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How to read your energy bill (ACT, NSW, QLD, SA, WA)

Understand the elements on your electricity and natural gas bill, including details of your energy charges, usage, meter and tariff type.

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Written by Radomir
Updated over 2 years ago

Your bill has all the details of your energy charges and usage, as well as handy info about your meter and tariff type.

It might look a bit complicated, but once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s a great place to see a detailed breakdown of how you’re using your electricity and natural gas.

This guide is for our residential and small business customers in ACT, NSW, QLD, SA and WA. If you're living in Victoria, there's a different bill guide for you.

If you’re a large business or commercial customer, check out this guide instead.

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1. Your supply address – the address of the property we’re billing you for which we supply your electricity or natural gas to.

2. Your account details – including your account number, the tax invoice number and the date this bill was issued.

3. Billing period – the time period covered by this bill. For electricity, billing periods are normally either monthly or quarterly. For natural gas, it’s normally every two months.

4. The due date and amount due – the due date is the date you need to pay your bill. The amount due is how much you need to pay (including GST). You’ll also see your discount here, if your plan has one.

The amount due can look different if:

  • Your account is in credit or you don’t owe us anything

  • Your account is overdue or you have an outstanding amount due

  • You’re on a payment plan or have a direct debit set up

5. Your usage summary – usage for this billing period, compared with the same time last year. This includes:

  • Your average cost per day and daily usage

  • Greenhouse gas emissions for the energy you used

  • Any emissions you offset – if you’re on a green product

Your usage is shown in the unit of measure.

  • Electricity is measured and billed in kilowatt hours (kWh) in most states

  • Natural gas is measured in mega joules (MJ)

6. Your energy plan – details of your energy plan or agreement at the time we issued your bill, including:

  • The energy plan or agreement name

  • The energy plan end date – if there is one

  • Any discounts or rebates

7. How to pay – this section shows the different ways you can pay your bill, and any payment fees that might apply.

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8. Account summary – featuring a summary of your past and present balances, including:

  • The amount you owed us when we sent your last bill (if we've billed you before)

  • What you paid towards that bill – marked with an A in an orange circle

  • Any amount owing, carried over to this bill from the last one

  • Any adjustments carried over from your last bill e.g. payment fees, account credits, solar charges or feed-in credits – marked with a B in an orange circle

  • Your new energy charges for this billing period – marked with a C in an orange circle

You can see details of items A and C (marked with the orange circles) just below the Account Summary.

9. Payments received – this is what you paid towards your last bill, when you made payments and how you paid them during the last billing period.

10. Total electricity or natural gas charges – this includes details of your supply address, your usage and what that usage cost, including:

  • Your meter number (your meter measures the usage at your property)

  • Your last and next scheduled meter read dates

  • Whether your last meter read was Actual (A) or Estimated (E); It’s Actual (A) if we actually read your meter for this bill; and Estimated (E) if we couldn’t read it.

  • Your billing period in number of days

  • Your rate – the pricing structure we use for your address, e.g. General Domestic or Time of Use

The rest of this section is a breakdown of how much energy you used during the billing period and what it cost. You will also see any rebates or discounts we applied to your bill in this section.

All the charges and discounts generally include GST. Some items, like goodwill credit, don’t include GST. With these, we’ll add “non-taxable, no GST” to make it clear for you.

11. Need to get in touch? This right hand column on your bill has detailed information about how to contact us online, on the phone or by post.

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12. Your usage breakdown – on the third page of your bill, you’ll see your average daily usage for this billing period compared with this time last year.

You can also see approximately how much greenhouse gas was emitted to generate the energy you used – again with a comparison to last year. There is a graph showing your usage and greenhouse emissions over the last year.

13. How you compare (electricity bills only) – this graph shows your average daily electricity usage compared with other households in your area.

This is a great way to see how you’re doing, compared to your neighbours. If you want to see what you can do to bring your usage down, visit our Energy efficiency tips page.

Got a digital meter? Then you’ll see your average daily usage cost for this billing period. If you’re on a Time of Use pricing structure, this will be broken into ‘peak’ and ‘off peak’ figures.

The Origin Bill image is for illustration and is indicative only.

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