Australia's regulated small business electricity price for 2026-27 works out between 38.5 and 55.2 cents a kilowatt hour once the fixed daily supply charge is counted in, a 43% gap between the cheapest and dearest networks on identical use.
Skai Solutions took those figures from the Australian Energy Regulator's Default Market Offer, which is published as an annual dollar amount rather than a rate, so the cents are our own division of the published price by the published usage. New Zealand has no equivalent business series at all, which is the first thing worth knowing if you are trying to budget a venue there.
No regulator publishes a restaurant electricity benchmark, so every article claiming an average restaurant power bill is either American or invented. What does exist is a regulated reference price, and it is more useful than an average because you can check your own bill against it.
A canopy and duct system is the overhead nobody budgets until the first invoice arrives. Commercial kitchen exhaust cleaning costs A$230 to A$900 a visit in Sydney, and the number of visits is set by what is cooking rather than by the size of the room.
The Australian Energy Regulator sets the Default Market Offer each year for small businesses on standing offer plans in New South Wales, south east Queensland and South Australia. For 2026-27 it is published as an annual dollar figure for a small business using 10,000 kilowatt hours a year. Dividing that annual price by 10,000 gives the all in cost of a unit with the fixed daily supply charge already inside it, which is the number an operator actually wants and the one nobody prints.
| Distribution zone | Flat rate, 2026-27 | Time of use | All in, flat | All in, time of use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Energex, south east Queensland | A$3,849 | A$3,693 | 38.5c | 36.9c |
| Endeavour, New South Wales | A$4,343 | A$4,326 | 43.4c | 43.3c |
| Ausgrid, New South Wales | A$4,523 | A$4,450 | 45.2c | 44.5c |
| SA Power Networks, South Australia | A$5,162 | A$4,868 | 51.6c | 48.7c |
| Essential, regional New South Wales | A$5,517 | A$4,919 | 55.2c | 49.2c |
Annual prices from the Australian Energy Regulator Default Market Offer information kit for 2026-27, effective 1 July 2026, all at an annual usage of 10,000 kilowatt hours. The cents per kilowatt hour columns are Skai Solutions' own division of the published annual price by the published annual usage, not an AER figure.
Look down the flat rate column. A small business using exactly the same 10,000 kilowatt hours pays A$3,849 in south east Queensland and A$5,517 in regional New South Wales. That is A$1,668 a year, or 43% more, for identical consumption. Nothing about the business changed. Only the poles and wires it hangs off did.
The AER's own cost build up explains it. Network costs are 39 to 54 per cent of a DMO price, wholesale energy is 30 to 41 per cent, environmental schemes are 2 to 3 per cent, and the retail cost of serving the customer is 7 to 16 per cent. Delivery is the biggest single component, and delivery is decided by geography.
Two things follow, and both cut against the advice operators usually get. The first is that switching retailer argues over the smallest slice of the bill. The second is that a benchmark borrowed from another state is worthless: a cafe in Brisbane and a cafe in Dubbo comparing power bills are comparing two different products.
The time of use column carries the same lesson in miniature. Moving from the flat rate to the time of use offer at the same consumption is worth A$17 a year in the Endeavour network and A$598 in the Essential network, a 35 fold difference in the value of one decision.
Three honest limits, because a number used wrongly is worse than no number.
It is not an average. The AER reports 77,082 small businesses on standing offers across the three regions, 15 per cent of the small business population. The other 85 per cent are on market offers, which should sit below the DMO. Treat it as the price to beat.
It is not a restaurant. The reference customer uses 10,000 kilowatt hours a year, about 27 units a day. A venue running a cool room, a dishwasher, a coffee machine and an extraction canopy is well past that. Scale the table by your own usage.
It is not everywhere. The DMO applies in New South Wales, south east Queensland and South Australia only. Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory sit outside it.
This is the question the regulated price hides, and it is worth two minutes because the answer changes which market you are buying in.
The AER's own comparison site, Energy Made Easy, publishes the annual electricity consumption thresholds that define a small business customer. Read 11 October 2026:
| Jurisdiction | Small customer threshold |
|---|---|
| New South Wales | 100 MWh (100,000 kWh) a year |
| Queensland | 100 MWh a year |
| Australian Capital Territory | 100 MWh a year |
| Tasmania | 150 MWh a year |
| South Australia | 160 MWh a year |
The gas threshold is 1 terajoule a year in each of those. Victoria is not listed on that page, so no Victorian figure is asserted here.
Now hold the two numbers side by side, because this is the gap nobody writes about. The reference small business behind every published DMO price uses 10,000 kilowatt hours a year. The ceiling on being a small customer at all, in New South Wales and Queensland, is 100,000. That is a tenfold band, and every "small business electricity price" you have ever read sits at the very bottom of it. A restaurant is not at the bottom of it.
100,000 kilowatt hours a year is about 274 units a day averaged across 365 days, which is our arithmetic rather than a published figure. A single-site cafe will not be near that. A multi-kitchen pub, or a venue with a commercial laundry, can cross it.
Crossing it matters in three concrete ways. The small customer protections in the energy retail rules stop applying to you. Energy Made Easy will no longer compare plans for your site, so the free comparison tool is gone. And prices become a direct negotiation with retailers, which is worse if you do nothing and better if you actually negotiate, because a large-market contract is priced on your own load shape rather than on a regulated ceiling built for a reference customer ten times smaller than you.
So the practical instruction is the same one as the rest of this page, with a reason attached. Read your own annual kilowatt hours off your bills before you read anybody's average. That one figure tells you whether the regulated price is a ceiling you can use as a benchmark, or a number that has nothing to do with the market you are actually buying in.
The arithmetic is short enough to do at the pass. Take the kilowatt hours off your last bill, annualise them, and price them at the all in rate for your network from the table. A venue on 60,000 kilowatt hours a year in the Ausgrid network is looking at roughly A$27,000 at 45.2 cents; the same venue on Energex is nearer A$23,000.
Two corrections to apply, because the straight multiplication is slightly wrong in a way worth knowing. Part of the annual price is a fixed daily supply charge that does not repeat as you use more, so multiplying out overstates the marginal unit. And a business using six times the reference volume is usually on a different network tariff class altogether. The table gives you the right order of magnitude and the right ranking between states. It does not give you a quote.
Energy sits in the overhead line rather than the cost of sales line, which is why it never shows up in a food cost review. The restaurant overhead costs page puts that line at about 25.5% of turnover on the ATO's Australian benchmarks, and restaurant prime cost explains why the two are counted separately.
Fifteen minutes, your menu, your hardest order.
Book a Free DemoNew Zealand has no equivalent of the DMO, and this is the part of the question that has a worse answer than most operators expect. MBIE publishes a quarterly electricity price series that is quoted everywhere, and it is a domestic series. The model customer is a household using about 22 kilowatt hours a day, 8,000 a year, on a low user plan with controlled hot water, and the prices include GST.
| Town | Total, c/kWh | Lines component |
|---|---|---|
| New Zealand average | 42.1 | 16.8 |
| Wellington City | 37.20 | 12.3 |
| Nelson | 38.43 | 11.5 |
| Christchurch | 38.61 | 14.6 |
| Hamilton | 39.78 | 15.0 |
| Auckland Central | 41.30 | 16.1 |
| Queenstown | 42.38 | 18.3 |
| Tauranga | 45.01 | 15.6 |
| Kerikeri | 50.62 | 23.3 |
| Balclutha | 51.00 | 25.6 |
MBIE Quarterly Survey of Domestic Electricity Prices to 15 August 2026, surveyed 15 August 2026, GST inclusive, modelled household using 8,000 kilowatt hours a year. Not a commercial tariff.
The spread is the same story as Australia: 37.20 cents in Wellington against 51.00 cents in Balclutha, a 37% gap driven mostly by the lines component, which runs from 11.5 cents in Nelson to 25.6 cents in Balclutha. In both countries the network a venue sits on moves the unit price more than the retailer it signed with.
The gap, stated rather than filled. There is no published New Zealand commercial electricity price by town. MBIE does monitor commercial and industrial costs on a sales basis, revenue divided by units sold, but only at national level and only inside the MBIE energy prices data tables. So a New Zealand operator cannot look up what venues like theirs pay in their own city, and anyone quoting a regional figure for a cafe is quoting a household.
This question comes up in search as often as the electricity one and it has no published answer at all. There is no regulated reference price for small business gas anywhere in Australia. The Default Market Offer is electricity only. Nothing in New Zealand fills the gap either.
So the honest method is your own bill. Gas is sold in gigajoules, the rate is printed on the invoice, and the annual figure is the twelve months of gigajoules times that rate plus the daily charge. A gas wok line and an induction kitchen are not the same business, so another venue's figure tells you nothing.
Track cents per kilowatt hour and dollars per gigajoule off your own invoices and watch the trend, not the level, which is the discipline our restaurant water bill page applies to the third utility.
Network charges are the largest component and you cannot move your building, so the levers left are ordinary ones.
Energy is spent on being open rather than on serving a particular customer, so a quiet Tuesday costs close to what a full Tuesday costs and the bill per cover falls as covers rise. That is the arithmetic behind restaurant occupancy cost. Skai Solutions sells an AI phone agent, so treat that as an interested party's observation, and what an AI receptionist is and what it costs covers the category including who should not buy one.
The other energy question is what happens when there is none. What a restaurant does in a power outage covers the stock decision, the four business days notice your distributor owes before planned work, and the guaranteed service level payments most venues never claim.
There is no published restaurant figure, but there is a regulated reference. The AER's Default Market Offer for 2026-27 prices a small business using 10,000 kilowatt hours a year at between A$3,849 in the Energex network in south east Queensland and A$5,517 in the Essential network in regional New South Wales. Dividing those by the 10,000 kilowatt hours gives an all in cost of 38.5 to 55.2 cents a unit, supply charge included. A venue using more than 10,000 units scales up from there, though not quite in a straight line, because part of the annual price is a fixed daily charge that does not repeat.
Nobody publishes one for Australia or New Zealand, and any figure presented as an average is almost always American. What is published is each component: the AER sets regulated electricity prices in three distribution regions, water utilities publish business tariffs, and the ATO's benchmarks give total expenses as a share of turnover. Build it from your own meter.
There is no regulated reference price for small business gas anywhere in Australia. The Default Market Offer covers electricity only, and only in New South Wales, south east Queensland and South Australia. That absence is the honest answer to the question: the reason you cannot find an average gas bill for a restaurant is that no regulator publishes a small business gas benchmark to build one from. Your own bill, in gigajoules times the rate on it, is the only reliable number available.
It depends almost entirely on which network you sit in. At the same 10,000 kilowatt hours a year, moving from the flat rate DMO to the time of use DMO is worth A$17 a year in the Endeavour network and A$598 a year in the Essential network. That is a 35 fold difference in the value of the same decision. Check your own network before anyone sells you a tariff switch as a saving.
MBIE's survey to 15 August 2026 puts the national average at 42.1 cents a kilowatt hour, of which 16.8 cents is the lines component. Wellington City is the cheapest town surveyed at 37.20 cents and Balclutha the dearest at 51.00 cents. Read those figures carefully: they are a domestic series, modelled on a household using 22 kilowatt hours a day, with GST included. They are not a commercial price.
Less than most operators expect, because the retail component is the smallest part of the bill. In the AER's own cost build up for 2026-27, network costs are 39 to 54 per cent of a DMO price and wholesale energy is 30 to 41 per cent, while the retail cost of serving the customer is 7 to 16 per cent. Switching retailer competes over the smallest slice. When you use power competes over the largest.
No, and treating it as an average is the most common mistake. The AER reports that only 15 per cent of small businesses are on a standing offer, 77,082 customers across the three DMO regions. The DMO is a regulated ceiling for people who have not shopped around, so a market offer should sit below it. Use it as the number to beat, not as the number to expect.