What electricity costs today, wholesale

Your bill does not follow this line. Households buy on a retail plan, and the wholesale price is only one part of what builds it - network charges, environmental schemes, retail costs and margin make up the rest. That is why the retail rate today sits about 3.7 times above wholesale rather than tracking it.

It does tell you when power is abundant. The cheapest hours are the middle of a sunny day and the small hours of the morning. If you are on a time-of-use or wholesale-linked plan, or you have solar or a battery, those are the hours worth shifting into - a pool pump or an electric car does not care what time it runs.

Where the numbers come from. Wholesale regional reference prices for the five National Electricity Market regions, at five-minute settlement intervals. Western Australia and the Northern Territory run separate markets and are not covered. Prices are regional reference prices at five-minute settlement intervals, published by AEMO, converted from dollars per megawatt-hour to cents per kilowatt-hour. Daily averages are weighted by demand, because a cheap interval at 3am and an expensive one at 6pm are not worth the same to a household. Retail comparisons use the 2026-27 reference rates described in our method.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory run separate markets with no equivalent public feed, so they are absent here rather than estimated.