Market Review: Open
Overview
On 25 July 2024, the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) self-initiated a broad, forward-looking review (The Pricing Review) to address the important role that electricity pricing, products, and services will play in supporting the diverse needs of customers, including delivering the consumer energy resources (CER) that is being acquired, and will continue to be acquired, for the energy transition.
The review is examining how markets and regulatory frameworks can provide the products and services that best match consumer preferences, now and into the future.
The review’s key areas of focus are:
- market arrangements that provide for consumer choice between a range of appropriate pricing structures, products, and services that suit their needs and preferences.
- the role of distribution networks in enabling the right incentives, products, and services for consumers, and the efficient cost and pricing outcomes that result.
- the role of retailers and energy service providers in effectively packaging and pricing electricity products and services to match consumer preferences.
The Commission is committed to undertaking the review in an open, collaborative, and transparent manner. This involves making use of existing AEMC forums plus project-specific groups to seek ongoing input from a range of interested stakeholders.
We consider that this is an important review required under the CER roadmap to realise the benefits of CER for all energy consumers, including those without CER, and to support CER integration in the National Electricity Market.
We released a draft report
On 11 December, we published a draft report outlining six recommendations under three themes to achieve our vision for a dynamic energy services market.
We aim to implement reform as quickly as possible while also balancing potential risks and costs of rapid change.
Written submissions to the draft report closed on 13 February 2026
We received 2,712 submissions to the draft report.
All submissions have now been uploaded. We have uploaded them as follows:
- Submissions from an organisation or company, have been uploaded under the categories of “Submissions” and “Late Submissions.”
- Submissions from individuals, where personal information was required to be redacted, were uploaded under “Individual submissions,” depending on how they were submitted:
- Submissions sent as attachments were uploaded as separate documents
- Submissions sent through our website or by email were grouped
- Submissions sent through the Solar Citizens form were combined
The order and form in which submissions were uploaded does not reflect the order in which they were assess by the Commission.
We published supporting reports and held a public forum on 23 April 2026
To support our preparation of the final report, we published two reports on 23 April.
Smarter, cleaner, cheaper energy: What network tariff reform means for consumers. Pricing review distributional impact analysis
In our draft report, we recognised that further analysis of our proposed network pricing reforms would be especially important and committed to publishing the analysis on the benefits and distributional impacts of network pricing reform. This modelling report presents that analysis.
Consumer protections to support network tariff reform
Our draft report and the modelling report identify that the proposed reforms could create risks of bill increases for some customers. We commissioned analysis from HoustonKemp Economists, outlining an assessment of options that could be considered to protect consumers against these potential bill impacts.
We held an online public forum on 23 April 2026 where the project team presented these reports. Q&As from that forum have been published.