Managing your phone bill

Your telco must give you a bill for each current billing period, except if your service is prepaid, or if all of the following apply:

• you pay by direct debit
• the charges are a fixed amount for each billing period
• you have agreed that your telco will not issue a bill, except when the amount due is more than 10% higher than the fixed amount of your plan.

Your telco may give you an option to choose how you get your bill:

• paper, sent by regular post (your telco may charge you to receive paper bills)
• email
• online via the telco’s website or app.

If you want information about an old bill, your telco must send you this for free for bills from up to 2 years before the date of your request. You can ask for older billing information, but you may be charged for it.

Generally, your telco should send your bill within 10 working days of the end of your billing cycle. Sometimes there can be a delay before your telco adds a call to your bill.

Your telco must try to include all charges for the current billing period. They must tell you when charges are from a previous billing period – this is called ‘back-billing’. They cannot charge you for a call more than 160 days after you made it.

Some telcos want customers to pay bills by direct debit. This is when you authorise them to withdraw money from your bank account at a set time to pay your bill. 

If you pay by direct debit, your telco must:

• have your authorisation before they can take money
• make it easy for you to cancel a direct debit authorisation
• send you the billing amount before the direct debit occurs
• only withdraw money on the date you specify
• cancel your direct debit within 3 working days if you request it.

You can access information or tools to help you manage your spending. To avoid unexpected large bills, make sure you know:

• how to use your mobile overseas with international roaming
• your plan’s data limit and how much mobile data you’ve been using
• how to check if you are using wi-fi or mobile data
• the cost of calls from mobiles or call charges from landlines.

Ask your telco if they have spend-management tools to help you. These are things like getting SMS alerts when you use a certain amount of credit, using an app to check your usage or getting a warning before using more expensive services.

Whether you receive a bill from your telco, or access your billing information via your telco’s app or website, you should check:

• the rate your telco has charged is the rate you expected. This rate is on your contract or your plan's Critical Information Summary
• all the charges on the bill are yours.

If you see numbers or charges you don’t know, contact your telco as soon as possible.

Talk to your telco if you are having money issues. They have to help if you can't pay your bill.