Time of use tariffs in NSW.

The short answer first

Switching to a time of use tariff and changing nothing else is worth almost nothing. On the Australian Energy Regulator's own reference prices for 2026-27, a benchmark Ausgrid household on 3,900 kWh a year pays $1,899 on a flat rate and $1,893 on time of use. That is a saving of six dollars. A year.

• $6Ausgrid, flat vs time of use, per year
• $8Endeavour, flat vs time of use, per year
• $74Essential Energy, flat vs time of use, per year

Australian Energy Regulator, Default Market Offer 2026-27, residential prices as at 1 July 2026. Ausgrid at 3,900 kWh a year, Endeavour at 4,900 kWh, Essential at 4,600 kWh.

Those numbers are the honest starting point, and they are the thing no government page will put in front of you. The tariff is not the saving. The tariff is only the price signal. What actually saves money is moving power use out of the peak window, and how much that is worth depends entirely on which network you are on, because the three NSW networks define peak differently.

On Ausgrid the peak window is 42 hours a week and it includes Saturday and Sunday. On Essential Energy it is 15 hours a week and weekends are always off-peak. Same state, same idea, nearly three times the exposure. That is the difference worth knowing before you rearrange your evenings.

Which network are you on?

This decides everything else on this page, and it is not the same thing as who sends you the bill. Your retailer is who you pay. Your distribution network is who owns the poles, wires and meter, and who sets the windows. You do not choose it, your address does.

• Ausgrid covers Sydney's inner, eastern and northern suburbs, the Central Coast and the Hunter.
• Endeavour Energy covers Sydney's greater west and south west, the Blue Mountains, the Illawarra and the Southern Highlands.
• Essential Energy covers most of regional and rural New South Wales.

Each of those links goes to a page dealing with that one network in detail: the exact windows, the seasonal rules, the business tariff codes and their demand windows, and the quirks that only apply there.

Your network is named on your electricity bill, usually in the fine print near your NMI, the long number that identifies your connection point. If the bill is not to hand, the boundary is roughly this: if you are in the older established Sydney suburbs you are almost certainly Ausgrid, and if you are west of Parramatta you are probably Endeavour. The NSW smart meter page walks through working out which network you are on and what changes when your meter is swapped.

The seasons change the rules, and not in the way you would guess

Each network handles seasonality differently, and two of the three do something genuinely useful that is worth knowing.

Ausgrid switches peak pricing off entirely for four months. During April, May, September and October there is no peak period at all, so every hour of those months is off-peak. Peak season is June to August and November to March, which tracks heating and cooling load. If you are on Ausgrid, load shifting is something you do for eight months of the year and can stop worrying about for the other four.

Endeavour changes the rate, not the window. Its peak window stays 4pm to 8pm on business days all year round, but the price inside it is seasonal: a high season rate from November to March, and a lower one from April to October. So the discipline is the same year round, the reward for it is bigger in summer.

Essential Energy does not vary by season at all. Same windows, same structure, all year.

One more difference that catches people out: public holidays. Endeavour treats gazetted NSW public holidays as non-business days, so there is no peak charge on them. Essential Energy treats a public holiday as a normal day, and Ausgrid's residential peak applies every day regardless. So a Christmas Day roast is peak-priced on two of the three networks and free of peak on the third.

Endeavour's solar soak window is the standout

Endeavour runs a solar soak period from 10am to 2pm, every day including weekends, where network power is at its cheapest. The reason is rooftop solar: in the middle of the day there is more generation than the network wants, so it pays to encourage consumption rather than discourage it. That makes 10am to 2pm the single best time on that network to run a dishwasher, a washing machine, a pool pump or a hot water heater.

Neither Ausgrid nor Essential Energy has an equivalent residential window on their standard time of use tariff, though Essential does offer a separate Sun Soaker tariff built around the same idea. If you are an Endeavour customer with a timer or a smart plug, the solar soak window is the easiest money on this page.

The verdict rule: does time of use actually pay for you?

Here is the arithmetic, and it needs three numbers off your own bill. Do not use ours, use yours, because retail rates vary a lot more than network windows do.

Run that on the regulator's own 2026-27 rates and each network gives a different answer. These are worked from the Default Market Offer, so they are the regulated reference rather than any one retailer's plan.

The Endeavour result is the one worth stating twice, because it inverts the advice everyone gives. On the regulated reference rates, an Endeavour household that uses no electricity at all in the evening peak still pays more on time of use than on a flat rate. Moving the dishwasher to 9pm does not fix it. What fixes it is running the heavy things in the middle of the day, where the rate is 12.35c against a flat 33.73c.

Ausgrid is the opposite case and the reason the benchmark saving was only six dollars: the benchmark household sits just above the 22.5 percent line, so the tariff switch on its own is a wash. Cross that line and it stops being a wash.

What shifting is worth

This is the part that matters, and it is a much bigger number than six dollars. Take one kilowatt hour a day, move it out of the peak window, and a year of that is worth:

• Ausgrid: about $132 a year, per kilowatt hour a day. The 60.20c peak is two and a half times the 24.04c off-peak, the widest gap in the state. Load shifting pays best here by a distance.
• Essential Energy: about $66 a year, moving from the 42.12c peak to the 24.14c off-peak.
• Endeavour Energy: about $40 a year moved overnight, or about $78 a year moved into the 10am to 2pm solar soak window instead. On this network the middle of the day beats the middle of the night, which is the reverse of the usual advice.

For scale: an electric storage hot water system is usually 5 to 8 kWh a day on its own, and a pool pump 3 to 5 kWh. Put both on a timer on Ausgrid and you have moved something like 9 to 13 kWh a day, which on those numbers is the difference between a six dollar tariff switch and a genuinely worthwhile one.

Which gives the honest verdict this whole page exists to deliver: time of use is worth it if, and only if, you can reliably move something out of the peak window, and on Endeavour only if you can move it into the middle of the day. If your household cannot shift anything off the evening block, the flat rate is the safer bet and the tariff switch will not rescue you.

To put your own numbers through it rather than ours, the time of use calculator runs this same arithmetic on your network and your usage.

What is shiftable

The full playbook, load by load and network by network, is on shifting usage off peak.

In rough order of how much they are worth and how little you will notice:

• Hot water. Usually the single biggest shiftable load in a house, and often already on a controlled load circuit. Worth checking what yours is set to.
• Pool pump. Large, runs for hours, and nobody cares when it runs. The easiest win on this list.
• Dishwasher and washing machine. Both have delay timers built in. Free to use, and most people never have.
• Electric vehicle charging. The biggest single load most homes will ever add. Charging at 10pm rather than 6pm is worth more than everything else here combined.
• Clothes dryer. Shiftable, though the one most likely to fight your actual routine.
• Air conditioning. Partly shiftable by pre-cooling before the peak window starts, rather than by going without.

What is not worth chasing: lights, the fridge, phone chargers, the television, the modem. They are either too small to matter or cannot be moved.

If you want the shifting to happen without anyone remembering to do it, that is automation, and it is what a smart home is genuinely good for. Timers and smart plugs handle the simple cases, and a Home Assistant dashboard or a set of Grid Connect plugs can run the schedule for you. A washing machine alert is a useful nudge if you are running the machine on a delay and want to know it finished.

You get a say in this, for two years

If your meter was replaced on or after 1 December 2025, the retailer that installed it cannot move you off a flat rate onto a time of use or demand tariff without your explicit informed consent. That protection runs for two years from the installation, and it applies in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, but not in Victoria, Western Australia or the Northern Territory, which sit outside the national retail rules. It came in as a transitional rule alongside the accelerated smart meter rollout, and it exists because moving people onto cost reflective tariffs without telling them properly was already happening.

After the two years the retailer can change your tariff structure, but it has to give you notice and an estimate of what your last year would have cost on the new tariff. Switching retailers ends the protection, which is the edge most people miss. The NSW smart meter page sets out the exact notice period and the other edges of the rule.

The practical step either way: look at your most recent bill, find the tariff name printed on it, and if it changed and you did not expect it to, ask your retailer what you are on and what else they offer.

Where these numbers come from

Every window and figure on this page traces to a primary source, checked on 14 August 2026. Check any of it yourself rather than take our word for it.

• Ausgrid, Time of use prices, for the 3pm to 9pm window and the four months with no peak period.
• Endeavour Energy, Network Price List, section 6.1 Time of Day, for the 4pm to 8pm peak, the 10am to 2pm solar soak and the high and low season months.
• Endeavour Energy 2026-27 pricing proposal, approved by the regulator in April 2026, confirming those windows are unchanged for this financial year.
• Essential Energy, Network Price List and Explanatory Notes, for the interval and basic meter windows.
• Essential Energy 2026-27 pricing proposal, confirming the same tariff codes apply from 1 July 2026.
• Australian Energy Regulator, Default Market Offer 2026-27, for the flat rate versus time of use reference prices.
• Energy Made Easy, the government comparison site, for the plans actually available at your address.

The rest of this guide

• Time of use calculator: put your own network and usage through the break-even arithmetic on this page.
• Smart meters in NSW: which network you are on, what happens on install day, and your consent rights on a tariff change.
• Home energy dashboard setup: getting your own meter data on screen with the tariff windows drawn on it.

Page changelog

• 14 August 2026First published. Windows for all three NSW networks verified against primary sources. Default Market Offer figures taken from the 2026-27 determination effective 1 July 2026.

Network tariffs reset every 1 July and can drift in between. We review this page each January and July, and the date at the top of the page is the last time every figure on it was checked, not the last time the page was touched.