If you've seen the term “Victorian Default Offer” (VDO) on your bill or a comparison site and weren't sure what it meant, here's the short version — plus why we built this as a live checker instead of a one-off number.
The Victorian Default Offer is a maximum electricity price set and reviewed every year by the Essential Services Commission (ESC), Victoria's independent energy regulator — not by us, and not by any retailer. New VDO prices take effect on 1 July each year after a public review process.
It applies automatically to residential and small-business customers who are on a retailer's standing offer — in practice, anyone who hasn't actively chosen one of a retailer's own “market” plans. It exists as a safety net for people who haven't engaged with the market, and as a public benchmark every retailer has to disclose their market offers against.
In other words: the VDO is a reasonable, regulated price — but it is almost never the cheapest price available on your network. Retailers' competing market offers are where the real savings usually are, which is exactly what this tool compares.
Unlike the VDO, market offers aren't reviewed once a year — retailers can add, withdraw, discount, or reprice them at any time, often several times a quarter. A plan that was cheapest last month might not be today, and a brand-new offer can appear next week that beats everything currently on the market.
That's the reason a static “here's the cheapest plan” page — including this one, if we never updated it — goes stale fast. We re-pull live plan data directly from each retailer's own published feed, so the comparison you run today reflects what's actually on offer today, not a snapshot from whenever an article was written.
It's also why we built the subscription tier: instead of you having to remember to re-check every few months, we keep watching the market for your usage pattern and tell you the moment something cheaper turns up.
These are the current VDO benchmark figures we use as the “what you'd pay with no market plan at all” comparison point when you don't enter your own current bill on the check page. Your network (distributor) is shown on your bill — it's not the same as your retailer.
| Network | Supply charge | Usage rate | Controlled load | Indicative annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Citipower | $1.21/day | 26.0c/kWh | 16.6c/kWh | $1,481.00/yr |
| Powercor | $1.38/day | 28.2c/kWh | 17.3c/kWh | $1,633.00/yr |
| United Energy | $1.19/day | 27.4c/kWh | 17.3c/kWh | $1,529.00/yr |
| Jemena | $1.27/day | 27.5c/kWh | 21.4c/kWh | $1,563.00/yr |
| AusNet Services | $1.28/day | 32.0c/kWh | 22.1c/kWh | $1,748.00/yr |
“Indicative annual” is the ESC's reference amount for a typical single-rate residential customer on that network — not a quote for your household. Your own usage, tariff type, and any concessions change what you'd actually pay, which is why checking your real bill gives a far more accurate number than this table alone.