Electricity rates by state: what the filed tariffs actually say

Why these numbers differ from the ones you usually see

The figures normally quoted for state electricity prices come from the US Energy Information Administration, and they are computed the other way round: total residential revenue divided by total residential kilowatt-hours. That is an excellent measure of what people paid and a poor guide to what you would pay, because it blends every plan, every household size, and every fixed charge into one number.

What follows is the other view. It is the median energy rate across the tariffs available in each state — the price on the menu, not the average check. Neither number is wrong; they answer different questions. Ours is the more useful one if you are choosing a plan, and the less useful one if you want to know what your neighbors spend.

Highest and lowest

The top of the table is not surprising and the reasons are structural. Hawaii imports fuel oil to islands. California carries wildfire mitigation and transmission costs unlike anywhere else, and has moved most households onto time-of-use pricing. New England is at the end of a constrained gas pipeline network. The bottom of the table is mostly states with cheap baseload generation and public power.

Every state we cover

What this table does not tell you

Three limits worth stating plainly, because they are the difference between a useful number and a misleading one.

It excludes fixed charges. A state with low energy rates and high standing charges can be more expensive in practice for a small household. The median fixed charge across our whole index is $205 a year, and the spread between utilities is far wider than the spread between states.

Coverage is uneven. We publish the tariffs we can parse and verify, not every tariff that exists. A state represented by one utility here is not a state with one utility. Compare the plan counts before reading much into a single state’s median.

A state median is not your price. Within California the plans in our index range across more than a factor of two, and the variation between utilities inside a state is routinely larger than the variation between state medians. The useful comparison is always between the plans your utility offers, which is what our utility pages are for.

Where we cover more than one utility in a state, the state name in the tables above links to a page that runs the same household through the default plan at each of them — so you can see how far the utilities in your state sit apart, and how far each one’s cheapest plan sits from its default. That within-state gap is usually the more useful number.