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A market contract is created when you consent (either by signing or by being voice-recorded) to a contract — usually in response to marketing such as by a door-to-door salesperson, or a telemarketer working on behalf of an energy retailer. You are agreeing to a specific offer from that retailer — it’s your explicit informed consent to the terms of the contract that makes it a market contract. A market contract is often for a fixed term, but it doesn’t have to be. It will sometimes have incentives for staying with the retailer — such as a discount for paying on time. Some 60-65% of contracts in Victoria are market contracts.
When you arrange to have the electricity or gas supplied — without formally recording your explicit informed consent to the terms of a contract — you go onto a standing contract. For example, you might have just rung the local retailer for the area you moved into and asked for the electricity and/or gas to be put on, so you could move in. While all Victorians have been able to choose their energy retailers for some years now, some customers haven’t made any changes and are still with the retailer they’ve been with all along. These customers are on standing contracts. The prices for standing contracts are published in the Government Gazette. It used to be that the Government had the power to check those prices but, from 1 January 2009, the retailers can decide their own prices for standing contracts. Some 35-40% of contracts in Victoria are standing contracts.
Return to Questions customers often ask us
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You can either set up an account with a LPG
retailer to arrange for ongoing deliveries (e.g. whether you would like
to set up an open-ended or fixed-term contract), which results in a
market contract; or you can buy LPG cylinders from an agent such as
your local gas service station without entering into a contractual
arrangement.
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