Electricity is not a luxury, but it is a necessity. In Australia, the electricity you pay for depends heavily on where you live and also whether you own a home or rent. Since 2021, prices have increased across the country, and the government rebates provided short term relief, but the prices have spiked again. The renters and low-income households are the categories of people who are most affected by these rising power costs.
Since October 2021, the electricity costs have significantly increased across the different cities in Australia. The prices peaked in the years 2022-23, and was relaxed after the government rebates took effect in the mid of 2023, and then soared again through 2025 and 2026. The government reliefs were temporary and did not manage to fix the issue.
The prices are not equal across the different cities in the country. As of April 2026, Melbourne and Sydney saw the highest electricity costs, while Brisbane, Hobart and Perth was comparatively lower of the lot. The gap between the cities that recorded the most expensive and least expensive prices represents more than 20 index points, which is a significant divide, entirely based on geography.
The heatmap here represents when the prices peaked through the years. The 2022-23 period saw the highest and most severe price spikes across the whole nation. Some of the cities saw back to back increases in the price spikes in double digits. No city managed to escape this crisis and the severity varied by city and timing.
In July 2023, the government introduced rebates for households. The prices dropped across the major Australian cities, but the relief was only short-term. By 2025, the prices increased again and broke the pre-rebate levels of cost across several cities. This raised questions regarding whether temporary subsidies can help address pricing problems in the country.
The final visualisation is the most notable. The cities where electricity became the most expensive includes a large amount of individuals who rent. Renters are unable to install solar panels, unable to switch electricity providers, and can’t do much in general to lower their electricity bills. Darwin is a good example, where nearly half of their residents rent, and yet the city saw some of the steepest price rises. For these households, there is no escaping from these power bills.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022). 2021 Census all persons QuickStats, Tenure type: Greater capital city statistical areas. ABS. https://abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/1GSYD
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026). Consumer Price Index, Australia: Table 10, CPI group, sub-group and expenditure class, index numbers by capital city. ABS. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/latest-release
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026). Consumer Price Index, Australia: Table 11, CPI group, sub-group and expenditure class, annual percentage change, by capital city. ABS. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/latest-release
Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. (2023). Energy bill relief fund. Australian Government. https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/energy-bill-relief-fund
Anthropic. (2026). Claude [Large language model]. https://claude.ai
I used Claude (Anthropic, 2026) to assist me with brainstorming on how to structure the markdown document, and debug R code. The visualisations were built and verified by me in RStudio.