TAS Annual Electricity Concession — $645.56 per year via daily 176.866c rebate

What Is This Payment?

The Tasmanian Annual Electricity Concession is the headline cash benefit for low-income and pensioner households in Tasmania, recorded inside the rule database as a monetary primary Group A rule with parent_cluster TAS Energy Rebates. The entitlement_scope is household over a financial_year, meaning the rebate attaches to the household's electricity account rather than to the individual card holder, and accrues across the full 365 days of each Australian financial year from 1 July to 30 June. The headline figure of $645.56 in amount.value is the largest single state-level energy concession in the TAS Energy Rebates cluster, dwarfing the much smaller Heating Allowance ($56) and the time-limited Energy Bill Relief ($150).

The administering body is the Tasmanian Department of Premier and Cabinet through Concessions Tasmania, but the operational pathway sits with licensed electricity retailers — Aurora Energy is the dominant residential retailer, with smaller competitors covering specific market segments. The retailer is the only intake channel listed in application_meta.channels = [retailer]; there is no online portal, no service centre walk-in, no Service Tasmania form. The card details must be supplied directly to the retailer's customer-care team, which then attaches the daily rate to the billing record from the registration date forward.

The rule's design intent is to spread a meaningful annual rebate across every billing cycle rather than pay it as a lump sum, softening the cash-flow impact of high Tasmanian winter electricity bills. Compared to the sibling Heating Allowance, which targets PCC-only households with a small lump sum, this rule is broader on cards (PCC + HCC + DVA Gold) but stricter on the account-holder gate. Unlike the time-limited Energy Bill Relief, it has no expiry date and is the persistent baseline benefit Tasmanian card-holder households rely on year after year.

How Much Can You Get?

The rule's amount.type is fixed with amount.period yearly, value $645.56, and outputs.display_period yearly. Underneath the headline figure, the daily rate from amount.notes is 176.866 cents per day. The retailer multiplies the daily rate by the number of days the household qualified inside the billing period and applies the credit directly against the bill, so a quarterly bill covering 91 days produces a credit of approximately $160.95, and a monthly bill covering 30 days produces a credit of approximately $53.06.

The headline annual figure resolves to $645.56 only when the household qualifies for all 365 days. A household that registered the card with the retailer from 1 December accrues the daily rate for 212 days, producing a partial-year benefit of approximately $374.96. The retailer does not back-date before the registration date, so timing of the registration call materially affects realised value.

Audit recipe. First confirm state = TAS. Second check the concession card type against the three-card list and reject CSHC or no card. Third verify the user is the named account holder on the electricity bill. Fourth multiply 176.866 cents by the number of qualifying days in the billing period to derive the bill-level credit. Fifth confirm the rule has no caps, multipliers, reduces_if entries, or date_windows, so the only variable is the day count inside the billing window.

Eligibility Conditions

The eligibility block is an all set with three items; every item must pass for the daily rate to apply.

1. Tasmanian residency: state = TAS. The rule is jurisdiction-locked. A residence outside Tasmania, even on the same electricity retailer's national network, fails this gate. Holiday homes in TAS owned by mainland residents typically fail because the primary residence sits in another state.
2. Eligible concession card held: concession_card_type in [pensioner_concession_card, health_care_card, dva_gold_card]. Three card types unlock this rule: the pension-type Pensioner Concession Card, the allowance-type Health Care Card, and the veteran Department of Veterans' Affairs Gold Card. The Commonwealth Seniors Health Card, the Low Income Health Care Card variants, and DVA White and Orange cards are not listed and do not pass.
3. Named on the electricity bill: electricity_bill_account_holder = true. The retailer cannot apply the daily rate to a billing record that does not carry the card holder's name. Renters whose landlord retains the electricity account, share-house occupants whose flatmate is the account holder, and adult children living with parents on the parent's account all fail this gate.

Required fields collected at intake: state, concession_card_type, and electricity_bill_account_holder are the three fields in the rule's required_fields block. Application evidence is short — only concession_card sits in evidence_required — because the retailer verifies the card directly with Services Australia or DVA when the customer registers it.

The exclude block, conflicts list, and affects list are all empty. Card holders can stack this concession with the Heating Allowance ($56) when the card is PCC and assets pass the heating-allowance test, and with Energy Bill Relief ($150) for any electricity account holder, producing a maximum stacked annual benefit close to $851.56 for a PCC household.

Two practical considerations matter. First, the daily rate carries across retailer switches only if the new retailer registers the card on the day the old contract ends; even a few days of gap produces an uncreditable window. Second, the rebate is attached to the billing record rather than the card, so a household with multiple eligible card holders still receives one daily rate per electricity account, not a doubled rate.

How To Apply

Application metadata defines a single channel: retailer. There is no Service Tasmania application form, no Concessions Tasmania portal upload, and no MyGov claim. The customer contacts their licensed electricity retailer — Aurora Energy for most residential households, smaller retailers for specific accounts — and asks for the concession card to be registered against the billing record. The retailer's customer-care team validates the card with Services Australia or DVA and applies the daily rate from the registration date forward.

Evidence requirements listed in the rule are minimal:

• Concession card — the physical or digital card showing card number, holder name, and expiry date. The retailer needs the card number to complete the validation lookup. A card photo emailed to the retailer's customer-care address is usually acceptable.

Two practical tips help. First, register the card with the retailer the same day it is issued — the daily rate accrues from the registration date forward and the retailer does not back-date to the card's issue date, so a six-week delay between getting the PCC and calling the retailer costs roughly $74.28 in foregone daily rebate. Second, when moving house within Tasmania or switching retailer, re-register the card immediately on the new account, because the rebate does not carry across automatically and the retailer's onboarding workflow does not always prompt the customer to re-supply the card details.

Read the official Concessions Tasmania electricity page

Rule-Based Scenarios

Scenario 1: PCC pensioner, full-year accrual

Tiriki is a 71-year-old single Age Pensioner in Hobart who has held her Pensioner Concession Card continuously since 2019 and has been the named account holder on her Aurora Energy bill since she bought the unit in 2014. She registered the card with Aurora the week she received it. For the 2025-26 financial year she qualifies for all 365 days at 176.866 cents per day, accruing the full headline figure of approximately $645.56 against her quarterly electricity bills. With the federal-state Energy Bill Relief stacking on top, her total electricity rebate this year is close to $795.56.

Scenario 2: HCC tenant whose landlord owns the account

Bohuslav holds a Health Care Card and rents a unit in Launceston. His landlord owns the strata title and historically kept the electricity account in the landlord's name with rent inclusive of bills. The card list health_care_card passes, the state gate state = TAS passes, but electricity_bill_account_holder = true fails because the bill is in the landlord's name. The daily rate cannot flow to him until the lease is renegotiated to put the account in his name; until then his realised benefit is $0 even though two of three eligibility items pass.

Scenario 3: DVA Gold Card holder, mid-year card registration

Jovita is a 68-year-old DVA Gold Card holder who relocated to Devonport in November 2025 and put the Aurora Energy account in her name immediately, but only registered the Gold Card with the retailer on 1 December 2025 after a friend mentioned the concession. From 1 December 2025 to 30 June 2026 she qualifies for 212 days at 176.866 cents, producing a partial-year rebate of approximately $374.96. Aurora does not back-date to her arrival date, so the four-week registration delay cost her around $50 in foregone daily accrual.

Scenario 4: Commonwealth Seniors Health Card, not on the list

Talisha is a 67-year-old self-funded retiree in Burnie who holds a Commonwealth Seniors Health Card but no PCC, HCC, or DVA card. She has been the Aurora account holder since 2009 and lives full-time in Tasmania. The state gate passes, the account-holder gate passes, but concession_card_type in [pensioner_concession_card, health_care_card, dva_gold_card] fails because CSHC sits outside the three-card list. She receives nothing from this rule, even though her household profile otherwise looks identical to a PCC pensioner in the same suburb.

Common Mistakes

• Treating CSHC as equivalent to PCC for TAS energy: the rule's card list contains only pensioner_concession_card, health_care_card, and dva_gold_card. CSHC unlocks several federal energy supports and some state rebates elsewhere, but it does not unlock this $645.56 daily concession. Self-funded TAS retirees on CSHC are the largest group of incorrectly self-assessed eligibility on this rule.
• Renter living in the property but not on the bill: the gate electricity_bill_account_holder = true is binary on the retailer's billing record. A PCC holder renting from a landlord whose lease keeps the electricity account in the landlord's name fails the rule entirely. The retailer can only credit the named account holder.
• Expecting automatic rebate without registering the card: the retailer channel is not the same as automatic delivery. Aurora and smaller retailers do not cross-reference Services Australia card data without explicit customer registration. New card holders must contact the retailer; the daily rate accrues only from that registration date forward, never back-dated.
• Reading $645.56 as a lump-sum payment: the value is a daily-accrual reduction of 176.866 cents on the retailer bill, not a cheque or BSB deposit. Households that switch to a non-mains supply, fall behind on bills enough to be cut off, or migrate to a prepay meter outside the standard billing system can lose access to the daily rate.
• Stacking confusion with the federal-state Energy Bill Relief: the $150 Energy Bill Relief for 2025-26 stacks on top of the $645.56 daily concession with no conflicts entry between them. A TAS card-holder household receives both, not a choice between them; the combined annual benefit is close to $795.56.
• Confusing daily rate with monthly fixed amount: the rate is 176.866 cents per day, producing approximately $53.06 a month or $160.95 a quarter, not a flat monthly figure. Households reading their first quarterly bill after registration sometimes assume the credit looks too small because the day-count varies by billing period.

Related Benefits

The rule sits inside the TAS Energy Rebates cluster and the broader Tasmanian concession-card-driven utility ecosystem. Six related pages share field gates, retailer pathways, or card-type pathways with this rule:

• TAS Heating Allowance — companion TAS energy rule that stacks on top for PCC holders only; uses the same Tasmanian residency check but adds a cash-asset test and pays a separate $56 yearly amount.
• TAS Tasmanian Energy Bill Relief — federal-state co-funded $150 yearly bill credit for 2025-26 that shares the electricity_bill_account_holder = true gate but does not require any concession card, broadening the audience to all TAS households.
• TAS Water and Sewerage Concession — sibling utility concession in the same Concessions Tasmania family that uses the same three-card list but applies to the water account holder rather than the electricity account holder.
• TAS Council Rates Concession — companion TAS housing concession for the same PCC, HCC, and DVA Gold cohort; shared concession-card pathway but assessed by the local council rather than the electricity retailer.
• Federal Energy Supplement — Centrelink-embedded fortnightly supplement that flows automatically to grandfathered recipients of qualifying primary payments; conceptually distinct from this state-level retailer rebate but lands at the same household budget line.
• Federal Health Care Card — prerequisite federal card that unlocks one of the three card values accepted in concession_card_type; without an active HCC, PCC, or DVA Gold Card the eligibility check on card type cannot pass.

Frequently Asked Questions