What you are actually paying for

The AER publishes a breakdown of what sits inside a Default Market Offer price, which is the regulated safety-net price and the benchmark most offers are quoted against. Its information kit for 2026-27 lists four Cost components that make up a DMO annual price with a percentage range for each, because the mix differs by region.

Network is the cost to transport electricity, and it is the biggest band at 39 to 54 per cent. Wholesale, the cost to buy electricity, is 30 to 41 per cent. Environmental scheme costs are 2 to 3 per cent. Retail, the cost to serve customers, is 7 to 16 per cent. So on the high side of the range, more than half of the bill is the wires, not the electrons.

That is the reason this masthead spends so much time on transmission projects and network revenue: it is the part of the bill with the most money in it and the least public attention.

Who decides it, and for how long

Network businesses are monopolies. You cannot choose a different set of poles, so instead of competition there is a regulator deciding how much revenue each business may recover from customers. The AER makes that decision for a regulatory control period, which on the current pattern is five years.

Two different businesses sit behind a Hunter bill. Transgrid owns the high-voltage transmission network that moves power across NSW. Ausgrid is the distributor that runs the lower-voltage poles and wires to your street. Both are regulated by the AER on the same machinery, on different clocks.

The AER publishes the whole forward schedule, currently out to 2037. On that timetable, Transgrid’s next period is 1 July 2028 to 30 June 2033. For distribution, Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy, Essential Energy and Evoenergy share a period running 1 July 2029 to 30 June 2034, and the work that produces it starts on 31 October 2026 and finishes with a final decision indicated for April 2029. The document is explicit that it assumes no change to the length of regulatory control periods and that Dates are indicative and may be subject to change. Treat them as a diary, not a promise.

What the process looks like from outside

A determination is not one decision on one day. It is a sequence of published documents, each of which is a moment where somebody outside the process can say something. The AER starts with a Framework and Approach paper, the business then submits a revenue proposal, the AER publishes an issues paper and holds a public forum, submissions close, a draft decision is published, there is a predetermination conference, the business submits a revised proposal, submissions close again, and then the final decision lands.

The Framework and Approach paper is worth understanding because its name oversells it. In the current Transgrid one the AER describes it as The first step in the revenue determination process, which sets our proposed approach to key elements of the upcoming determination and facilitates early public consultation before businesses submit their revenue proposals. And then, in the same document, the sentence that tells you what it is not: Our proposed approach set out in this F&A is not binding on the AER or Transgrid.

So an F&A is a statement of intent, not a decision. It still matters, because it is where the incentive schemes that apply for five years get proposed, and because it is the earliest point at which an outsider can influence the shape of the thing.

The part that should bother you

Here is what happened at that earliest point on the current NSW transmission reset. Before the Framework and Approach paper was written, the AER consulted on whether the previous framework should be amended or replaced. The paper records the result of that consultation in four words: Having received no submissions.

Nobody wrote in. On the opening step of a process that sets the framework for what a monopoly may recover from customers for five years, at the one stage designed for early public input, the count was zero.

We are not pointing at anyone in particular. Consumer advocacy bodies are small and stretched across every one of these resets in every state at once, and an individual household reading a framework paper is a lot to ask. But it is worth knowing that the door is genuinely open and that on this occasion nobody walked through it, because the next one opens for Ausgrid, and Ausgrid is the business whose charges land on a Hunter bill.

What a normal person can actually do

Three things, in increasing order of effort. Read the draft decision when it appears, because it is written to be read and it tells you what the regulator thinks the business should be allowed to spend. Make a submission at one of the two points where submissions close, which is a letter and not a legal document. Or go to the public forum, which is held in the year after the proposal is submitted.

None of that requires expertise in regulatory economics. The single most useful thing an ordinary customer can contribute is not a critique of the weighted average cost of capital. It is evidence about what reliability and price actually feel like where they live, which is exactly the thing a business’s own submission cannot supply.

Our view

Labelled as opinion and resting on the documents cited below. The design of this process is better than its reputation: the dates are published a decade ahead, every step produces a public document, and there are two separate windows for submissions plus a forum. The failure is not transparency. It is that the whole thing is legible only to people who already know it exists, and the largest line on a household bill is decided in a venue almost no household knows the name of.

The zero-submission moment is the honest measure of that gap, and it is not an argument for cynicism. A process nobody contests is not the same as a process nobody could contest. The next one has a date on it, and the date is close.

What this page does not tell you

It does not tell you what your network charge will be, and nothing here predicts a price. The percentage ranges are for a Default Market Offer annual price across regions, not for your bill specifically, and where your own bill sits inside those ranges depends on your tariff, your usage and your distributor. The timetable dates are the AER’s own and are marked indicative, so check them against the Register before relying on one. We have described the sequence of steps as the AER publishes it and have deliberately not matched each individual date in the timetable to each named step, because the published table is a wide grid and we would rather say less than guess. We have not sought comment from the AER, Ausgrid or Transgrid; this is a reading of published documents.