Ask most people what energy plan they're on and they can probably tell you the retailer, and maybe the rate. Ask them what network tariff their home is on and you'll usually get a blank look. Fair enough too - because most retailers never mention it.
Every home connected to the grid is on a network tariff. It's assigned to your property by your local distributor (the company that owns the poles and wires in your area), and it determines how the network portion of your bill is charged. Some network tariffs charge a flat rate for every kilowatt hour, whenever you use it. Others are time-of-use, with peak, off-peak and sometimes "solar sponge" periods priced very differently. Some include demand charges based on your highest usage in a window. And a growing number include export components that reward you for sending energy to the grid at certain times, or charge a small amount for exporting when the grid is flooded with solar.
That structure shapes a big chunk of your bill. Network costs make up much of the daily supply charge you pay just for being connected, and they influence what you pay for every unit of energy on top. Yet on a traditional plan, you'd never know any of this was happening.
Why you've never seen it
A traditional retailer buys energy on the wholesale market, pays the network its charges, then blends everything into the rates on your plan. What you see is a single usage rate and a daily charge. What you don't see is how those numbers were built - including which network tariff sits underneath them and how the retailer chose to recover it.
We wrote recently about how some retailers are shifting more of their costs into the fixed daily supply charge - the part of the bill you can't reduce no matter how carefully you use energy. The network tariff is part of the same story. Retailers pay network costs and then decide how to pass them on to you, and because the underlying tariff is invisible, you have no way of checking whether the way that it's been packaged up works in your favour.
The result is that a genuinely important detail about your home's energy costs sits hidden behind the scenes - known to your distributor and your retailer but rarely to you.
What your network tariff changes
Your network tariff affects more than the size of your bill. It affects the shape of it.
If you're on a flat network tariff, energy costs the same to move through the wires at 6pm as it does at 2am. If you're on a time-of-use network tariff, the network portion of your evening usage can cost several times what it costs overnight, and midday usage can be close to free in some areas. If your tariff includes a demand charge, one heavy evening of usage can affect what you pay for a whole month.
For homes with solar, batteries or an EV, this matters even more. Some distributors now run two-way tariffs that pay a reward for exporting during the evening and apply a small charge for exporting in the middle of the day. If your home is on one of these, the timing of your exports changes what they're worth. If you don't know you're on one, you can't respond to it. And then there are demand tariffs, which deserve a section of their own.
Demand tariffs, and why we think they shouldn't exist
If you're in Ausgrid's patch, covering much of Sydney, the Central Coast and the Hunter, there's a decent chance your home is on a demand tariff without you knowing. Ausgrid assigns new residential customers to its residential demand tariff by default, and has been moving homes onto demand tariffs since 2019 when they get a new connection or upgrade to a smart meter. You can ask to be moved to a time-of-use tariff instead, but you have to know the demand tariff exists first. Most people don't.
At first glance, a demand tariff looks like a bargain. Take Ausgrid's residential demand tariff: the network usage rate is just 2.81 cents per kilowatt hour, a fraction of what the equivalent time-of-use tariff charges at peak times. The catch is the demand charge sitting next to it. Instead of paying for energy as you use it, you pay based on your highest burst of usage during the peak window, typically the busy late afternoon and evening hours. Cook dinner while the dryer runs and the air con fights a heatwave, and that single half hour sets your demand charge, no matter how frugal you were for the rest of the month.
That's the design problem. A demand tariff doesn't reward consistent good behaviour. It punishes your worst moment. Energy experts have made the same point: to come out ahead on demand pricing, you have to know what every appliance in your house draws and stay on guard through every half hour of every peak window. Nobody lives like that, and nobody should have to.
You might think a battery solves this, since it can cover your evening usage and keep your peak draw low. It helps, but it doesn't make a demand tariff good. A battery on a demand tariff spends its life playing defence. There's no export reward built into the tariff, so all that stored energy has nothing to earn, and if the battery runs flat on one cold evening while the heater and oven are going, that single spike still sets your charge. Your best asset gets used as an insurance policy against a penalty that shouldn't exist in the first place.
Two-way tariffs get it right
Compare that with the two-way tariffs some distributors now offer. The structure is simple: exports are rewarded during the evening when the grid actually needs energy, and a small charge applies for exporting in the middle of the day when the grid is drowning in solar.
For a home with a battery, the strategy writes itself. Soak up cheap or free solar through the middle of the day, then send it back in the evening and get paid for it. Instead of tiptoeing around a penalty, your battery is chasing a reward. That's a price signal a household can actually act on, and it's the direction we'd like to see every distributor head, rather than defaulting people onto demand tariffs they never asked for.
How to find out what you're on
Your network tariff is tied to your property's National Metering Identifier, or NMI, which you'll find on any recent bill.
A rough way to get a sense of it is through the government's Energy Made Easy comparison site (or Victorian Energy Compare in Victoria). When you enter your NMI, it looks up your meter details, and the plans it shows you (flat rate versus time-of-use, for example) reflect what your meter and tariff setup can support. Treat this as a guide rather than a definitive answer.
For the definitive answer, you can ask. Your distributor can tell you which tariff your NMI is assigned to, and so can your retailer, although with a traditional retailer you may need to ask directly because it won't be on your bill.
If you discover you're on a demand tariff, you're not stuck. Ausgrid customers, for example, can be reassigned to the time-of-use tariff after at least one full calendar month of billing.
What Amber does differently
Amber doesn't blend network costs into a made-up rate. We pass them through at cost, exactly as your distributor charges them, alongside the wholesale price of energy, which we also pass through with no markup. Our only margin is a flat monthly subscription.
Because there's no blending, there's nothing to hide. We publish the network tariff rates for every distributor we operate in, right down to the individual tariff codes, on our help centre. You can look up your tariff and see precisely what the network charges for peak, off-peak, demand and export components, before you've signed anything.
Once you're a customer, your network tariff isn't a mystery either. You can see which tariff your home is on in the Amber app, and if a different tariff offered by your distributor would suit your household better, you can request a change through the app.
Some distributors are also trialling new tariff structures, including export tariffs that reward sending energy to the grid when it's needed most. Because we pass tariffs through at cost, those rewards flow to you rather than disappearing into a retailer's margin.
The point of all this
You can't make good decisions about something you can't see. The network tariff assigned to your home shapes what you pay every day, and on a traditional plan it's buried under a blended rate you have no way to unpack.
Amber's model is to show you the real numbers: the real wholesale price, the real network charges, and a subscription that stays the same regardless. Once you can see how your bill is actually built, you can start making it work for you.
Want to see the network rates for your area? They're all published at help.amber.com.au.
