What we counted
We hold every electricity plan the Australian Energy Regulator publishes through its Consumer Data Right dataset, and we re-cost the catalogue every night. That makes some questions answerable by counting rather than guessing.
One of them: how many plans carry a demand charge — a dollar amount levied on your highest measured power draw, on top of what you pay per kilowatt-hour?
As at 1 August 2026, the answer was **2,362 plans**. Not a rounding error, and not confined to industrial customers. (That figure moves: retailers add and withdraw plans constantly, and it shifted by eight overnight while this article was being written.)
Why you cannot just filter them out by name
The obvious approach is to look for the word "demand" in the plan name. It does not work. A large share of the plans carrying a demand charge do not mention it in their name at all — the charge only appears in the structured tariff data underneath.
That matters because a comparison tool filtering on the name will confidently include plans it cannot correctly price, and will show you a number for them anyway.
The only reliable way to identify them is to read the tariff structure itself and look for the demand component. That is what we do, which is how we can count them.
What goes wrong when a demand plan is priced on energy alone
A demand charge cannot be derived from your total consumption, because it is measured on a different thing entirely: your peak, not your volume. Two customers using identical energy can face very different demand charges.
So a tool that does not know your peak has two honest options — leave the plan out, or show it with the demand component clearly unpriced. What it must not do is cost the energy, ignore the demand, and present the result as a complete figure.
Do that and a demand plan can appear to be the cheapest thing available while being among the most expensive in practice. The error is not small and it is not random: it always makes those plans look better than they are.
What we do about it, including where it costs us
For households we exclude demand tariffs from the ranking entirely, and show a note saying how many were hidden. We would rather show a shorter list than a wrong number.
That decision has a visible cost. On some networks the plans that look cheapest on paper are demand tariffs, so excluding them means our results can appear less impressive than a competitor's that includes them. We think a saving you cannot actually realise is worse than a smaller one you can.
For business customers, where demand is often the largest line on the bill, we price it from the figure your bill states, or from interval data if you upload it. Where we genuinely cannot price it, the plan is shown with the charge flagged as unpriced rather than costed at zero.
How to check your own bill
- Look for a line charged in dollars per kW or per kVA, rather than cents per kWh. That is a demand charge.
- Find your measured peak, usually printed next to it in kW or kVA.
- Check whether the tariff states a demand window — many only measure weekday afternoons, and some only in summer.
- Check for a ratchet clause, where your highest peak is remembered and charged for months afterwards.
- When comparing, make sure the demand component is priced in. If a comparison cannot tell you your peak, it cannot have priced it.