Your Power Bill Is About to Get More Confusing — Here's What's Actually Changing From the 1st of July
If you've had an email from your electricity retailer lately about "price changes," you're not imagining it: daily supply charges are jumping sharply for a lot of households from 1 July. And if that feels like it clashes with everything you've heard about power bills coming down in 2026-27, you're not wrong to be confused.
Here's what's really going on — and why it makes checking your own plan more important than ever.
What's changing?
Electricity bills are made up of two main parts: a daily supply charge (a fixed fee you pay just for being connected, no matter how much power you use) and a usage charge (what you pay per kilowatt-hour you actually consume).
This year, the way the regulator calculates the benchmark "Default Market Offer" changed. In the past, regulators capped the total annual bill and left retailers free to decide how that was split between the fixed and usage components. Now, for the first time, there are separate caps on the fixed and usage portions. That sounds technical, but the practical effect is simple: it's pushed a lot of retailers — not just one or two — to lift their daily supply charges, regardless of who you're with.
Why this isn't a simple "bills going up" story.
The twist is that most providers are offsetting the higher supply charge with a lower usage rate. So whether you actually come out ahead or behind depends almost entirely on how much electricity you use.
Heavy users often benefit, because the usage-rate cut outweighs the fixed-fee increase.
Low-usage households — smaller homes, people who are out a lot, anyone running a tight energy budget — are the most likely to end up paying more overall, because they're being hit with a bigger fixed cost without using enough power to claw it back through the cheaper rate.
For context, the actual network (poles and wires) costs behind all this are only rising by somewhere around 10–11% in many areas. The bigger jumps showing up in some supply charges are coming from how retailers have chosen to restructure their plans around the new regulatory benchmark — not from the underlying cost of delivering electricity to your home.
Thankfully, it hasn’t gone unnoticed
The scale of some of these supply charge increases has drawn attention from the federal government, with concerns raised directly with energy retailers and the regulator about whether cost savings are genuinely being passed on to customers. The regulator has confirmed it's actively reviewing how retailers are structuring and communicating these changes. Even energy policy experts have acknowledged the messaging around this shift has been poor, leaving plenty of households unsure whether they're actually better or worse off.
Why this matters more than a headline rate increase or decrease
This is exactly the kind of change that makes comparing plans by an advertised rate almost useless. A plan with a lower usage rate but a much higher daily supply charge could easily cost a low-usage household more per year than their current plan — even though it looks cheaper on paper.
The only way to really know is to compare plans against your actual usage pattern, not just the headline numbers.
So what can consumers do?
This is precisely the problem SwitchBuddy was built to solve. Upload your latest electricity bills and SwitchBuddy reads your real usage data, checks it against current market offers, and tells you which plan will actually save you money — fixed charges, usage rates, and all the fine print included. No guesswork about whether a "cheaper" plan is actually cheaper for your household.
With supply charges shifting across the board from the 1st of July, now is the perfect time to check whether your current plan still stacks up.
Check your bill with SwitchBuddy, set up a free account at www.switchbuddy.com.au
This post summarises reporting on recent electricity pricing changes published by the Australian Financial Review and industry groups — we'd encourage you to read the original article in full here.
https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/bowen-calls-in-watchdogs-to-probe-surprise-power-price-rises-20260622-p6090h