How do business energy brokers get paid?

Business energy brokers are paid by the retailer you sign with, not by you. The payment usually takes one of three shapes: an upfront commission when the contract is signed, an ongoing commission tied to how much electricity you consume across the term, or a margin built into the rate you are quoted.

None of that is hidden and none of it is illegitimate. It is a business model, and like every business model it has consequences you should be able to see before you sign, which is what this page is for.

How do business energy brokers get paid?

Three mechanisms, and a broker may use more than one on the same contract.

Upfront commission. The retailer pays a fee when the contract is signed, usually scaled to the site's consumption and the length of the term. This is why a longer contract is often pushed harder than a shorter one: it is worth more at signing.

Ongoing or trail commission. The retailer pays a continuing amount, typically calculated on your consumption over the life of the contract. It is the reason a broker may stay in touch about your renewal, and also the reason a high consumption site attracts more attention than a small one.

Margin uplift. The broker's fee is added to the retailer's rate and appears inside the price you are quoted, rather than as a separate line. From the outside this is indistinguishable from the retailer's own pricing, because it is quoted as one number.

There is also a fourth model, less common in the small business market: a fee you pay directly for advice, with no retailer commission. It is the only one of the four where the person advising you has no financial interest in which retailer you choose, and it is worth asking whether you are in it.

The thing to take from that list is not that brokers are paid. Everyone is paid. It is that the payment comes from the retailer in three of the four cases, which means the cost of the brokerage is recovered from you in the rates whether or not you ever see a line for it. Brokerage described as free is brokerage whose price is somewhere else on the page.

Does a broker compare the whole market or a panel?

Usually a panel, which is a defined set of retailers the broker has commercial arrangements with, rather than every retailer authorised to sell to your site.

A panel is a perfectly ordinary commercial arrangement and it is not evidence of bad faith. It is also a hard limit on what a comparison can tell you. The plans a broker cannot sell you are not in its comparison, so the cheapest option on a panel is the cheapest option on that panel, which is a different claim from the cheapest option available to your site. The two coincide only when the panel happens to contain the market.

The distinction is easy to test. Ask how many retailers are on the panel, ask whether that is all the retailers authorised to sell in your state, and ask what happens if the best plan for your site is with a retailer that is not on it. The answers are usually given straight, because there is no reason not to.

What does "we don't represent every retailer" mean on a comparison site?

It means exactly what it says: the site is showing you a subset of the market, and the subset is defined by who it has arrangements with rather than by who is cheapest for you. It is standard wording, it is often in the footer, and it is the single most useful sentence on the page.

Read alongside it any statement that commercial relationships may affect which retailers or plans are made available. Where that appears, the site has told you that its own commercial arrangements are an input to what you see. That is a disclosure doing its job, and the only mistake is not reading it.

Our version of that disclosure runs the other way, and it is on how we make money rather than in a footer. Some retailers pay us a fee when a customer switches to them through us. It is not an input to the ranking, it cannot move a plan up or down the list, and we show the plans we earn nothing from alongside the ones we do, because we build the comparison from the Consumer Data Right register rather than from a panel. If that claim matters to you, are energy comparison sites accurate is the longer version, including where comparison sites in this market have gone wrong.

Do I have to take a phone call to get a business energy price?

Not with us, and often yes with a brokered process, because the call is usually where the model works rather than an inconvenience along the way.

The typical brokered flow asks for your contact details and a good time, invites you to send a bill so somebody can look at it before ringing, then presents the comparison and signs the contract on the call itself. It is efficient at what it is for. It is also a process in which the comparison is spoken rather than published, which makes it hard to sit with, hard to check, and hard to take to a business partner before deciding.

The alternative is arithmetic you can read. Upload a business bill and you get the projected annual cost of each published plan for your site, on your own usage, on a screen, with the workings shown. Nobody rings you. If your current plan is already the best of them, the list says so and you have lost a minute.

When is a broker genuinely the right choice?

For some businesses, yes, and pretending otherwise would be daft. Three cases in particular.

Sites above the small customer threshold. Once a site's consumption passes the limit set in energy retail law, it stops buying published retail plans and starts buying on negotiated contracts. There is no published price to compare because the price is made for the site, and negotiating it is genuine work that a broker does and a comparison engine does not.

Multi-site portfolios. A business with sites across several networks, and possibly several states, is not solving one comparison problem. It is solving an aggregation problem, where the leverage comes from taking the whole portfolio to market at once and the answer may be a single contract covering all of it.

Commercial and industrial scale, and anything with a load profile worth engineering. Sites where demand management, capacity contracting, embedded generation or a hedging strategy are genuinely on the table need advice, not a ranked list. That is a different service from this one.

Fix Your Bill is built for small customers on published plans, which is most businesses but not all of them. If you are in one of the three cases above, a good broker or an energy consultant is doing work worth paying for, and the only advice this page has is to be clear which of the four payment models yours is using.

What is a commercial energy tender and when does a business need one?

A tender is a process where a business asks multiple retailers to price a defined load, on defined terms, by a defined date, and compares the responses. It is how large customers buy energy, because their price does not exist until somebody quotes it.

A business needs one when its consumption is large enough that retailers will price it individually, when it has several sites worth bundling, or when it wants terms that published plans do not offer, such as a fixed term at a fixed rate across a portfolio, or contracted capacity. Running one properly means specifying the load and the terms precisely enough that the responses are comparable, which is the part most businesses hire out.

A small single site does not need one, and would struggle to get responses if it ran one. Its price is already published, and the work is choosing between the published options rather than soliciting new ones.

What should I ask a broker before I sign?

Seven questions. All of them have straight answers, and a reluctance to give one is itself the answer.

1. How are you paid on this contract, and by whom? Upfront, ongoing, margin in the rate, or a fee from me.
2. Is your fee inside the rate you have quoted me? If yes, ask what the rate would be without it.
3. How many retailers are on your panel, and how many are authorised to sell to my site? The gap between the two numbers is the part of the market you are not being shown.
4. What is the total projected annual cost, not the rate? A sharp usage rate on a high supply charge, or on a plan that ignores your demand line, is not a cheap plan. Rates are not comparable; annual costs are.
5. Does this quote price my demand charge, and on which tariff? If your site has a kW or kVA line and the quote does not address it, the quote is incomplete. See demand charges explained.
6. What is the term, and what does it cost me to leave early? Exit fees, and whether the rate is fixed for the term or variable within it.
7. What happens at the end of the term if I do nothing? Rolling onto a default rate at the end of a term is one of the more expensive things that can happen to a business energy account, and it happens by inaction.

Ask the same seven of us, and the answers are: retailers pay us a fee where we have an arrangement and you switch, it is not in any rate, we compare the published plans available to your site rather than a panel, we rank on projected annual cost rather than on rates, we price demand where the plan publishes it and flag the plans we cannot fully price, and we do not put you on a contract at all, because you sign with the retailer directly.

Compare it yourself first

Even if you end up using a broker, knowing what the published plans would cost your site is a better starting position than not knowing. It takes about a minute.

Upload your business bill and the engine projects the published plans for your address onto your own usage and ranks them by annual cost. The full picture of what changes on a business bill is at business electricity plans, and if the bill itself is the puzzle, start with how to read a business electricity bill.