Why did my daily supply charge go up? And who loses out

What happened

When prices reset on 1 July 2026, many households saw two things on the same notice: a lower price per kilowatt-hour, and a much higher daily supply charge. One of the largest retailers told customers their daily supply charge would rise by between 60 and almost 100 per cent on some plans, while usage rates fell.

Tasmania’s regulator described the same pattern there: tariff restructuring would generally raise daily supply charges and lower usage charges, so the effect would vary from one household to the next.

This is not a fringe change. A cheaper usage rate and a dearer supply charge can leave one household better off and its neighbour worse off on exactly the same plan.

Why supply charges are rising

A large part of your bill pays for the poles and wires, which your electricity network charges to your retailer. Most of the cost of a network is fixed: it costs the same to maintain a street’s wires whether its houses use a lot of power or a little. Networks and retailers have been moving more of that fixed cost into the fixed daily charge, and less into the price per kilowatt-hour.

There is a reason behind it. As more homes install solar and batteries, they buy fewer kilowatt-hours from the grid while still relying on it. If network costs are recovered mainly through usage, households without solar end up paying for the wires that solar households use. A higher fixed charge spreads the cost more evenly across everyone connected.

Whatever you think of the reasoning, the effect on your bill is mechanical, and you can work out which side of it you are on.

Who wins and who loses

High-usage households tend to win. A cut of a few cents per kilowatt-hour across a large annual usage outweighs a higher daily charge.

Low-usage households tend to lose: apartments, single people, small homes, holiday homes, and houses with solar or a battery that buy little from the grid. Their supply charge is a large share of their bill, and the lower usage rate saves them little because they use little.

Here is an illustrative example, with round numbers chosen for the arithmetic rather than taken from any real plan. If a plan’s supply charge rises by 50 cents a day, that costs $182.50 a year. If its usage rate falls by 5 cents per kilowatt-hour at the same time, you need to use 3,650 kWh a year just to break even. Use less than that and the change costs you money. Use more and it saves you money.

What you can do about it

You cannot avoid a supply charge while you are connected, but you can choose how much of one you pay. Supply charges differ a lot between plans on the same network, and the plan with the cheapest usage rate is often not the plan with the cheapest supply charge.

If you use little power, weight the supply charge heavily when you compare. A plan with a low daily charge and a slightly higher usage rate is frequently the cheapest option for a small household, and it never appears at the top of a list sorted by usage rate.

If you have solar, the calculation also includes your feed-in tariff, and the right plan is the one with the lowest total after your export credits, not the lowest supply charge on its own. See solar feed-in tariffs explained.

Let the whole plan be costed, not one line

The reason this change catches people out is that most people compare plans one number at a time. The only fair comparison adds up the supply charge for every day of the year, every kilowatt-hour you use at the rate it is charged, your controlled load if you have one, minus your solar credits, and then compares the totals.

That is what EnergySorted does. Upload a bill and we cost every plan available at your address on your actual usage, including the supply charge, and rank them by what you would pay in a year. A low-usage household sees its real cheapest plan, not the plan with the most eye-catching rate. The free electricity bill estimator shows how much of your current bill is the fixed daily charge.