The best power plan in NZ for EVs and solar (2026 guide)

There's no single "best" power plan in New Zealand, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What there is is a best plan for your house, and it depends on one thing more than any other: when you use power, not how much.

That's good news if you've got an EV or solar, because you have more control over timing than almost anyone else on the grid.

2026 has been a big year for this. From 1 July 2026, every large retailer (anyone with 5%+ market share: Contact, Genesis, Mercury and Meridian, about 83% of the retail market) is required by the Electricity Authority to offer at least one plan with cheaper off-peak rates. From 1 April 2026, lines companies pay retailers a rebate for power exported at peak, which retailers can pass on to you. And the default solar export limit doubled from 5kW to 10kW.

Translation: the plans below didn't exist in this form two years ago. It's worth a fresh look.

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First, the "best for you" picker

Find yourself in this table, then read the matching section.

If you have an EV

An EV adds roughly 2,000–3,000 kWh a year to your bill. Because extra usage doesn't add a daily charge, what matters is your variable rate, so realistically that's $550–$1,000 of new electricity a year. About half that if you shift it all into a cheap night window. This is the single biggest lever you have.

The half-price-night plans

Three retailers now do essentially the same thing, and they're the cleanest option for most EV owners:

• Contact Good Charge. 50% off your usage rates, 9pm–7am, every night. No fixed term.
• Genesis EVHome. 50% off variable rates 9pm–7am. Same shape.
• Meridian Night Saver. Cheaper rates 9pm–7am, open term, plus a $10/month credit for your first 12 months. (Meridian's old fixed-term EV Plan has been retired; existing customers keep their rates until the term ends.)

A 10-hour window at 7.4kW is about 74kWh of charge, far more than anyone needs in a night. The window length is never the constraint.

Also worth a look: Electric Kiwi's MoveMaster runs night rates at half the peak rate, but from 11pm, not 9pm, which is two hours less useful. Pulse's Power Shift adds half-price all weekend on top of an 11pm–7am night rate. Mercury's EV Fuel Package is the weakest of the majors: only 20% off in the same window, it verifies you actually own an EV, and the discount only lasts two years.

When does a time-of-use plan beat a flat rate?

How much of your power has to be off-peak before a time-of-use plan beats a flat rate? There's a simple rule:

Share of use you need off-peak = (peak rate minus flat rate) ÷ (peak rate minus off-peak rate)

Say a flat plan charges 32c, and a time-of-use plan charges 38c peak and 28c off-peak (illustrative numbers, not a real plan). (38 − 32) ÷ (38 − 28) = 60%. So you'd need at least 60% of your usage off-peak just to break even.

When the gap between peak and off-peak is small, you need most of your use off-peak to come out ahead. With a plan that halves the night rate, it's much easier to beat a flat rate. The rule ignores any difference in daily charge, so compare those too.

The free-hours plans

Uniquely Kiwi, and genuinely good if your charging is modest.

• Contact Good Nights. Free power 9pm–midnight, Monday to Friday. Three hours at 7.4kW is ~22kWh a night, which covers about 130km of driving. Important: not available if you have solar.
• Electric Kiwi Hour of Power. One free hour a day, on any Electric Kiwi plan, which you pick from 9am–5pm or 9pm–7am and can change daily in the app. Worth ~7kWh a day at a fast home charger.

If you charge away from home

Some retailers discount public fast charging when you're on their EV plan.

• Contact Good Charge. 10% off bp charge public charging, rising to 70% off if you charge between 7–9am or 4–6pm.
• Genesis EVerywhere. If you're on Genesis EVHome, you pay your home rate at ChargeNet public chargers instead of ChargeNet's normal price. Genesis says that can save up to 70%. Some sites are excluded, and idle fees aren't covered.
• Electric Kiwi and Octopus. Both let you add ChargeNet sessions to your power bill, but you pay ChargeNet's normal price. Handy, not a discount.

The trade-off: an EV plan can have a higher daily charge, or higher unit rates, than the same retailer's standard plan. A public charging discount only pays off if you fast charge often, for example several road trips a year, or you have no charger at home.

What it's worth varies a lot. Two readers told us what they got from it (reader-reported):

• One has saved about $850 so far in 2026.
• Another saved $87, after spending $48.

We include public charging discounts from any retailer that offers them.

Three things nobody puts in the marketing

1. The daily charge doesn't get discounted. Free hours aren't free. You still pay the fixed daily supply charge right through them.
2. The cheap night is paid for by a dearer day. Toast Electric is one of the few retailers publishing a full rate card, and the shape is instructive: on their Wellington day/night plan the night rate is exactly half the day rate (33.6c day, 16.8c night for a standard user, incl GST). But that day rate sits about 22% above their flat anytime rate of 27.6c. If your household is daytime-heavy, a night plan can leave you worse off even with cheap charging.
3. Road user charges now cost more than the electricity. Light EVs have paid RUC since April 2024 at $76 per 1,000km, or about 7.6c/km. Charging on a night rate costs roughly 3c/km. Any "EVs cost $2 to fill up" claim you see is quietly ignoring the bigger number.

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If you have solar

Here's the uncomfortable truth first: a unit of solar you use yourself is worth roughly 1.5–3× a unit you export. Self-consumption saves you your variable import rate, typically 22–38c/kWh depending on retailer and network. Export earns you 8–24c. So run the dishwasher at midday, charge the car in the sun on weekends, and treat buy-back as the consolation prize it is.

(You'll see "solar is worth 4× exported" quoted a lot. That compares export against the all-in average price of about 40c/kWh, but that figure includes your daily fixed charge spread across your usage, and generating your own power doesn't get you out of the daily charge. Compare against the variable rate only.)

Buy-back rates as they stand

Rates show what a household that isn't GST-registered is paid. If you're GST-registered, add 15% to rows the retailer quotes excl GST.

Rates checked 5 October 2026. Octopus, Ecotricity, PowerEdge and Contact rechecked 30 October 2026.

Daily charges depend on your network and address, so we haven't listed them here. Get a quote for your address, or use Powerswitch or Billy. On low-user plans, the daily charge is capped at $1.80 a day excl GST ($2.07 incl GST) from 1 April 2026. That cap is removed on 1 April 2027.

Retailers quote buy-back both ways, and it's a 15% difference: PowerEdge's 12.5c excl GST is 14.4c incl GST. If you're not GST-registered (most households aren't), you're paid the rate exactly as the retailer quotes it: an excl GST quote lands in your account without GST, an incl GST quote with it. So each rate here is shown as quoted, and the "Retailer quotes" column says which way. Rates vary by network and change often, so confirm before switching.

The trap in that table

Every peak export window sits in the morning (from 7am, ending 9–11am) and the evening (ending around 9pm). Solar generates at midday.

Without a battery, you have almost nothing to sell during the hours that pay best. You'll realise the off-peak rate on nearly all your export. Which means a panels-only household on Octopus Peaker, headline rate 23c, actually lands around 10c. Worse than a boring flat 12.5c plan. Several peak windows are weekday-only too, writing off 104 days a year. Meridian's 24c is narrower still: July, August and September only, so for the rest of the year it's a flat 15c.

Peak rates are battery products. If you don't have storage, sort by the off-peak or flat number and ignore the headline entirely.

If you do have a battery

Now the peak rates mean something, and you can arbitrage: charge overnight cheap, export into the evening peak. Be realistic about the maths, though. If peak export is 23c and your night import is 16c, the gross spread is 7c. But at ~90% round-trip efficiency you need 1.11kWh in for every 1kWh out, so the real spread is closer to 5c/kWh. And peak export windows are weekdays only. A 10kWh battery pushing 5kWh into peak every weekday earns roughly $65–90 a year. That doesn't pay for a battery on its own; resilience and self-consumption still do the heavy lifting.

The exception has been Canterbury. Ecotricity and lines company Orion ran Resi-Flex, which paid 60c/kWh for peak export (7–11am and 5–10pm weekdays) against a 16c off-peak rate. You needed to be on the Orion network with a battery on one of seven approved inverter brands: Huawei, AlphaESS, Redback, SolaX, Sungrow, Solis or SigEnergy. The catch was that it was a small trial. Orion reported 50 households signed up, each exporting about 8kWh at peak a day on average. The trial was planned to run to the end of winter 2026, and Orion hasn't announced what comes next. If you're in Christchurch with a battery, ask Ecotricity whether it's still open.

Battery plus free hours. Readers with a battery on a free-hours plan reported the biggest wins. Here's what they told us (reader-reported):

• One household on an Electric Kiwi plan took about 76% of its yearly grid import during the free Hour of Power, by charging the battery and the car in that hour.
• The same reader exports around 4kWh from the battery in the hour before the free hour, at the peak buy-back rate, then refills it during the free hour.
• A Contact customer charging only in free hours reported 524kWh free against 284kWh paid in one month.

How much you can pull in one hour is limited by how fast your battery and charger can charge, and by your supply (single or three phase).

If you have solar and an EV, but no battery

This is a common setup and a very good one, because the car is your battery. A typical EV holds 40–80kWh, several times the size of a home battery. Every unit you put into it at midday saves you your full import rate (22–38c) instead of earning 8–16c in export. Two EVs give you two places to put that solar.

The trick is matching the charge to the sun. A standard 7.4kW wallbox on a single-phase supply will happily pull most of that from the grid unless your panels are producing more than the car draws. Look for a charger with a solar or "excess only" mode that follows your surplus, or at least schedule charging for 10am–3pm on days the car is home. A plain 2.3kW portable charger is a surprisingly good match for a modest array's midday surplus.

Then pick the plan:

1. Ignore the peak export headline, same as any panels-only home. Sort by the flat or off-peak buy-back. Meridian and Ecotricity ecoSOLAR are near the top of the table.
2. A night rate works better for you than for most. The usual catch with night plans is a dearer day rate, but your panels cover much of your daytime use, so that catch bites less. Worth it if one car commutes and has to charge overnight. Meridian Night Saver pairs a 9pm–7am rate with its 15c buy-back.
3. Free hours are a mixed bag. Contact Good Nights isn't available with solar. Electric Kiwi's Hour of Power still works, but pick a night hour: your midday power is already free.
4. Check the low-user plan. Low-user plans are priced to suit homes buying less than 8,000kWh a year from the grid (9,000kWh in the Lower South region, which includes Christchurch). You only buy what your panels don't cover, so a big array can make low-user the cheaper option even with two EVs. The regulation behind them ends on 1 April 2027, after which retailers can reprice them freely, so recheck then.
5. Big systems bank credit in summer. Ask how your retailer treats a running credit over winter: it should carry forward, but terms vary.

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Actually making the switch

Big loads to think about

Before you compare, list the big loads in your house:

• Spa pool or hot tub (it can use more than an EV)
• Hot water cylinder, and heat pump hot water if you're switching
• Pool pump
• Dishwasher, washing machine and dryer (easy to time-shift)
• Heat pumps in winter

If you can move these to off-peak or solar hours, they change which plan wins.

Run the numbers on your own usage

The most useful comments we got came from readers who tested plans against their own data. You can do the same:

1. Get your data. Ask your current retailer for your half-hourly or hourly smart meter data. Your retailer has to give you this data for free within five business days. You can ask by phone or email, and many retailers also let you download it from your online account.
2. Split it up. For each plan you're comparing, add up how much you used in its peak, off-peak and free hours. Plans draw those lines at different times, so do this once per plan.
3. Do the maths. Use the break-even rule to see whether a time-of-use plan beats a flat rate on your split, then add each plan's daily charge.
4. Check it. Run your address through Powerswitch and Billy, below, and see if they agree.

Comparison tools

Most NZ retailers price by address, so their plan pages rarely show a usable rate until you plug in your details. Two free comparison tools do that for you:

• Powerswitch. Run by Consumer NZ, covers 97–99% of households, with average reported savings of around $350 to $480 a year depending on the source. It excludes one-off joining credits from its rankings, and doesn't ingest your half-hourly smart meter data, so it approximates TOU and free-hours plans rather than modelling them exactly.
• Billy. The Electricity Authority's own site, launched March 2026. Publicly owned, takes no commissions, models results against real consumption data from ~27,000 households.

Use both. Have your ICP number (15 digits, on your bill) and at least 12 months of usage handy.

Switching takes 3–4 days and your power never goes off. It's free unless you're breaking a fixed term, so check for exit fees, and check whether a joining credit covers them. Once you've left, your old retailer is barred under the industry code from targeted win-back marketing for 180 days, so you won't get a "come back" call the week after.

One more thing worth knowing: from 1 April 2027, retailers must check your plan against their own cheaper options at least once a year, tell you if there's a better one, and let you change to it for free. It's a good rule. It's also no substitute for looking yourself, because it only compares you against that retailer's plans.

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Common questions

Is an EV power plan worth it if I don't drive much?

Often not. If you charge around 200kWh a month or less, or you're home during the day, a good flat-rate or standard plan can beat an EV plan, because EV plans can have higher daytime rates. Test both against your own usage.

Do any power companies give discounts on public EV charging?

Yes. Contact Good Charge gives 10% off bp charge public charging, rising to 70% off at set times, and through Genesis EVerywhere, Genesis EVHome customers pay their home rate at ChargeNet chargers. The discount only pays off if you fast charge often, because the EV plan itself can cost more.

Are buy-back rates quoted with or without GST?

Both, which is why they're easy to mix up: PowerEdge's 12.5c excl GST is 14.4c incl GST. If you're not GST-registered, you're paid the rate as the retailer quotes it, so this guide shows each buy-back rate as quoted and says which way. If you're GST-registered, add 15% to the excl GST ones.

How much of my power needs to be off-peak to beat a flat rate?

Divide (peak rate minus flat rate) by (peak rate minus off-peak rate). With a 32c flat rate against 38c peak and 28c off-peak, you'd need at least 60% of your use off-peak just to break even, before any difference in daily charge.

Is the Hour of Power worth it with a home battery?

It can be. One reader on Electric Kiwi took about 76% of a year's grid import in the free hour, by charging the battery and the car then. How much you can pull in one hour depends on your battery, your charger and your supply.

How we put this together

We take rates from retailer websites and comparison sites, confirmed with retailers where we could. The line under the buy-back table says when each rate was checked. Import rates include GST, and buy-back rates show what a household that isn't GST-registered is paid. Spotted something wrong or out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it.

Rates and plan terms change constantly and vary by network area. Everything here was accurate as at October 2026. Always confirm with the retailer before you sign up.

Changes since first published

• Updated 30 October 2026. The buy-back table now shows what a household that isn't GST-registered is paid, and which way each retailer quotes GST. Added PowerEdge, a section on public charging discounts, a break-even rule for time-of-use plans, a battery and free hours example, a big loads checklist, how to test plans on your own usage, and common questions. Corrected: Electric Kiwi and Octopus add ChargeNet to your bill but don't discount it. Updated the Resi-Flex trial details. Thanks to readers on Reddit for raising PowerEdge, public charging discounts and the break-even rule.
• Updated 5 October 2026. Added the "Solar + EV, no battery" scenario after a reader's comment, and rechecked the rates.
• First published 9 August 2026.