Why Energy Comparison Sites Don't Know Your Real Usage (And We Do)

Energy comparison sites in Australia are not inaccurate because they're dishonest. They're inaccurate because of a structural limitation they've never had a reason to fix: they don't know how much electricity your household actually uses.

CHOICE examined the major Australian energy comparison sites and identified the core issue: the main problem with commercial comparison sites is that they're not searching all the available deals on the market. But there's a second, deeper problem they didn't focus on. Even when a comparison site has access to all available plans, the comparison it runs may bear little relation to what your household would actually pay on each plan.

We tracked what has and hasn't shifted in the years since that investigation in energy comparison sites in Australia: the 2026 picture.

Here's why. And here's what we do differently.

The Usage Assumption Problem

Every Australian energy comparison site, every one of them, runs their comparison against a usage assumption. Either an assumption you provide (by typing your average quarterly kWh, which most people don't know) or an assumption the site provides (a national or regional average).

The most common default figure applied by Australian comparison tools is approximately 3,900 kWh per year for a single-rate residential customer. Some tools use state-specific averages. None of them use your household's actual consumption.

Why does this matter? Because the cheapest plan for a 3,900 kWh household is often not the cheapest plan for a 7,500 kWh household. Tariff structures interact with usage volume. Some plans have competitive usage rates but high supply charges, so they're better for high-usage households where the usage savings outweigh the supply cost. Some plans have the lowest supply charges but moderate usage rates, so they're better for low-usage households.

A comparison run with the wrong usage assumption can recommend the wrong plan. Not maliciously. Just structurally incorrectly. Three cases where that happens, worked through end to end, are in postcode vs bill.

The Tariff Structure Problem

Most comparison tools apply a single average annual consumption figure to their comparison and calculate an estimated annual cost for each plan. This works reasonably well for households on simple flat-rate tariffs.

It doesn't work well for:

Time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. If you're on a TOU plan with peak, shoulder, and off-peak pricing, the correct comparison requires knowing how your consumption is distributed across those time bands. A household that runs most of its load in off-peak periods (overnight) has a fundamentally different cost profile than a household running heavy loads in peak periods (5–9pm weekdays). A comparison tool that doesn't know your TOU split cannot correctly calculate your current plan cost or the cost of alternative TOU plans.

Demand tariffs. Some plans charge based on your peak demand (maximum kW drawn at any moment) rather than or in addition to consumption (kWh used over time). Standard comparison tools almost never handle demand tariffs correctly. If these structures are unfamiliar, electricity tariffs explained covers each one in plain language.

Solar feed-in tariffs. A solar household's net electricity cost depends on both import rate and export credit. A comparison that optimises import rate without accounting for export credit, or that optimises FiT rate without accounting for import rate, is incomplete.

The Plan Access Problem

CHOICE's criticism, that comparison sites don't show all available plans, is real and worth understanding.

Commercial comparison sites earn commission when you switch through their platform. They only list plans from retailers who are in their commercial network. A retailer who hasn't signed up with a particular comparison site, or whose commission rates don't make participation attractive, may not appear in the results.

This means the "cheapest plan" shown by a commercial comparison site is the cheapest plan among participating retailers, not the cheapest plan in the market.

We use retailers' published plan data, the Product Reference Data they lodge under the Consumer Data Right (CDR). It is the same public data that powers Energy Made Easy, the government's non-commercial comparison service, in the jurisdictions Energy Made Easy covers. Victoria is not one of them and runs Victorian Energy Compare instead, though Victorian retailers publish to the CDR the same way. The CDR requires energy retailers above the small-customer threshold to publish their current plan data in a standardised format. That gives us published plans from across the market rather than only from commercial partners. We read the public plan data only and we are not an accredited data recipient.

Our intended commercial model is a fee from a retailer on a switch, and it would only ever capture switches where that retailer has an arrangement with us. Every retailer that has one is named, with the date it started, on arrangements, and that is the current list, always. Either way our comparison is run against the full published plan set in the CDR. If the cheapest plan is from a retailer who pays us nothing, we show it anyway. We'd rather show you the real answer and build your trust than hide a better option to protect a fee.

The Seasonal Problem

One more limitation that's almost never discussed.

Standard comparison tools produce an annual cost estimate. They arrive at that estimate by applying your (or their assumed) usage figure to each plan's rate schedule. The estimate doesn't account for the fact that your electricity consumption varies across the year and that this variation interacts differently with different tariff structures.

A household that consumes heavily in summer (air conditioning) and lightly in winter finds that some plan structures are more expensive in summer and cheaper in winter, and vice versa. The flat annualised comparison misses this interaction.

Our seasonal extrapolation adjusts for this. When you upload a summer bill, we don't just multiply by four. We estimate your seasonal curve based on the billing period and the season, and apply it to the comparison. This produces a more accurate annual cost estimate and a more reliable saving projection.

What that accuracy rests on, and where it stops, is set out in how accurate is an electricity comparison.

What We Read Off Your Bill

When you upload your bill to Fix Your Bill, we extract:

• Your actual usage for the billing period, not an estimate
• Your tariff structure, whether flat rate, TOU or demand
• Your current rates, the specific cents-per-kWh and cents-per-day you're currently paying
• Your solar export volumes and FiT rate (if applicable)
• Your billing period, so we know the seasonal position of the bill

That is the difference between a comparison run with real data and a comparison run with assumptions. It rests on three things: we read your actual bill, we show every retailer publishing plans in your state, always, and we compute your saving against what you actually pay, with any feed-in credit netted honestly.

We tested the market with one real household bill. Several major comparators produced materially wrong annual figures, and none asked what the household currently pays, which is the number every saving claim has to be measured against.

The result is a saving figure grounded in your actual situation (your usage, your tariff structure, your current rates, adjusted for the season) rather than an approximation built on national averages.

When to Use Us vs Energy Made Easy

Energy Made Easy is the government's non-commercial comparison service, covering the national electricity market apart from Victoria, which has Victorian Energy Compare. It uses the same published plan data we use. It doesn't earn commission. It also doesn't read your bill. It requires you to enter your usage manually or link your smart meter (available in some states).

If you have your smart meter data handy and you want a commission-free comparison experience, Energy Made Easy is a legitimate option. We have no commercial reason to talk it down.

If you have a bill in front of you and you'd rather not key your usage in by hand, upload it and we read the rates and usage straight off the document and compare from there. How Fix Your Bill works walks through the whole process, start to finish.

Use whichever suits the data you have to hand. The thing worth checking of any comparison, ours included, is whether it asked what you currently pay. A saving figure that isn't measured against your present bill is an estimate about a household, not a number about yours.

Fix Your Bill compares retailers' published plan data (CDR Product Reference Data). We are not an accredited data recipient. We earn a fee on switches made through our platform where we have an arrangement with the retailer; it is not an input to the ranking and the ranking code never sees it. Our comparison is run against the full published plan set regardless of commercial relationships. Every result states what its baseline is built from.