The Year Ahead: Australian Competition and Consumer Commission focusses on 11 priorities

The ACCC has announced its compliance and enforcement priorities for 2026-27, which it has described as reflecting the ongoing financial pressures facing households and businesses, rapid market changes, and the need for regulatory responses that are evidence-based, proportionate to harm and effective.

This article examines the ACCC's priorities for the year ahead, highlighting key changes from 2025.

What you need to know

The Australian competition and consumer regulator focusses on 11 priorities for the year ahead. Notably, the ACCC:

• Maintains its focus on competition and consumer issues in priority sectors, including supermarkets and retail, essential services (with a focus on telecommunications and energy), aviation and digital markets. Greenwashing, unfair contract terms and product safety issues also remain key priorities.
• Continues to advocate for digital market competition regulation and a general prohibition on unfair trading practices.
• Shifts its focus on industry compliance with consumer guarantees from consumer electronics to motor vehicles.

What you need to do

• Businesses in priority sectors (supermarkets and retail, essential services, aviation, digital markets and motor vehicles): Assess your exposure to ACCC scrutiny and review competition and consumer law compliance frameworks.
• All businesses:
  • Review standard contracts with consumers and small businesses for potentially unfair terms, focusing on cancellation, automatic renewal and early termination provisions.
  • Assess the implications of a prohibition on unfair trading practices for your business, particularly considering whether existing compliance frameworks need to be uplifted.
• Businesses making environmental and sustainability claims: Ensure claims are substantiated and accurate.

Continuing and enduring priorities in 2026-27

Supermarket and retail sectors

The supermarket and retail sectors remain an ACCC priority, given the central role these sectors play in household budgets and the economy, particularly given cost-of-living pressures.

The ACCC will continue to address competition issues, focusing on firms with market power and on conduct impacting small businesses. This will build on its activity over the past year, having actively pursued conduct in retail supply chains, including commencing proceedings in relation to alleged price fixing in the supply of fruit and vegetables to ALDI stores, and pursuing suppliers in respect of alleged resale price maintenance.

The ACCC also remains focused on consumer and fair trading concerns, having emphasised the need to ensure consumer trust in pricing by targeting misleading pricing practices. Retailers should therefore expect ongoing scrutiny of promotional practices, including discount claims and representations about value for money.

Essential services

The ACCC will continue to prioritise competition issues and misleading pricing and claims in essential services, with a specific focus on the telecommunications and energy sectors (including gas and electricity), on the basis that poor market outcomes in these sectors are felt more acutely given their essential nature for consumers.

The ACCC is committed to increasing transparency in essential services, as well as ensuring accountability for conduct that causes serious or systemic harm through enforcement action.

Aviation sector

Aviation remains an ACCC priority for 2026-27, reflecting its critical economic and social role, particularly for regional communities, and the ACCC’s ongoing concerns about pricing transparency and consumer remedies.

The ACCC intends to address these concerns through market monitoring, advocacy and enforcement action, where appropriate.

Digital markets

Reflecting growing concerns about the emergence of subscription traps, dark patterns that manipulate consumers, and the rise in unsafe consumer goods sold online, the ACCC will prioritise manipulative and false practices, as well as unsafe consumer goods in digital markets. This aligns with the recently published exposure draft Bill on unfair trading practices, which addresses dark patterns, subscription contracts and drip pricing.

The ACCC will also prioritise the promotion of competition in digital markets. The ACCC continues to advocate for a new digital competition regime with service-specific codes of conduct for platforms and critical intermediary services with market power that it considers impede competition and diversified innovation. The proposed model is similar to digital regimes in the UK and the EU.

The ACCC's work in digital markets will also extend to the implementation of Australia’s new Scams Prevention Framework, and continuing to detect and disrupt the harm caused by scams.

Consumer safety, trust and confidence:

(i) Environment and sustainability

Greenwashing remains a priority as environmental claims continue to proliferate in the marketplace, and consumers rely on these claims to make informed purchasing decisions.

Over the past year, the ACCC has taken enforcement action against misleading environmental claims, including initiating proceedings on "reef friendly" sunscreen claims and alleged unsubstantiated claims about renewable gas. It has also litigated in respect of false "ocean plastic" representations. Beyond litigation, the ACCC will also use compliance, education and guidance to address misleading green claims and shape market conduct.

Businesses making sustainability or environmental claims should ensure these are accurate, substantiated and not likely to mislead consumers.

(ii) Unfair contract terms

The ACCC is concerned that trust and effective competition are undermined when consumers and small businesses are locked into unfair contractual arrangements or denied remedies to which they are entitled. For this reason, it will continue to target unfair contract terms in consumer and small business contracts, with a focus on harmful cancellation practices, including automatic renewal clauses, early termination fees and non-cancellation clauses.

Businesses should review their standard form contracts to ensure cancellation and termination provisions are fair and do not create a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations.

(iii) Product safety

Product safety (particularly in respect of young children) remains a key ACCC priority. The ACCC has emphasised that cost and safety should not be trade-off decisions for households, especially in an environment of continuing cost-of-living pressure. In 2026-27, its focus will be on compliance with button battery, infant sleep and toppling furniture mandatory standards, as well as unsafe products in the digital economy.

This focus builds on recent enforcement outcomes, including a $14 million penalty for supplying products that failed to comply with mandatory button battery safety standards, and infringement notices and court enforceable undertakings in relation to products supplied without required button battery warnings.

New priorities for 2026-27

Consumer safety, trust and confidence: Consumer guarantees on motor vehicles

As consumer difficulties in accessing guarantee rights remain one of the most common issues raised with the ACCC, and motor vehicle purchases represent one of the most significant outlays for many consumers, the ACCC will focus on consumer guarantee issues relating to motor vehicles.

The ACCC intends to explore new approaches to compliance, working collaboratively with industry to benefit consumers, and has emphasised that when issues arise with vehicles covered by consumer guarantees, businesses must meet their obligations.

Want to know more?

• Australian Merger Reforms Hub
• Australian Merger Reforms FAQS
• More with more: ACCC announces bumper compliance and enforcement priorities for 2025-26 (21 February 2025)
• Play fair: Unfair trading practices ban coming in 2026 (26 November 2025)
• Digital markets regulation in the EU and UK: DMA v DMCC (22 August 2024)

Authors: Melissa Fraser, Partner; Alyssa Phillips, Partner; Tihana Zuk, Partner; Victoria Beswick, Senior Associate; Peter Tryfonopoulos, Lawyer; Sophie Doyle, Lawyer