What if my business is above the small customer threshold?

Above the threshold your site stops buying published retail plans and starts buying a negotiated price, because at that size retailers price each site individually instead of publishing a plan it could take. Nothing has gone wrong and nothing has been withheld from you: the market above the line is a different market, and the useful thing to know is how to buy well in it.

This page is what we can honestly offer a site above the line. It has no comparison in it, because there is nothing published to compare.

Why do published plans stop at the threshold?

Because above it there is no published price to stop at. A small customer plan is an offer made to everyone at once, printed in a fact sheet and lodged where anyone can read it. A large customer price is made for one site, from that site's own consumption shape, for a term that starts on a particular date.

That is not a marketing decision. A retailer selling to a large site is buying wholesale cover for that site's specific load over that specific term, and the price of that cover moves daily. A number published in March cannot survive contact with a contract signed in August, so nobody publishes one.

Two consequences follow, and both are worth holding onto. The first is that a comparison engine has nothing to read for your site, ours included. The second is more useful: your price is made rather than found, which means it is negotiable in a way a published plan never is. A small customer takes the best published offer or leaves it. You are in the other position.

What is the small customer threshold in my state?

It is written in energy used per year, not money spent, and it is assessed at each business premises rather than across the whole company. Here are the figures for the jurisdictions in the national market.

• New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland. Small below 100 MWh of electricity a year, or below 1 TJ of gas. At or above that, large.
• South Australia. Small below 160 MWh of electricity a year, or below 1 TJ of gas.
• Tasmania. Small below 150 MWh of electricity a year, or below 1 TJ of gas.
• Victoria. Small at not more than 40 MWh of electricity a year, or not more than 1000 GJ of gas, measured at the supply point.
• Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Outside this framework, with their own definitions. We do not publish figures for them, and we would rather say that than print a number we have not verified.

Gas is the same quantity everywhere it applies, because 1000 GJ is 1 TJ. Electricity is not, and Victoria's figure is low enough that a mid sized Melbourne site can be a large customer while the same load in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide or Hobart is still a small one.

Where these figures come from. The national numbers are set by the National Energy Retail Regulations and restated by the Australian Energy Regulator in the glossary of its Retail Exempt Selling Guideline (version 7, August 2025), which also carries the South Australian figure at footnote 18 and both the Tasmanian and South Australian figures in its exemption class table. The AER's consumer site puts the same set in plainer words at am I a small energy customer. Victoria's figures come from Orders in Council under the Electricity Industry Act 2000 and the Gas Industry Act 2001, and are carried into the Essential Services Commission's Energy Retail Code of Practice (version 6, 1 July 2026). Every source above was read on 3 August 2026, and every figure on this page came from one of them rather than from memory.

How do I know which side of the line my site is on?

Take the total kilowatt hours on one bill, divide by the days the bill covers, and multiply by 365. Hold that against the figure for your state.

One bill carries its own season, so a summer bill on a refrigerated site annualises high and a shoulder bill annualises low. Four consecutive bills is a far better estimate than one, and if the number lands within about ten per cent of the threshold either way, treat it as unsettled and check the year properly rather than assuming.

If you want the full version of the classification question, including why your retailer's own definition of a small business may disagree with the regulator's, that is am I a small business energy customer. If it is the bill itself that is the puzzle, how to read a business electricity bill shows you where the usage total and the day count sit.

How do businesses above the threshold actually buy energy?

Three routes, and most businesses of this size use one of them. None is the right answer for everybody.

A tender, run by you or by a broker or consultant. You specify the load, the sites and the terms, ask several retailers to price it by a date, and compare what comes back. This is how large sites are meant to buy, because it is the only way to know what the market thinks your load is worth on the day. Running one properly means defining the load precisely enough that the responses are comparable, which is the part most businesses hire out. How that side of the market is paid, and what a panel is, is set out in how business energy brokers get paid.

Direct negotiation with retailers. You can ring the business desks yourself and ask for a price. It is more work than it sounds and less work than people fear, and it is entirely ordinary: retailers quote large sites every day. The trap is taking one quote and having nothing to hold it against, because a single quoted number tells you almost nothing on its own. Two or three make each of them readable.

Aggregation or a buying group. Several businesses, often through an industry association, a franchise network or a group of related sites, take a combined load to market together. The leverage is real, because a bigger and better shaped load is worth more to a retailer than the same energy split into pieces. The thing to check is what you give up: how long you are committed, whether you can leave, who negotiates on your behalf and how that person is paid.

Multi site businesses sit across all three. A portfolio spread over several networks and possibly several states is not one comparison problem, it is an aggregation problem, and the answer is often a single contract covering all of it.

What is actually inside a large customer's price?

Five things, whether or not you are shown five numbers. Knowing the parts is what makes a quote readable, and it is the difference between negotiating and nodding.

• Wholesale energy. The cost of the electricity itself, bought through the National Electricity Market, where the spot price settles every five minutes. Your quote does not contain today's spot price; it contains a retailer's view of what your load will cost across your term, plus the cost of hedging that view. This is the part that moves most, and the part that makes a quote expire.
• Network. Poles, wires and the transmission behind them, charged under your distributor's published tariff schedule and approved by the regulator rather than set by the retailer. For a site this size the network component usually includes a demand charge measured in kW or kVA as well as a usage charge, which is why the shape of your load can cost you more than the amount of it. Demand charges explained covers that line in full.
• Environmental. The cost of the schemes a retailer must comply with on your behalf, chiefly the federal Renewable Energy Target and the state energy efficiency schemes that apply where you are. These are obligations with a market price, so they are a cost rather than a levy the retailer chose.
• Metering. A large site is read remotely by an interval meter, and metering services are usually a separate charge from a separate provider. It is the smallest of the five and the one most often left out of a spoken comparison.
• Retail margin. What is left after the four above. Nobody publishes it, everybody has one, and there is nothing improper about that. It is simply the part of your price that is decided rather than incurred.

Here is the single most useful question that falls out of that list. Ask whether the quote is bundled or pass through. A bundled quote folds all five into one rate, which is simple to read and impossible to decompose. A pass through quote charges network, environmental and metering costs at cost and names the retailer's own component separately. Neither is a trick and both are common. But you cannot compare a bundled rate against a pass through rate as if they were the same kind of number, and a quote that will not tell you which one it is has answered a different question from the one you asked.

We are not going to hand you a calculator for this. Decomposing a real quote properly needs your own network tariff and your own interval data, and a calculator built on anything less would produce a confident number that is wrong, which is the specific failure this whole product exists to avoid.

What should I ask before I sign?

Seven questions, all with straight answers. These are the above the line versions; if a broker is involved, ask these as well as the payment questions on the brokers page rather than instead of them.

1. Is this bundled or pass through, and which costs sit where? The first thing to establish, because it decides whether the rest of the numbers mean anything.
2. How many retailers were approached, and may I see every response? Not the winner. All of them, including the ones that declined to quote, because a thin field is worth knowing about.
3. What load and what shape was this priced on? A quote is built from an assumed consumption profile. If that assumption is wrong, the price is wrong, and the correction usually arrives later as a charge rather than a discount.
4. What is the term, and what does the price do inside it? Fixed for the whole term, fixed with pass through elements moving underneath, or partly floating. All three exist and they are not comparable.
5. What happens at the end of the term if I do nothing? Rolling onto a default arrangement at expiry is one of the more expensive things that happens to a business energy account, and it happens by inaction.
6. What does it cost me to leave early, and is there a termination charge tied to market movement? Above the threshold this is often more than a flat fee, because the retailer has bought cover for your load.
7. Who holds the relationship at renewal, and who gets told first when the term ends? Whoever finds out first has the advantage next time. It should be you.

A reluctance to answer any of the seven is itself an answer, and none of them is an unusual thing to be asked. People who sell energy to large sites are asked these every week.

Can Fix Your Bill help me above the threshold?

Not with a comparison, and we would rather say so plainly than dress up something that cannot work. We build our comparison from published plans, and above the threshold there are none to build from. Anyone who offers you a ranked list for a large site is either quietly using small customer plans your site cannot buy, or showing you a panel and calling it a market.

What we can do is two honest things. If some of your sites sit below the line, those sites still have published plans and we price them the same way we price anything else: upload a bill for one of them and the engine reads the usage, the tariff and any demand line, and ranks the available plans by projected annual cost on your own numbers. And if you are not sure which side of the line you are on, the arithmetic above settles it in a minute. Business electricity plans is the head page for the rest of it.

The rest of this page is the part we can do today: telling you how the market above the line works, and what to ask, so that nobody gets to snow you in it. We would like to do more here, and there is real work we could do, starting with reading a quote against your own network tariff and showing you the decomposition. It is on the list and it is not in the product, and when it is, we will say so here.