WHAT WAS CLAIMED
A graphic shows the change in median electricity bills between 2021/22 and 2025/26.
OUR VERDICT
Misleading. The graphic uses cherry-picked median market offers from the priciest regions rather than median household bills.
AAP FACTCHECK - A Liberal Party graphic is painting a misleading picture of household power bills by using cherry-picked data.
The graphic claims the median household power bill in Australian states and the ACT ranges from $1925 to $2858 a year, however this omits regions with lower bills and more people.
The figures in the graphic also don't show median household bills, but the median advertised price, which is significantly higher than separate data measuring bills directly.
The graphic also contains other errors, including mislabelled date ranges.
The Liberal Party published the graphic in a July 6, 2026 Facebook post that claimed to show "median bills" in Australian states and ACT between 2021/22 and 2025/26, and the percentage increase over this period.
It was also posted by Liberal MP Jason Wood two days later.
When asked what the figures were based on, the Liberal Party responded to AAP FactCheck with three sets of data: The Australian Energy Regulator's (AER) Retail Markets Report 2024/25, AER retail performance data for the Q1 2025/26 and energy market data from Victoria's Essential Services Commission for Q1 2025/26.
The figures in the graphic match the data in the AER's Retail Markets Report 2024–25, which tracks "median market offers" (see Figure 2.3, Median market offers).
A market offer is an electricity plan that retailers advertise to households and the figures are based on average household usage. The median is the midpoint price of these advertised offers.
The figures list offers for 13 distribution networks - areas serviced by a single electricity distributor - in NSW, South Australia, Queensland, ACT, Tasmania and Victoria.
While the Liberal graphic claims the data shows bills in 2021/22 and 2025/26, the matching figures in the AER report are for the September 2021 and June 2025 quarters.
The graphic has cherry-picked the zones used, citing only offers from higher-priced regions outside of capital cities, while excluding figures from lower-priced urban areas that include far more people.
For example, the graphic uses figures for Queensland's regional network provider, Ergon Energy, where the median offer was $463 higher than the state's urban provider, Energex, in the June 2025 quarter.
That's despite separate AER figures showing Energex had more than twice as many customers in 2025 (see Sheet 10, Customer numbers).
Similarly, the graphic uses figures for the Essential Energy zone in NSW, where the median market offer was $730 higher than the urban Ausgrid zone in June 2025.
Essential Energy covers much of rural and regional NSW and had nearly half the number of customers as Ausgrid in 2025, which services greater metropolitan Sydney.
The median offer in the state's other zone, Endeavour Energy, was also $451 lower.
Prices also increased at a slightly slower rate in the urban zones omitted from the Liberals' graphic (see graph below).
There is only one distribution zone for South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT.
The $1925 price listed for Victoria's 2025/26 bill in the graphic also appears to be a typo.
The 2021/22 figure for Victoria in the graphic is identical to the median offer in the AusNet distribution zone in September 2021, but the June 2025 figure for this zone is $1965, not $1925.
Dylan McConnell, an energy expert at the University of NSW, said regional zones have longer transmission lines and serve fewer households, increasing costs per customer.
"A lot of the cost difference between the networks comes down to this," he told AAP FactCheck.
While the AER report states market offers can be a reasonable proxy for consumer prices (page 42), they do not track household bills directly.
However, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) does track median household bills based on samples of customer data in its market inquiry reports.
The latest report was released four days after the Liberal Party graphic was posted.
It includes figures that show median household bills in the year to June 2025 were between $670 and $1293 lower than shown in the graphic, when excluding rebates (Figure 2.1, Median bills paid by residential customers).
When rebates are included, bills were $982 to $1874 lower.
The latest ACCC figures are for the September 2025 quarter and likewise show bills were $648 to $1229 lower than in the graphic when excluding rebates, or $937 to $1512 lower when rebates are included.
Thomas Longden, an energy economics expert at University of Western Sydney, said the graphic wasn't a reasonable presentation of electricity data.
The ACCC figures are a more accurate measure of household electricity bills as they are based on actual retailer data and reflect real power usage patterns, Dr Longden told AAP FactCheck.
The AER figures meanwhile are based on an average electricity usage profile, which doesn't capture how users respond to price signals like time-of-use tariffs and solar energy, he said.
"How much you use during the time of day massively impacts your bills," Dr Longden said.
When compared with earlier ACCC figures (Supplementary Table 3.9), it shows median bills still increased between the year to September 2021 and the year to June 2025, but mostly at lower rates than the graphic suggests.
When excluding rebates, Southeast Queensland was the only market where the ACCC data showed a larger increase than the AER data, with prices rising by 56.7 per cent.
However, price increases in NSW and Victoria were less than half that shown in the graphic.
When rebates are included, median bills actually fell in two states during this period and remained flat in the other two.
This ranged from a 15.3 per cent fall in Victoria, to a 1.4 per cent increase in South Australia.
When looking at price changes between June 2022 and September 2025 - the closest approximation to what the graphic claims to show - the price changes were also lower, except in South East Queensland when rebates are excluded.
The ACCC does not publish figures for Tasmania and only publishes data for south-east Queensland, not the state as a whole, while data for consumers in the ACT is included in the NSW figures.
Dr McConnell also noted that the AER figures don't reflect actual household bills, adding that the figures in the graphic also don't account for inflation, which was roughly 20 per cent over the four-year period.
While ACCC's latest report (p33) shows inflation-adjusted power prices have mostly increased since 2021, Dr McConnell said it has not been at the level suggested in the graphic.
"The way it is presented and framed is quite misleading and incomplete," he told AAP FactCheck.
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