Project timeline

Overview

Consultation Paper

This review is an opportunity to refresh and consolidate our guidelines to better reflect the energy market of today and tomorrow. 

On 12 November 2025, we released a consultation paper seeking stakeholder views on opportunities to simplify and improve the guidelines. We invited feedback on 5 overarching issues that our guidelines can influence:

  • Improving retailer communications by using design principles, making communications more accessible and improving benefit change notices
  • Managing increasing complexity by communicating secondary settlement points, differentiating certain types of offers and making plan names easier to understand
  • Making it easier to access a better offer by clarifying better offer messages, providing them in more places and defining the deemed better offer
  • Improving price transparency by making fees and charges easier to understand and improving transparency for embedded network customers of authorised retailers
  • Improving payment assistance information by making hardship policies more consumer friendly and helping customers access concessions and rebates. 

Retail guidelines review - Consultation paper - November 2025 View details

We are looking at what we can do to simplify energy communications and ensure customers are receiving clear, useful and timely information and support.
To do t

Retail guidelines review - Consultation paper - Nov 2025.pdf
PDF (412.78KB)
Retail guidelines review - Consultation paper summary - Nov 2025.pdf
PDF (151.33KB)
Authors
AER
Content type
Document

Submissions

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Initial consultation closed on 23 December 2025. 

Non-confidential submissions, including summaries of verbal submissions and the stakeholder workshop, will be published here in early 2026.

Stakeholder workshop

On 11 December 2025, we held an online workshop with 26 invited stakeholders, including retailers and consumer groups. The workshop focused on opportunities to make energy plan information more effective in different contexts, including: 

  • comparison information that aims to prompt customers to consider comparing their plan
  • plan summaries that aim to help customers understand and compare key plan features
  • plan information documents that aim to help customers understand important details to choose the best plan for them.