Am I a small business electricity customer in NSW?

In New South Wales the line sits at 100 megawatt hours a year, which is 100,000 kilowatt hours. Below it your site buys published retail plans and keeps the small customer protections written into energy retail law. Above it your site is a large customer, buys on a negotiated contract, and loses access to published pricing.

Worth knowing that the threshold is not uniform across the country. Victoria draws the same line at 40 megawatt hours, so a business with sites in both states can be a small customer in one and not the other on identical consumption. Fix Your Bill is built for sites under the threshold, which is the large majority of them.

Do NSW business plans use time-of-use windows?

Many do. The DMO sets regulated tariffs for small business customers on flat rate and on time-of-use structures, so both shapes exist in the NSW market as standing offers and far more variations exist as market offers.

The windows themselves are not set by your retailer. They come from the network tariff your site sits on, they differ between the three NSW distributors, and they differ between tariff codes within one distributor. That is why the hours are not listed here: the tariff code on your own bill answers it in one line, and a list long enough to be correct would be too long to find yourself in. What the windows do to your annual total, with the arithmetic worked, is at how business time-of-use windows change your annual cost.

Is there a NSW concession or rebate for business electricity?

Not a concession, no. State energy concessions and rebates in New South Wales are household measures, tied to concession cards and domestic supply, and they do not extend to a business account.

What does exist for businesses is different in kind: the NSW Energy Savings Scheme provides incentives for upgrading equipment and appliances to reduce electricity consumption. That is a scheme about the equipment you run rather than the price you pay for electricity, so it sits alongside a plan comparison rather than replacing one. Both are worth doing and neither substitutes for the other.

What is the same wherever your business is?

Most of it. Business plans are published as separate products from household ones, business sites are more often placed on a tariff that charges for demand as well as usage, and business rates are usually quoted without GST. None of that changes at a state border.

The full treatment is on business electricity plans. If the bill in front of you is the puzzle, how to read a business electricity bill walks it line by line. If there is a line priced in kW or kVA, demand charges explained is the page for it.

Start with the bill

Upload your NSW business electricity bill and the engine prices the published plans available at your site against your own usage, tariff and demand, and ranks them by projected annual cost with the workings shown. Estimates, not quotes.