Am I a small business energy customer?

You are a small business energy customer if the energy your premises consumes in a year sits below the threshold your state sets, and that threshold is written in energy used rather than money spent. In most of the country it is 100 megawatt hours of electricity or 1 terajoule of gas a year, and Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania each use a different electricity figure.

It matters because the answer decides which consumer protections cover you, whether there is a cap on what your retailer can charge you on a standing offer, and whether you can take a complaint to an energy ombudsman. Retailers also answer the same question with tests of their own, and those tests do not agree with each other or with the regulator, which is where most of the confusion starts.

What is a small business energy customer?

A small business energy customer is a business that consumes energy at its premises below the upper consumption threshold set for its jurisdiction, and is therefore covered by the same retail protections as a household rather than by a negotiated commercial contract.

Two details in that sentence do the work. It is about consumption, not turnover, staff numbers or how small the business feels. And it is assessed at the premises, so the question is what a site uses, not what a company uses.

What is the small business energy threshold in my state?

Here are the figures, per jurisdiction, for the states and territories in the national market.

• New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland. Below 100 MWh of electricity a year, or below 1 TJ of gas.
• South Australia. Below 160 MWh of electricity a year, or below 1 TJ of gas.
• Tasmania. Below 150 MWh of electricity a year, or below 1 TJ of gas.
• Victoria. Not more than 40 MWh of electricity a year, or not more than 1000 GJ of gas, measured at the supply point.

The national figures come from the National Energy Retail Law and the National Energy Retail Regulations, which set 100 MWh and 1 TJ, with South Australia and Tasmania substituting their own electricity numbers through local provisions. The Australian Energy Regulator restates the full set in the glossary of its Retail Exempt Selling Guideline%20-%20August%202025.pdf) (version 7, August 2025), and the AER's consumer site puts it in plainer terms in am I a small energy customer. Victoria sits outside that national framework: its definition of a domestic or small business customer comes from the Electricity Industry Act and the Gas Industry Act, and is carried into the Essential Services Commission's Energy Retail Code of Practice.

Gas is the same everywhere in substance, because 1000 GJ is 1 TJ. Electricity is not.

Why does Victoria use a lower number than everywhere else?

Because Victoria never adopted the national retail framework and kept its own, and its own threshold was set at a lower level. A Victorian business consuming 60 MWh a year is a large customer at home and would be a small customer in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide or Hobart on the same load.

That is worth knowing if you operate across a border, because the same coffee machines and the same fridges can put two of your sites in two different regulatory classes. It also means Victorian advice about business energy protections does not transfer to New South Wales, and the reverse, which is the sort of thing generic guidance flattens.

Does the threshold apply to each site or to my whole business?

Each site, separately. The consumption thresholds apply per business premises, so a business running four small shops is assessed four times rather than once on the total.

There is one exception and it runs one way only. A retailer and a business customer can agree in writing to treat several premises as aggregated, which pushes the combined consumption against the threshold and can move the customer into the large class. A retailer cannot do that on its own initiative. If your sites have been treated as one and you never signed anything to that effect, that is worth a question, and the National Energy Retail Rules are the thing to point at when you ask it.

Why does my retailer say I am a large business when the regulator says I am small?

Because your retailer is not applying the regulatory test, and retailers do not all apply the same test as each other. The regulatory definition decides which protections cover you. A retailer's own published test decides which sales desk and which product set you land in, and there is no market wide version of it to look up.

What tests do retailers actually publish?

Several different kinds, and the differences are the point. Each of the following is quoted as that retailer's own published claim, read on their own site on 30 July 2026, and none of them is the legal definition.

• A stated dollar spend threshold. AGL: "a small to medium business is one that spends less than $30,000 (GST incl.) on electricity or $50,000 (GST incl.) on gas per year", with a large or multi site business being one that has more than 10 sites or spends above those figures (AGL, understand your bill).
• A dollar spend threshold, stated approximately. Momentum Energy: "typically an annual spend of approximately $40k or more on your power requirements would mean you are a large business" (Momentum Energy, business).
• No consumption test at all. Origin: "there're no minimum consumption criteria to be eligible for small business energy rates", with a registered business name and an ABN given as the requirements instead (Origin, business energy rates and eligibility).
• Spend bands, with a consumption figure at the top end. iO Energy publishes three tiers: small business for single site operators paying less than $20,000 a year on power, SME multi site for roughly $20,000 to $200,000 of annual spend, and large business for sites above 100 MWh a year (iO Energy, business plans).

Read those together and the shape of the problem is clear enough. One is an identity test, two are money tests set at different levels, and one runs money bands with an energy figure on the top tier. So a site can be a small business to one retailer and a large one to another on identical numbers, and a spend test moves whenever prices move, which means the same site can cross a line in a year when its consumption did not change at all.

None of that is misconduct and none of it is hidden. It is several companies segmenting their own sales operations for their own reasons, and there is no particular reason they would land on the same cut off. What it does mean is that "am I a small business customer" has two different kinds of answer, and you need to know which one you are being given. If what you are asking about is your protections, the number to check is your annual consumption, because that is the one the law is written in.

What do I get for being a small customer?

A set of retail protections that a negotiated commercial contract does not carry. The main ones, stated plainly:

• A retailer that has to offer to sell you energy. In the national framework the designated retailer for your premises must offer supply on standard retail contract terms.
• A cap on the standing offer. The AER's Default Market Offer caps standing offer electricity prices for small customers in New South Wales, south east Queensland and South Australia. Victoria has the Victorian Default Offer, set by the Essential Services Commission. Regional Queensland has notified prices set by the Queensland Competition Authority. Tasmania and the ACT have their own regulators approving or capping standing offer prices.
• Billing rules. The AER's Better Bills Guideline, which governs what a bill has to show and how clearly, applies to small customers.
• An ombudsman. Your state energy ombudsman scheme is built for small customers and costs you nothing to use.

None of that caps a market offer, and none of it means the standing offer is a good deal. A price cap is a ceiling on the default arrangement, which is a different thing from a competitive price, and most small business customers on a capped standing offer would do better on something else.

What happens if my site is above the threshold?

You become a large customer, and the retail protections above stop applying to that site. Energy is then bought on a negotiated contract, priced on your load rather than from a published plan, and often through a tender rather than a comparison.

That is a genuinely different market and we will say so rather than pretend otherwise. Above the threshold, and particularly across multiple large sites, a broker or a tender process does real work that a self serve comparison does not. How business energy brokers get paid sets out how that side of the market is structured and where the line honestly sits.

How do I work out my own annual consumption from a bill?

Take the total kilowatt hours on one bill, divide by the number of days the bill covers, and multiply by 365. That gives you an annualised figure you can hold against the threshold for your state.

Two cautions. A single bill carries its own season, so a summer bill on an air conditioned site will annualise high and a shoulder bill will annualise low. Four consecutive bills, or a year of them, is a much better estimate than one. And 100 MWh is 100,000 kWh, which is a larger site than most people picture: a small shop, cafe or office is usually nowhere near it, while a site with refrigeration, commercial kitchen equipment or workshop machinery can be closer than it looks.

For gas, your bill is likely in megajoules. A terajoule is a million megajoules, and 1000 GJ is the same quantity stated the other way.

If you would rather not do the arithmetic, the bill has everything needed on it. How to read a business electricity bill shows you where each figure sits, including the usage total and the day count.

Does my eligibility change what Fix Your Bill shows me?

No. We show every authorised retailer's published plans for your address, ranked by projected annual cost on your own usage, and an eligibility condition never moves a plan up or down that ranking.

Here is the rule in plain words, because it is a rule rather than a preference. Where a plan carries an eligibility condition, we state the condition and leave the judgment to you. We do not infer whether you qualify, we do not quietly filter a plan out because we guessed you were ineligible, and we do not promote one because we guessed you were. Inferring things about a business from thin evidence is exactly how a comparison ends up confidently wrong, and reading a business classification off an ABN is the specific version of that mistake we have already made once and fixed.

So this page is here to tell you what class you are in and what it buys you. It is not a filter on what you get shown.

Where to go next

If you now know you are a small customer, the useful next step is finding out what your own site would pay across the plans published for it. Upload your business bill and the engine reads the usage, tariff, rates and any demand line, prices the available plans against your numbers, and ranks them by projected annual cost with the workings shown. Estimates, not quotes.

If you are still working out what is on the bill, start at how to read a business electricity bill. If there is a kW or kVA line on it, demand charges explained covers what that line is doing. And business electricity plans is the head page for the whole comparison.