How we compare EV electricity plans

Every price is published by the Australian Energy Regulator. Under the Consumer Data Right the regulator is the data holder for retail energy product information, so every retailer’s plans are available from one place as open data. We download them directly rather than reading them off comparison sites.

The current build covers 10,192 plans from 76 retailers, last checked on 11 September 2026. We rebuild it regularly, and every page shows the date its figures were checked.

Source: Australian Energy Regulator, energy Product Reference Data.

Coverage is NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, ACT, TAS. Those are the states in the National Energy Customer Framework, which is the set the regulator publishes.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory run their own arrangements and are not in this data at all. We would rather say so than quietly present a national figure that is nothing of the sort.

Each plan is turned into a weekly price grid: seven days divided into half hours, each holding the rate that applies at that moment. A charging pattern is then read straight off the grid, which handles time of use windows, windows that run past midnight and weekday and weekend splits without approximating any of them.

Overnight means midnight to 6am and midday means 10am to 3pm. The rate we quote is the average across every half hour in the window, so a plan whose cheap period is narrower than a charging session is not flattered by it. Where a plan does not publish a price for part of a window, we leave it out of that comparison rather than guessing.

Energy is measured at the meter, not at the battery. We add 10% for the energy lost as heat when charging on AC, which is normal for a home wallbox.

• Daily supply charges. You pay these whether or not you own an electric car, so charging them to the car would overstate what driving electric costs. They matter when you compare whole bills, which is a different question from this one.
• Demand tariffs. These bill on your highest burst of usage rather than your total. That cannot be derived from annual kilowatt hours, so those plans are excluded rather than estimated.
• Discounts and sign-up credits. They vary by customer, expire, and often depend on paying on time. A rate you can verify is worth more than a headline you cannot.
• Solar exports. A feed-in tariff changes your bill but not the cost of the electricity going into the car, so it is recorded in our data and kept out of these figures.

Some retailers give electricity away for a fixed window each day. For most households that is hard to use, because you cannot move a fridge or a hot shower to suit it. A car is the exception. It is the one appliance that will happily take several kilowatt hours on command, which makes these plans worth more to an EV owner than to anyone else.

A free window is usually paid for through a higher rate at other times or a higher daily supply charge, so it is worth reading the whole plan rather than the headline.

A smaller group of plans price the middle of the day below the small hours, to absorb rooftop solar the grid cannot otherwise take. On those, charging at midday beats charging overnight, which is the opposite of the usual advice. Where that happens in a city, its page says so and shows the difference.

Costs use a Hyundai Ioniq 5 Long Range at 14.7 kWh per 100km, the median efficiency of the EV battery size list we maintain, driving 12,000km a year.

A typical EV sits between 12 and 21 kWh per 100km, so a more efficient car costs proportionally less and a large SUV proportionally more. Every table carries a cost per 100km column for exactly that reason: scale it to your own car and your own distance.

See the EV battery size list for the efficiency figure of a specific model.

• Sydney, 1,127 plans from 29 retailers
• Melbourne, 604 plans from 27 retailers
• Brisbane, 1,049 plans from 27 retailers
• Adelaide, 623 plans from 27 retailers
• Canberra, 498 plans from 11 retailers
• Hobart, 96 plans from 5 retailers

Prices change often. Always confirm on the retailer’s own site before switching.