How we compare plans.

The ACCC’s guide to comparator websites asks operators to say clearly who and what is compared, to disclose the commercial relationships behind a ranking, and to make only accurate savings claims. This page is our answer to each of those, and it stays public.

What we compare

Every residential electricity plan that is generally available to new customers at your postcode, from every retailer that publishes to the Australian Energy Regulator’s Energy Product Reference Data feed, the public Consumer Data Right service behind Energy Made Easy. Retailers are required to publish there. We discover retailers from the public CDR Register rather than a list we keep, so a new retailer appears in our catalogue when it appears on the register.

Plans that are restricted to particular customers, for example existing customers only, a specific solar installer’s customers, or an employer’s staff, are excluded and the reason is recorded. Plans that need a meter type you do not have, such as time-of-use, demand and Solar Sharer plans for a home with a basic accumulation meter, are excluded from your recommendations and listed separately as “needs a smart meter”.

The catalogue is refreshed every day. Each report records the date of the snapshot it used.

How we work out your usage

Everything is priced on a single canonical year of half-hourly usage for your home. How we build it depends on what you give us.

Address

Benchmark consumption for homes like yours, shaped over the day and the year by a library of South East Queensland load shapes (working household, home during the day, solar, controlled load). Results are shown as a range between a lower and a higher usage estimate.

Bills

Your actual consumption, export and current rates, read from each bill and checked by you. Where your bills do not cover a full year, the missing months follow the seasonal shape and the range widens to say so.

Meter data

Your actual half-hourly readings from a NEM12 or retailer CSV file, used directly. This is the only path on which demand charges are priced from your real peaks.

How each plan is priced

A deterministic pricing engine, tested against hand-worked examples for every rule, applies each plan’s published tariff to that year. It handles:

• daily supply charges and single-rate, stepped, time-of-use and demand tariffs;
• controlled loads (Tariff 31 and 33), with their own supply and usage charges;
• solar feed-in tariffs, including tiered and time-varying rates;
• the Solar Sharer Offer’s free window, in both of the ways retailers encode it in the feed;
• percentage and fixed discounts, whether guaranteed or conditional, and sign-up credits in the month they apply;
• Queensland public holidays, from a pinned table that is cross-checked against an external source and reviewed by a person before any change;
• GST, applied once to charges. Feed-in credits are not taxed.

Plan prices in the regulator’s feed are published excluding GST; we add it once, at the end, so the figures you see match what a bill would show.

How plans are ranked

On guaranteed annual cost: what the plan costs over the year if you never meet a single discount condition. Pay-on-time and direct-debit discounts are shown as a separate “if you meet the conditions” figure, never folded into the headline. We think a plan that punishes one late payment should be judged on that.

A recommendation model then chooses three plans from the ranked list, taking your stated preferences into account (for example no conditional discounts, no exit fees, a preference for a high feed-in rate), and writes the reasons. It cannot change a price, and a separate checking model verifies every figure it quotes against the engine’s output before the report is released.

What the forecast assumes

• The next 12 months from the date of the search, using the real calendar (weekends and public holidays fall where they fall).
• Current published rates for the whole period. We do not predict the 1 July reset or retailer repricing; we mark 1 July on the chart and say this.
• Sign-up credits in the month the plan applies them; exit fees on your current plan in the first month; benefit periods that expire inside the year revert to undiscounted rates from that month.
• A range for address-only searches and for bill searches with fewer than a year’s coverage. Meter-data searches show a line, with the remaining uncertainty (weather, behaviour) stated rather than drawn.

Every new bill you upload is scored against the forecast for the same period, and the errors feed back into the load-shape library.

The reference price

Each recommended plan is shown against the Default Market Offer reference price for your usage, the same way retailers are required to present their offers, so the figures you see here and on a retailer’s site line up.

What the method does not do

• It does not model home batteries or virtual power plants beyond a simple daily store-and-discharge, and says so when you have one.
• It does not cover gas, small business or regional Queensland.
• It does not assume you will meet discount conditions. If you always pay on time, the conditional figure is the one to look at, and it is right there.
• It cannot see plans a retailer has not published to the regulator’s feed, such as a private retention offer made to you by phone.

Who pays us

You do, by subscription. My Energy Agent receives no commission, referral fee, affiliate payment, sponsorship or data payment from any energy retailer, and links to retailers in reports carry no tracking. See why independent.

Sources

• Plan data: Energy Product Reference Data, Australian Energy Regulator (public, no accreditation required). Retailer discovery: the CDR Register.
• Reference price: the AER’s Default Market Offer 2026–27 determination.
• Free-hours plans: the Australian Government’s Solar Sharer Offer page.
• Network tariffs and controlled loads: Energex residential tariffs.
• Public holidays: the Queensland Government’s gazetted dates, maintained as a reviewed table and cross-checked.
• Comparator conduct: the ACCC’s guide to comparator websites.
• Load shapes: our own library of South East Queensland household profiles, versioned and named on every report.