Is Gas Being Phased Out in Australia? What Homeowners Need to Know (2026)

The short answer: phase-out at end of life

According to the Energy Efficiency Council, Australia's peak body for energy efficiency and electrification, the national plan for household energy calls for phasing out gas appliances and replacing them with efficient electric alternatives at end of life. That framing matters. It is not a demand that households rip out working equipment; it is a plan built around the replacement cycle that happens anyway.

Every gas hot water unit, ducted heater and cooktop in the country will eventually fail. Each failure is a decision point. If the default choice at that moment is an efficient electric replacement, the housing stock electrifies over roughly one appliance lifetime without anyone being forced to scrap usable equipment.

The practical implication for a homeowner is simple: decide now what you will install when your gas appliance dies, rather than making that decision under pressure with cold showers and a plumber standing in the laundry.

Some states already restrict new gas connections

The clearest signal is in new construction. Victoria has banned new gas connections for new homes, meaning new builds in the state are designed all-electric from the outset. Once a jurisdiction stops adding new customers to the gas network, the network's customer base can only shrink.

That has a second-order effect homeowners should understand. Gas distribution networks have large fixed costs recovered across their connected customers. As households leave, those fixed costs are spread across fewer remaining customers — which puts upward pressure on the daily supply charge for everyone who stays. Being among the last homes on a shrinking network is not a comfortable financial position.

Our gas vs electric homes comparison goes deeper on how this plays out for existing homes.

What "electrification" actually means

Electrification sounds abstract until you translate it into the three appliances that use gas in a typical Australian home.

Note the pattern: the two big loads are both replaced by heat pumps. Electrification in a home is largely a heat pump story.

The efficiency case — and what it does to your rating

A gas appliance burns fuel to make heat, and some of the energy in that fuel leaves through the flue. A heat pump does not create heat, it moves it — so it can deliver more heat energy than the electrical energy it consumes. That is the entire efficiency argument, and it is why efficient electric equipment outperforms the gas equivalent even before you add solar.

This matters directly for your energy rating. NatHERS Whole-of-Home assessment looks beyond the building fabric to the appliances that heat, cool and provide hot water. Swapping inefficient gas equipment for efficient electric equipment improves the appliance side of that assessment, while the thermal shell — insulation, glazing, sealing — continues to drive the star rating for the building itself.

Which is also why order of operations matters. Sealing and insulating first means you can install a smaller, cheaper heat pump that runs less often. Electrifying a leaky home just means running efficient equipment against an inefficient building.

How an assessment answers this for your home

Generic advice can only take you so far, because the value of going electric depends on your climate zone, your building fabric, your existing appliances and how you use the house. A NatHERS assessment resolves that by modelling your actual property.

• Where your home sits today, as a star rating and a modelled energy profile.
• What switching each gas appliance to efficient electric does to that result.
• Whether fabric upgrades should come first, and which ones carry the most weight.
• A sequence you can spread across years instead of doing everything at once.

If you want a rough sense of your current position before booking, our free energy rating calculator gives an estimate in a couple of minutes.

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