The short version: a dynamic tariff = standing charge + a base unit rate your supplier sets + a dynamic rate that follows the day-ahead wholesale market and changes every half hour. Tomorrow's 48 prices are published today. The dynamic part is capped at 50c/kWh; the base rate sits on top of it. You need a smart meter with a CTF score of 4. There is no meaningful "estimated annual bill" — your cost depends on when you use power, not just how much.
matched.ie is not a CRU-accredited comparison site. From June 2026 the accredited comparators are required to compare dynamic tariffs — the list is on cru.ie. Our own rankings and reviews start at best energy in Ireland.
What is a dynamic electricity tariff?
Every tariff you have ever had — 24-hour, NightSaver, smart time-of-use — fixes its unit rates in advance. The supplier guesses where the wholesale market will go, adds a margin, and you pay the same rate at windy midnight as on a still, freezing evening when half the country's kettles are on. A dynamic tariff removes that padding: part of your unit rate is the wholesale price itself, half hour by half hour.
This is not a fringe experiment. The CRU — the energy regulator — required Ireland's larger suppliers to offer a Standard Dynamic Price Tariff from June 2026, with a defined structure, a price cap, mandatory day-ahead publication of prices and mandatory price alerts. Energia, SSE Airtricity, Bord Gáis Energy, Electric Ireland and Prepay Power / Yuno are the obliged names. The idea, imported from the EU's electricity market rules, is simple: Ireland has a grid that is cheap when the wind blows and expensive when it does not, and households with flexible load — EVs, heat pumps, immersions, batteries — should be able to buy at the real price instead of a smoothed one.
One property of the standard version surprises people: the dynamic rate in each half hour is the same for every supplier, because it is the same wholesale market. Suppliers compete on everything wrapped around it — the standing charge, the base unit rate, the app that shows you tomorrow's prices. That makes dynamic plans unusually easy to compare and unusually hard to market, which may be why none of the suppliers shout about them.
What are the three parts of a dynamic price?
A standard dynamic tariff bills you three ways, and you need all three to judge one:
| Component | Who sets it | How it behaves |
|---|---|---|
| Standing charge | The supplier | Fixed daily amount regardless of usage, exactly as on any other plan — urban (DG1) and rural (DG2) differ. Standing charges explained. |
| Base unit rate | The supplier | A per-kWh rate charged on every unit. It can be flat or carry its own day/night/peak bands — Electric Ireland's, for instance, is banded. This is where suppliers differentiate. |
| Dynamic unit rate | The day-ahead wholesale market | Changes every half hour, published a day in advance, identical across suppliers, capped at 50c/kWh. Cheap when demand is low or wind is plentiful; dearest at the evening peak. |
On top of the tariff itself, the usual bill lines still apply: the PSO levy and 9% VAT. Nothing about a dynamic plan exempts you from either — the dynamism is confined to that third component. If reading the resulting bill sounds like work, it is; the anatomy is covered in the electricity bill explained, and dynamic bills must additionally show the half-hourly price and usage breakdown so you can check what you paid against what was published.
Each evening, your supplier publishes all forty-eight of the next day's half-hourly prices through its app, online account or email. That is the operational heart of the product: you can look at tomorrow tonight, spot the cheap valley and the expensive peak, and set the dishwasher, the immersion or the car accordingly. Suppliers must also offer alerts that ping you when the price crosses a threshold you set.
What does a typical dynamic day look like?
The CRU's own consumer material sketches the daily shape, and it matches how the wholesale market has behaved for years. The table below is illustrative — a shape, not a price forecast; every actual day differs with the weather.
| Time of day | Dynamic rate, typically | What to run |
|---|---|---|
| Midnight – 7am | The cheap valley — demand is at its floor, and a windy night pushes prices lower again | EV charging, storage heating, immersion, battery charging, delayed-start appliances |
| 7am – 5pm | Climbing steadily as the country wakes and works; solar can soften mid-day | Normal life; washing and drying in the early afternoon if you are at home |
| ~5pm – 7pm | The spike — national demand peaks around 18:00 and the dearest half hours of the day land here | As little as you can move: this is the window the whole product punishes |
| 7pm – midnight | Falling back as demand drops off | Anything that could not wait for the small hours |
To see what the spread can mean per unit, take Electric Ireland's published dynamic-plan base rates and bolt the two extremes onto them. This is arithmetic, not a quote — the dynamic rate on a real day sits somewhere between the extremes:
Illustrative: Electric Ireland base rates checked 28 August 2026; the 1c and 50c dynamic values are an assumed floor and the regulatory ceiling, not observed prices. The gap is the whole story — nearly an eight-fold difference per unit between the best and worst half hours on the same plan, on the same day. Move load across that gap and you win; sit in the spike and you lose.
How does the 50c/kWh cap actually work?
Wholesale electricity prices can, on rare evenings, go vertical. The standard dynamic contract carries a regulatory ceiling for exactly that reason, and the CRU's wording is precise: you will never be exposed to prices above 50 cent/kWh for the dynamic unit rate.
Read that carefully, because most summaries flatten it into "dynamic tariffs are capped at 50c a unit", which is wrong in the direction that costs you money. The cap applies to the dynamic component only. Your supplier's base unit rate is charged on top of the dynamic rate, so in a capped half hour you pay base + 50c — around 72.6c/kWh on Electric Ireland's peak band, on the arithmetic above. The cap is real protection against the market's worst evenings; it is not a promise about your all-in unit price, and it does nothing about the standing charge, the PSO levy or VAT.
The cap is also why "dynamic" is less terrifying than the horror stories from markets without one. The famous cases of households paying thousands in a week under dynamic pricing happened on uncapped products abroad. The Irish standard contract was designed after those stories, not before.
Which dynamic tariffs are actually live in Ireland?
Five products, verified on 28 August 2026 against the suppliers' own pages and terms. Note how little price information some of them publish — that is itself worth knowing before you ring up:
| Supplier | Product | What we verified (28 Aug 2026) | Meter requirement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electric Ireland | Dynamic Tariff | Standing charge €328.58 urban / €400.48 rural inc VAT; banded base rates of 19.81c day / 8.52c night / 22.55c peak inc VAT (from 19 May 2026); the capped dynamic rate sits on top. Requires an online account and e-billing. | Smart meter, CTF 4 |
| Energia | Smart Track | Half-hourly day-ahead pricing on the standard structure; €50-per-fuel exit fee; no rates published as an annual figure — Energia prints no EAB for it, correctly. | Smart meter, CTF 4 |
| Bord Gáis Energy | Smart Dynamic | 16.73c/kWh base rate plus the half-hourly dynamic rate; standing charge €331.96 urban / €394.50 rural. Bord Gáis's own material flags the plan as financially risky for unmanaged usage — unusual candour. | Smart meter with day-ahead comms |
| Yuno | Standard Dynamic Plan | Dynamic rate capped at 50c/kWh; standing charge €397.39/yr urban inc VAT — the highest of the verified five. We could not verify a dynamic-specific exit fee this week; ask before signing. | Smart meter |
| Prepay Power | Prepay Dynamic | The pay-as-you-go take: half-hourly day-ahead pricing on top of published base rates, dynamic component capped at 50c/kWh. Top-up discipline plus price-watching is a lot of homework. | Smart meter, CTF 4 |
| SSE Airtricity | — | On the CRU's obliged list, but we could not verify a named, purchasable dynamic product on its site this week. Ask SSE directly if you are a customer. | — |
Because the dynamic rate is identical everywhere, choosing between these comes down to the boring components: Yuno's €397.39 standing charge versus Electric Ireland's €328.58 urban is a real €69-a-year gap before either of you boils a kettle, and the base-rate structures differ enough that a night-heavy household should prefer a banded base (cheap night band under the cheap dynamic hours) over a flat one. Run your own comparison on an accredited comparator once you know your usage shape.
What meter do I need for a dynamic tariff?
A smart meter — no exceptions, because the entire product depends on half-hourly reads — and not just any smart meter, but one whose communications actually work. ESB Networks scores each installed meter with a CTF (Communications Technically Feasible) rating; a score of 4 means the meter has a strong, reliable signal and can ship half-hourly interval data dependably. Suppliers require it for dynamic plans because a meter that drops reads makes half-hourly billing impossible.
Over 2.1 million smart meters are installed in Ireland, so most homes qualify — but "most" is not "all", and a meter in a signal blackspot can sit below CTF 4 through no fault of yours. Before you plan a switch around a dynamic tariff, confirm your score: your supplier can check it from your MPRN, or ask ESB Networks directly. If you are still on a 24-hour or NightSaver meter, the wider smart-meter picture — what the meter changes, what it locks in — is covered in the smart meter guide, and the milder time-banded plans it enables are in time-of-use tariffs explained.
Who should — and should not — go dynamic?
The honest test is one question: can you move your biggest loads, most days, without making your life worse?
Dynamic suits you if a meaningful slice of your usage is shiftable and preferably automatable: an EV that charges while you sleep (see the EV tariff ranking for how dynamic compares with fixed-window EV plans), a heat pump or immersion on a timer, a home battery that can drink at 3am and pour at 6pm, smart appliances with delayed starts. These households buy most of their units in the valley, dodge the spike, and can beat any fixed-rate plan on the market — a solar-plus-battery house is close to the perfect customer. The willingness to glance at tomorrow's prices, or let a home-energy system do the glancing, is part of the deal.
Dynamic does not suit you if your evening is your evening. A family that cooks at six, runs the dryer at seven and has nobody home overnight to soak up cheap hours would buy its units in the dearest window of every day — the 5pm–7pm spike lands squarely on dinner. For that household a dynamic plan is not neutral, it is actively worse than a fixed rate, because the fixed rate at least averages the peak away. There is no shame in this: it is most Irish households. A discounted 24-hour plan from the main ranking or a night-rate plan will serve you better, and the find-your-energy matcher will say so.
If you are anywhere between the two — some flexibility, no automation — start with a smart time-of-use plan instead. It teaches the same habit with fixed, known bands and no daily price-checking, and NightSaver vs smart covers that decision.
Why is there no estimated annual bill for dynamic plans?
Every other page on this site shows year-1 and year-2 estimated annual bills. This one cannot, and any site that prints an EAB for a dynamic tariff is making it up. An EAB needs a known unit rate to multiply by the CRU's 4,200 kWh typical usage. A dynamic plan's effective unit rate does not exist until after you have used the power: it is the weighted average of 17,520 half-hourly prices a year, weighted by your usage in each half hour. Two households using identical annual kWh can land on materially different totals purely on timing.
That is also why our year-1 vs year-2 analysis has no dynamic column, and why the suppliers themselves publish no EAB for these plans. The only honest annual number is the one your own first year produces.
The practical consequence: you cannot comparison-shop a dynamic tariff on a headline figure. You can compare the fixed components — standing charge and base rate, where the differences are real — and you can estimate your own outcome by looking at your half-hourly usage history in your ESB Networks online account, which any smart-meter household can open regardless of supplier. If most of your kWh already sit between midnight and 7am, dynamic pricing was built for you. If they sit at 6pm, you have your answer without switching anything.
Is a dynamic tariff the cheapest way to buy electricity?
The trap in one line: dynamic is a price structure, not a discount. "Wholesale prices" sounds like buying at cost, and the marketing around dynamic tariffs leans on the cheap-windy-night imagery hard. But the supplier's margin has not vanished — it has moved into the base rate and standing charge — and the wholesale market gives as well as takes. A calm, cold week in January prices every evening at the ugly end of the curve, and the cap only trims the worst of it: a capped half hour still costs base + 50c.
So the honest comparison is never "dynamic vs expensive standard rate", it is "dynamic, given my load shape, vs the best fixed deal I could switch to today". A disciplined EV household genuinely wins on dynamic. An average household with average habits does not — it pays the spike at dinner and donates the savings back. And a household that takes a dynamic plan then stops watching the prices has bought volatility with none of the upside. If you would not check tomorrow's prices at least a few times a week, or automate the response, take the boring plan; the mechanics of moving are in how to switch, and the exit costs if you change your mind are in the exit-fee guide.
One last habit transfers from every other tariff on the market: whatever you sign, diary a check at month 11. Dynamic plans have no year-2 cliff in the usual sense — there is no teaser discount to expire — but base rates and standing charges are variable and move with notice, so the plan you signed is not guaranteed to be the plan you are on. The month-13 problem is smaller here, not absent.
Where to next?
- Best EV electricity tariff — dynamic vs fixed-window EV plans, ranked for overnight charging.
- Time-of-use tariffs explained — the fixed-band middle ground between 24-hour and dynamic.
- Smart meters in Ireland — what the meter changes, CTF scores, and what is one-way about upgrading.
- Best energy in Ireland — the main ranking, with the year-1 and year-2 figures dynamic plans cannot have.
- How to switch energy supplier — MPRN, meter reading, 2–4 weeks, supply never cuts.
