Who Pays for Electricity for a Remote Employee? You Banked the Saving and They Got the Bill

Your employee pays, and as of today that got measurably worse. The Australian Bureau of Statistics released its September figures this morning with electricity up 12.8 per cent over twelve months, a main contributor to a housing group up 5.2 per cent. So who pays for electricity for a remote employee has a short answer here: whoever the meter is registered to. What changed today is the size of it.

Which is fine, right up until they work out the number.

Outstaffer’s answer to the hardware half is to put a managed laptop on a monthly line and ship it with the role, a disclosure of interest more than a pitch. No equipment product on this market pays anybody’s power bill, ours included.

The Commonwealth already priced a home workspace at 70 cents an hour

The ATO’s fixed rate method lets someone working from home deduct a flat 70 cents for every hour worked there. That is the Commonwealth’s published estimate of what a home workspace costs to run, and the closest thing to an official price on the question.

What does the 70 cents cover?

Four things: electricity and gas for heating, cooling and lighting, internet or data, phone usage, and stationery and computer consumables. Take the fixed rate and none of those can be claimed separately. Laptops and desks sit outside it.

It has been 70 cents for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 income years. Before that, 67 cents.

What a remote employee’s electricity costs, and whose P&L it is not on

Thirty-eight ordinary hours a week across 46 working weeks, allowing leave and public holidays, is 1,748 hours. At 70 cents that is $1,223.60 a year, per head, of running cost the tax office treats as real. Ten people at home full time puts $12,236 a year of it inside your business and none on your profit and loss. It is on theirs.

A deduction is not a reimbursement. They claim it against assessable income, recover a fraction at their marginal rate, and carry the rest in cash all year.

How much of that is the 12.8 per cent?

Not all of it, and saying otherwise would be dishonest: the rate bundles power in with internet, phone and stationery, and the ABS figure moves one of the four. The comparison that holds is simpler. The fixed rate went from 67 cents to 70 in four income years, a rise of 4.5 per cent. One item inside it rose 12.8 per cent in twelve months, which the ABS attributes largely to Commonwealth electricity rebates ending. That rebate was doing work nobody accounted for.

Rates and thresholds change, so check your own position with your accountant rather than this paragraph.

The honest counter is that they were lighting the house anyway

Nobody switches the heating on because they started a job. Someone home five days a week was already paying to keep that room habitable, and a laptop and a lamp are a marginal load rather than a full one. The ABS figure is a retail price movement across every household, not a measurement of what one desk adds.

Plenty of employees will never run this sum. True, and a thin thing to rely on.

Related reading

• Who Pays for Internet for a Remote Employee?
• Somebody Has To Buy The Laptop

Price it before your employee prices it for you

On devices we name a figure: a suggested allowance of $325 for a new hire in Australia or New Zealand, $175 in the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, India and Malaysia, set by the client and claimed through expenses. Power is not in it. The point is not that the number covers everything, but that somebody decided it and budgeted it, unlike what an unpriced hour of work quietly costs.

Decide the same way here. Either a stated allowance on your payroll line, or a plain statement that running costs sit with the employee. Both are defensible. A saving you booked when the desk emptied and never revisited is not one.

If you want every cost of a head on one invoice rather than spread across people who never agreed to carry it, sign up and price a role, or see what ships with a new starter first.

So: has anyone on your team asked who pays for electricity for a remote employee yet, or will you find out at their next salary review?