What NBN providers pay for wholesale vs what you pay

Here's something unusual in the world of household bills: for your NBN plan, the wholesale cost underneath the retail price is public. Not leaked, not estimated, published. NBN Co sells the same regulated wholesale product to every provider, the price list sits on its website, and the framework it's set under is approved by the ACCC. Which means you can do something you can almost never do with a household service: look at your monthly plan price, look up what your provider pays for the pipe underneath it, and ask what the difference is buying you.

We think that question is healthy. Here's how to ask it properly.

The system underneath: the SAU

NBN wholesale prices are set under the Special Access Undertaking (SAU), a regulatory agreement between NBN Co and the ACCC, revised in 2023, that maps wholesale pricing through to June 2029. Under it, prices adjust once a year on 1 July, and annual increases are capped by inflation. Also under it, the old two-part pricing (a per-connection charge plus a separately purchased bandwidth charge called CVC that made provider costs murky and congestion-prone) has been retired for residential tiers in favour of flat per-connection pricing. One product, one price, public.

From 1 July 2026, NBN Co adjusted wholesale prices by just under the year's 3.63 per cent CPI benchmark on average. Across the most popular residential tiers the change ranges from zero to $2.34 a month; the entry level 12 Mbps tier edged down by one cent, and the largest rise, $4.04, landed on the top gigabit-class tier.

The numbers: what your provider pays

As at the 2026-27 wholesale price list, the per-connection monthly wholesale charges on the common residential tiers include $36.15 for the 25 Mbps tier and $57.60 for the 100 Mbps tier, with the popular 50 Mbps tier sitting between them after this year's $2.34 rise. (These figures move annually each July; NBN Co publishes the current tariff list, and it's worth looking at the real thing at least once, if only for the novelty of a household cost with its workings shown.)

Now put that against your own bill. Typical retail plans on these tiers run meaningfully above the wholesale charge, and the gap is not padding by definition: it has to cover real costs. What matters is knowing what those costs are, so you can judge whether your particular gap is buying you anything.

What the gap actually pays for

Backhaul and transit. The wholesale charge gets your data to NBN's points of interconnect. Your provider pays to carry it from there to the actual internet, and providers that skimp here are the ones that feel slow at 8pm regardless of your tier.

Network capacity choices. Even with CVC retired on residential tiers, providers make real engineering and capacity decisions that show up directly in the typical evening speed they report. Two providers, same wholesale product, different evening performance: the gap explains it.

Support. Humans, hours, escalation processes. Support quality varies enormously between providers, it's the difference you feel most when something breaks, and it's genuinely expensive to do well. The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman's quarterly complaints data shows who's getting it right; our guide to choosing an NBN plan covers how to read it.

Modems, installs, and the boring machinery. Hardware subsidies, activation costs, billing systems.

Margin. Obviously. Providers are businesses. The question was never whether a margin exists; it's whether the margin comes with evening speed, support that answers, and terms that don't need a magnifying glass, or whether it's margin for margin's sake. The wholesale list is what turns that from a suspicion into an inspection.

Reading your own NBN bill against this

Three things to pull off your current plan:

Your speed tier, and against it, the wholesale charge for that tier from the public list. That's the share of your fee that goes to the network itself; the remainder is your provider's costs and margin.

Your typical evening speed, from your provider's own published figures. This is the honest performance number, and it's the first thing the retail gap should be buying you.

Your promo versus ongoing price. Wholesale charges change once a year by a capped, published amount. If your retail price moves by more, or steps up sharply when a promotional period ends, that movement is a retail decision, not a wholesale one, and it's fair to ask about it, or to leave over it.

Why we're telling you this

Because this is the kind of transparency we think every household market deserves, and it already exists here; it's just that nobody hands it to customers. We compare energy today. Broadband is coming, built the same way we built energy: from providers' published information, not a commercial panel. When it arrives, wholesale-versus-retail context and typical evening speeds will be part of the furniture, because a comparison should show its workings.

Until then, the workings we can show you today are on your energy bills, and they're usually more expensive than your NBN anyway: upload a bill and see your real number. And for the full five-question framework on picking an NBN plan, start with how to choose an NBN plan.