Guide · South East Queensland · reviewed July 2026
The cheapest plan is rarely the one they leave you on. Retailers win new customers with sharp offers, then let the rates on older plans quietly climb. Stay put for a few years and you can end up paying more than someone who signed up yesterday — for exactly the same power.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It's the same play the banks were caught running on home loans, and it works for the same reason: most people don't look, and the system is built so the drift is hard to see.
Retailers run what amounts to two price lists.
You don't get moved from one to the other. Close a plan, open a fresher one alongside it, and everyone who doesn't act stays on the ageing plan while the marketing promotes the new one. Do nothing for long enough and the gap between what you pay and what a new customer pays just widens.
In its home-loan price inquiry, the ACCC found that long-standing borrowers routinely paid more than new customers for the same kind of loan — a "loyalty tax" on people who didn't refinance. Lenders offered their best rates to win new business and quietly left existing borrowers on higher ones. Electricity works the same way; the numbers are just smaller per bill, which is precisely why fewer people bother to check.
Electricity is better regulated than mortgages were, so it's fair to say the trick is less lucrative here than it was for the banks. Two protections matter:
Since 30 September 2023, every retailer must print a message on the first page of your bill — under a heading like "Could you save money on another plan?" — telling you if they have a cheaper generally-available plan for your usage. It's a real, useful protection. Its limits: it only compares your own retailer's plans, not the whole market, and plenty of people never read past the amount due.
Retailers must tell you before your rates change. But it arrives as a letter or email that's easy to file and forget, and there's no public record of it — so no one outside your own inbox can see how far an old plan has drifted.
Here's the part that keeps it working: closed plans are invisible in the places you'd go to compare. Public comparison data — including the government's Energy Made Easy — lists plans that are open to new customers. The moment a plan closes, it drops out of that data entirely, and every rate rise on it after that happens out of sight. So the very plan you might be overpaying on is the one a normal comparison can't even see.
The tax only exists if there's a gap, so the way to find it is to compare what you're actually paying now against every plan open to new customers today. If newer plans — including ones from your own retailer — are meaningfully cheaper for your usage, that gap is your loyalty tax, and it's yours to close.
That's what BillCheck is built to show. Because it reads the real rates off your bill — including a closed legacy plan that appears in no public comparison — and then prices every South East Queensland plan against your actual usage, it puts the two side by side: what you pay now, and what the market offers. No retailer pays us to point you anywhere, so there's nothing steering the answer.
We can show you your own gap today. We're not yet claiming a measured, retailer-by-retailer "average loyalty tax" — that needs a lot more real bills before it would mean anything, and we'd rather say nothing than quote a number we can't stand behind. When we have it, you'll see it here.
Related: Do you lose the 44c if you switch? · Plans you're not allowed to take · All questions
General information about electricity pricing in South East Queensland as at July 2026, not personal advice. The "better offer" bill requirement is set by the Australian Energy Regulator; the home-loan findings referenced are from the ACCC's Home Loan Price Inquiry.