From 1 October 2026, Victorian households can opt in to a new electricity offer that makes power completely free between 11am and 2pm, every day of the week.
It’s called the Victorian Midday Power Saver, and it’s one of the biggest changes to household electricity pricing in years. But it isn’t a rebate, and it isn’t free money. The rates you pay outside that window go up to pay for it, which means the offer rewards households that can genuinely move their energy use into the middle of the day.
Here’s how it works, what it’s realistically worth, and how to set your home up to make the most of it.
Because in the middle of the day, Victoria often has more electricity than it can use.
More than 850,000 Victorian homes now have rooftop solar. On a sunny day, all of that generation floods the grid at once, pushing wholesale prices down to near zero. Meanwhile, the expensive crunch comes in the evening, when everyone gets home, turns on the heating and starts cooking at the same time.
The Midday Power Saver is designed to move demand out of that evening peak and into the solar-soaked middle of the day. Households get cheaper bills; the grid gets a flatter, more reliable demand curve. Victoria generated 44.6% of its electricity from renewables in 2025, beating its 40% target, and this is one way that surplus gets passed back to households.
This is the part worth understanding before you sign up. The Midday Power Saver isn’t a flat rate with a free window bolted on, it’s a four-part time-of-use tariff. Here are the ESC’s regulated rates for the first cycle (1 October 2026 to 30 June 2027), including GST:
There are two important things to pay attention to here.
First, the 4pm–9pm peak is expensive. Around 43 cents a kilowatt-hour on average, and nearly 50 cents in AusNet’s distribution zone. That’s where the cost of the free window is recovered. If your household runs the dryer, the dishwasher and the oven at 6pm, you’ll feel it.
Second, there’s a fair use cap on the free period. Draw more than the cap during the three-hour window and the extra is billed at the “solar soak” rate rather than free. For most homes that won’t be an issue, as a typical Victorian household uses around 15–16 kWh across an entire day. The exception is EV owners: a 7kW charger running the full three hours pulls about 21 kWh on its own.
The national Solar Sharer Offer sets its cap at 24 kWh a day and the Victorian scheme has been designed to align with it, but confirm the exact figure with your retailer when you sign up.
The Victorian Government estimates households on the Midday Power Saver could save between $149 and $428 a year, depending on their circumstances and assuming they shift 5% to 30% of their usage into the free window.
Households charging an electric vehicle during the free period could save considerably more, an estimated additional $674, or around $1,102 in total.
Those numbers come with an important caveat: shifting 20–30% of your daily consumption by changing when you run typical appliances is genuinely hard for a lot of households. If you can’t move much, the higher peak and off-peak rates could leave you paying more than you do now.
Good fit:
Think carefully:
You might assume the offer doesn’t for you, you’re already making your own free power at midday. But there are real angles worth looking at:
The Midday Power Saver rewards you for using power between 11am and 2pm. The problem for most households is that the power they actually need is at 6pm; dinner, heating, hot showers, the dryer, the EV plugged in for the night. Those are the hours the new tariff charges the most for.
A home battery is the piece of equipment that solves that mismatch. It lets you take energy at 11am and spend it at 6pm.
It works when your solar can’t.
On a clear summer day your panels already fill the battery for free. The gain shows up on the days your array underperforms: winter, cloud, rain, short daylight hours, or a home that has electrified faster than its solar system has grown. Those are exactly the days your evening consumption is highest. A battery paired with this offer means the evening peak is covered every day of the year, not just the sunny ones.
Three things to get right:
