Australia has two government-run electricity comparison sites, and unlike commercial comparison services they carry every generally available plan and earn nothing from your choice. They are genuinely good tools. They are also tools with assumptions, and knowing what they assume is the difference between using them well and being quietly steered. This guide covers both, plus where our own calculator fits.
The two official tools
Energy Made Easy is run by the Australian Energy Regulator and covers the national retail market: Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT. Victorian Energy Compare is the Victorian Government's equivalent for Victoria's own system.
Both work the same way in outline: enter your address and some usage information, and they rank the market's plans by estimated annual cost. Because retailers are required to lodge their plan data, coverage is the whole market, not a paid panel; that lodged dataset is the same government Product Reference Data our import feature draws on. Retailers must also point you to these sites in their better offer messages; if the box on your bill (see our bill reading guide) says you can save, these tools are the official way to check the whole market.
Getting the most out of them
The output is only as good as the usage estimate underneath it, so:
- Use your real data, not the defaults. Both sites can estimate from household size, but an estimate ranks plans for an average household, not yours. Upload or key in your actual usage: both tools can work from your bill, and with a smart meter, Energy Made Easy can use your actual interval data, which makes its time-of-use comparisons meaningful.
- Have a recent bill beside you. Ten minutes and one bill is enough for either site, and it keeps the current plan comparison honest.
- Check the plan's fact sheet before acting. The ranking is an estimate; the Basic Plan Information Document linked from each result is the plan's actual terms, including benefit periods, conditional discounts and fees.
- Re-run it after 1 July. Prices reset around the new financial year across the market, and last year's winner is often this year's mid-packer; our reference price guide explains those annual benchmarks.
What they quietly assume
No criticism here, just calibration. The tools estimate an annual cost from a usage profile: if your life is about to change (new EV, new pool, working from home, solar going up), last year's data misranks next year's plans. Conditional discounts are shown at face value, so a pay-on-time discount flatters a plan you would sometimes pay late. And solar feed-in credits depend on export patterns the tools can only approximate; our solar guide covers weighing feed-in against usage rates properly.
Where our calculator fits
Compare My Power is not a replacement for the official tools; it is the workbench beside them. The government sites answer "rank the whole market for my estimated usage." Our calculator answers a different question: "show me the maths." You enter your daily usage and controlled load once, and every plan you add is priced transparently per day, month and year, side by side, with nothing assumed that you did not type. Pick your State and, in the six eastern States and Territories, import real plans for your postcode from the same government data the official sites use.
The workflow we would use ourselves: shortlist on the official site with your real usage data, then bring your current plan and the top few candidates into the calculator to see the actual daily and yearly gap between them, and to test what happens if your usage changes. If the gap covers the hassle of switching, our switching guide takes it from there.
Free, official, and independent tools all exist; the only losing move is comparing nothing and letting the plan drift.