Most of what this directory measures is public: what a network charges at a post, state by state. The rate that decides an EV owner’s bill is the one at home, and it is the one figure in this field that no one publishes for the country as a whole. Here are the two plans whose rates we could read on the retailer’s own page, what 100 km costs at each, what the rest of the tariff does to the saving, and the arithmetic behind the claims we left out.
- OVO overnight
- A$0.045
- Origin scheduled
- A$0.08
- Anytime reference
- A$0.216
- Public Type 2 median
- A$0.45
An EV rate is not a discount on the plan a household already has. It is a plan: a set of rates for the whole house, of which the cheap block is one line. That is why this guide prints the rate and not a saving — A$113 a year of electric driving at A$0.045 says nothing about whether the plan is cheaper for a household whose dinner, heating and hot water are billed on the same account. We read neither plan’s other rates, which is why the test further down uses yours.
The two rates, read at the source
Both were read on the retailer’s own page on 2 November 2026. They are not the two cheapest plans in the country and this is not a recommendation; they are the two whose pages would give us the number. A tariff can change with notice, so treat each figure as the plan’s rate on the day it was read.
| Plan | Rate | When it applies | What it needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| OVO Energy · The EV Plan | A$0.045/kWh | 00:00–06:00, every day | A smart meter and an electric vehicle. |
| Origin Energy · EV Power Up | A$0.08/kWh | Scheduled sessions, at any hour Origin chooses | An eligible plan, a smart meter, a compatible EV and the Origin app. |
Read 2 November 2026. Both rates apply to energy used for charging; supply charges apply on both plans and neither page published a figure for them.
How Origin’s 8c becomes 8c
You plug in and set a time the car has to be ready by; the app schedules the session. The energy is billed at your plan’s standard rate and the difference to A$0.08 is credited on the next bill, so it is an effective rate rather than a line on the invoice. Instant charging — the button that starts a session now — is billed at the standard rate. The plan is in beta with a variable rate, which is a condition the other plan does not carry.
What OVO’s 4.5c does not cover
The six hours are the whole of it: outside them the plan’s other rates apply, and a household that gets home at seven and plugs in straight away does most of its charging at those. The app scheduling (evControl) is offered to Tesla owners at this stage, though the rate itself does not depend on the car. Controlled load is excluded, and supply charges still apply — OVO says both on the same page.
Your night
A rate is quoted per kilowatt-hour and a household thinks in kilometres. This is the same division as the cost-per-kilometre guide run over one night: 6 km per kWh is the median car in this catalogue, and the three charger powers are the three ways a car actually gets plugged in at home — a 10 A socket at 2.4 kW, a 32 A single-phase wallbox at 7 kW, and a three-phase one at 11 kW. The rate box takes your own bill as well as the two published rates.
Night lab · one night, one car
Does the day’s driving fit the cheap hours?
2 · How you charge it
3 · The car
4 · The rate
OVO Energy's EV Plan, 00:00–06:00 daily, read on its own page.
One night
A$0.30for 40 km
6.7 kWh at A$0.045 · Overnight
- Hours to refill
- 1.0
- A year of it
- A$110
A 7 kW charger puts 42 kWh back inside 6 hours — about 252 km at this car’s efficiency.
The same 40 km at the public Type 2 median of A$0.45 would cost A$3.00 — A$986 a year more than this rate.
Meter energy, before charging losses: a wall charger draws more than the battery stores, so a bill reads slightly above these figures.
Two things move the answer more than the rate does: how far the car goes on an ordinary day, and how fast it refills. The rate only multiplies what those two decide, which is why a plan hunt before a charger decision tends to be the wrong order.
The six-hour window is a constraint
A clock window is only worth what the charger can put through it. Over the six hours a midnight-to-six rate prices cheaply, at this catalogue’s median efficiency:
| Charger | Power | Energy in 6 h | Distance at 6 km/kWh |
|---|---|---|---|
| A socket charger | 2.4 kW | 14.4 kWh | 86 km |
| A single-phase wallbox | 7 kW | 42.0 kWh | 252 km |
| A three-phase wallbox | 11 kW | 66.0 kWh | 396 km |
Delivered to the battery while the car accepts it at that power; a car with a lower onboard AC limit takes longer. Charging losses mean the meter counts slightly more than the battery stores.
A socket charger is the honest constraint here: 2.4 kW over 6 hours is 14 kWh, about 86 km — enough for a short commute and not enough for a long one. A 7 kW wallbox turns the same window into 252 km. Anything the window does not cover is billed at the plan’s other rates, which is why the evening top-up is the expensive habit: it is the one charge that reliably lands outside the cheap hours.
What 100 km costs at each rate
The same car at 6 km per kWh, across every rate on this page and the directory’s two public medians, so the gap between charging at home and charging away is one table rather than two.
| Rate | Per 100 km | A year at 15,000 km |
|---|---|---|
| OVO overnight · A$0.045 | A$0.75 | A$113 |
| Origin scheduled · A$0.08 | A$1.33 | A$200 |
| Standard single rate · A$0.216 | A$3.60 | A$540 |
| Public Type 2 median · A$0.45 | A$7.50 | A$1,125 |
| Public CCS2 median · A$0.70 | A$11.67 | A$1,750 |
Energy only, at 6 km per kWh. Charging losses, supply charges, public session fees, idle fees and parking are not in these rows.
The top row and the fourth are the whole argument for charging at home where you can: A$0.75 per 100 km against A$7.50, or A$1,250 a year instead of A$113. The row in between is the one a lot of households are actually on: a single rate with no EV plan at all, still about half the price of the median public AC post.
What the rate leaves out
- The supply charge. Every plan bills a fixed daily amount for the connection, and it is paid in a week the car does not move. Neither page published a figure we could read, so neither is on this page.
- The rest of the house. The cheap block applies to the whole meter, and the plan’s other rates apply to everything outside it. A plan with a very low overnight rate and a very high evening one can cost more for a household that cooks and heats during the evening — the section below turns that into a test you can run.
- Charging losses. A wall charger heats the car and the pack, so the meter counts more than the battery stores. Every figure here is meter energy before that loss, and the lab says so on screen.
- Compatibility. Origin’s rate is restricted to a list of BYD, Mercedes-EQ and Tesla models, one brand at a time. A clock-window plan is not restricted by the car at all.
- Solar. Charging from your own roof is not a tariff: the cost is the feed-in tariff you do not earn on the exported kilowatt-hour, which is a different number from the one a retailer prints, and it changes with the time of day and the state.
The rest of the tariff decides it
A charging rate is one line of a bill. The plan also prices everything else in the house, and bills a daily supply charge whether the car moves or not. Neither retailer published those figures to us, so this page does not print them — which leaves “is the EV plan worth switching to?” as a test you run on your own two bills, with the magnitudes below saying how much the test is worth running.
The window is the easy half. At A$0.045 against A$0.216, every kilowatt-hour charged inside the window is 17.1c cheaper, so 15,000 km a year — 2,500 kWh — saves A$428. Everything after that is decided by what the plan charges once the window closes.
The test
The plan wins when the window saving is larger than the premium it charges on the rest of the house plus any extra supply charge:
kWh charged in the window × 17.1c > household kWh a day × the premium per kWh × 365 + extra supply charge a day × 365
Three numbers off two bills, and the sign tells you which plan to keep. A positive result means the EV plan is the cheaper of the two.
| What the plan costs you | A year | Window charging to cover it | Driving at 6 km/kWh |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1c/kWh on the rest of the load | A$55 | 320 kWh | 1,921 km |
| 5c/kWh on the rest of the load | A$274 | 1,601 kWh | 9,603 km |
| 10c a day more supply charge | A$37 | 213 kWh | 1,280 km |
| 20c a day more supply charge | A$73 | 427 kWh | 2,561 km |
| 50c a day more supply charge | A$183 | 1,067 kWh | 6,402 km |
The gap is 17.1c a kWh — A$0.216 less A$0.045. The per-kWh rows assume 15 kWh a day for the house, before the car.
A worked case, with the rest of the tariff invented because we have not read it: a household using 15 kWh a day for the house, on the A$0.216 single rate, moves to the EV plan and charges 15,000 km in the window. The window is worth A$428. A 5c premium on the other 15 kWh a day takes A$274 back, and another 20c a day of supply charge A$73, leaving A$81. The plan is still ahead — and a second 5c on the evening rate would put it behind.
That is the answer, and neither headline number contains it. An EV plan usually wins for a household that drives a fair distance and keeps its evening load modest, by tens or a low hundreds of dollars a year. It loses when the plan prices the hours the house actually uses at twice the flat rate it replaced, or when its supply charge is much dearer. Read the peak and shoulder rates before the window rate: a car charged at A$0.045 does not rescue a plan that doubles its rate when the oven is on.
The claims we didn’t print
Three things a reader will meet while looking this up, and why none of them is a row in the tables above.
1 · “Home charging costs about 27c a kilowatt-hour”
A figure near 27c, attributed to an industry ownership survey, circulates widely. We could not open the survey, so it is not a number in this guide. Look at what it implies: it sits above even the standard single rate of A$0.216, and six times above the overnight rate a retailer publishes. Either it describes a flat anytime rate on a plan nobody optimised, or the number was collected for a purpose other than pricing a charge. A reader settles it in a minute from their own bill; we could not settle it from the source.
2 · “EV plans charge 5 to 12 cents overnight”
Seven more plans exist — AGL, Powershop, CovaU, GloBird Energy, Alinta Energy, Synergy and ActewAGL — and a round-up published in October 2026 puts the market’s overnight EV rates at roughly 5c to 12c. We could not read those retailers' plan pages — AGL's refuses a non-browser request, and the rest returned nothing usable — so the range comes from a second-hand round-up and no figure from it is in this guide. The two rates above fall inside that range, so the range is probably right. A range is not a tariff, and a guide that prints one as a row invites a reader to budget from a figure nobody will bill them.
3 · “A Tesla Model Y costs A$121 a year to charge”
Origin’s comparison page puts a Model Y at A$121.31 a year on EV Power Up over 12,000 km, against about A$500 on standard home charging and A$1,968 for a petrol SUV of similar size. The rate is checkable and we print it; the totals are the retailer’s own comparison, so here is the check. A$121.31 at A$0.08 is 1,516 kWh, and 12,000 km on 1,516 kWh is 7.9 km per kWh. The catalogue’s Model Y figure is 6.9 km per kWh; at that efficiency the same distance uses 1,739 kWh and costs A$139.13 at the same rate. Both can be arithmetically right — the retailer may assume a shorter year, a different car or a different distance — but only one describes the car in front of you.
Why provenance is the whole guide
A rate read on a retailer’s page is a fact about one plan. A national average is a fact about a sample: who was asked, which plans they were on, and which hours they charged. The two are not interchangeable, and the spread between them here — from A$0.045 to about A$0.27 — is wide enough to change whether an electric car looks cheaper to run than a petrol one. A reader deserves to know which of the two a figure is before they budget from it.
Your own number
The rate that matters is on your last bill: the usage rate including GST, in cents per kilowatt-hour. The lab above has a box for it. Two things to check while you use it — that the rate is the one that will apply when you actually charge rather than the headline rate on the plan’s first page, and that the plan’s window matches the hours you are at home. A car plugged in at seven in the evening on a midnight-to-six plan pays the standard rate for the evening.
The rest of the arithmetic is on the cost-per-kilometre guide, which divides any tariff by the car’s efficiency. The public medians behind the last two rows are on the cost pages, state by state.
The whole page in five lines
- 1Two plans would publish their rate to us: A$0.045 in a six-hour window and A$0.08 on sessions an app schedules.
- 2At 6 km per kWh, that is A$0.75 to A$1.33 per 100 km, against A$7.50 at the median public Type 2 post.
- 3A 7 kW wallbox puts about 42 kWh — 252 km — into the cheap hours, and a socket charger puts in a third of that.
- 4The plan still has to win on the rest of the house: 1c more for its other load costs 1,921 km of window charging, and 10c a day of extra supply charge costs 1,280 km.
- 5There is no national home rate, and the only figure that is yours is the one on your bill.