Average Electric Bill by State: What US Homes Pay a Month

Your state, and is your bill high?

Pick your state for its average bill, then type in your own. We set it against your state’s homes that month, and against homes like yours if you say what kind of home it is.

Map of average electric bills by state

The darker the square, the bigger the bill. Tap a state to load it into the box above.

Highest and lowest electric bills

The gap between states is wide: homes in Hawaii paid 2.3 times what homes in New Mexico paid. The lists of who uses the most electricity look different from the lists of who pays the most, and the next sections explain why.

Every state, sortable

Tap a heading to sort. Each bill is the average over the last 12 months, so a hot summer or a cold winter does not tilt one state against another. The highest and lowest months show how far a single bill can swing.

EIA-861M: each state’s revenue from homes ÷ its residential customers, each month, averaged over the last 12 months. Change on a year: against the 12 months before. Figures for recent months are EIA’s preliminary estimates.

Why bills differ: how much homes use, or what they pay per kWh

A bill is the electricity used times the price, so a state can reach a high bill either way. Each dot below is a state. The dashed curves join every mix of use and price that gives the same monthly bill.

Louisiana homes use the most, about 1,211 kWh a month, and California homes the least, about 507 kWh. Use tracks the climate and how homes are heated: states that cool all summer or heat with electricity sit to the right. Price tracks how power is made and delivered, so states that import fuel or run long networks sit higher. A state low on one and high on the other can end up with an ordinary bill.

Electric bills month by month

Across the US the dearest month was July 2026 ($212) and the cheapest November 2025 ($124). Southern states peak in summer, from air conditioning. Northern states with electric heat peak in winter, and some have two peaks. Shading compares each month with the state’s own average, so you can read the shape of the year at a glance.

Average electric bill for apartments, houses, bedrooms and people

Size matters most. On today’s US bill, a one-bedroom apartment comes to about $86 a month, 46% less than the average home, and a two-bedroom apartment about $113. A house of 2,000 to 2,499 sq ft comes to about $192. A person living alone pays about $110.

These come from EIA’s survey of 18,496 homes, which measured how each kind of home’s bill compares with the average home nearby. We apply that to the latest bill in your state. Pick your state at the top of the page and the tables follow.

What your electric bill pays for

Air conditioning is the biggest single part of the average US bill, at about 22%, or $35 a month. In Texas it is 33%. In cold states with electric heat, heating takes that place. Fridges, water heaters and lighting are steady all year. Pick a state at the top to see its mix.

To work out one appliance, use our guides to how much electricity a TV uses and how much a fridge uses, or the electricity cost calculator for anything with a wattage.

The average electric bill since 2010

The US bill is +43% on 2010, when it averaged $111 a month. The price per kWh rose from 11.53¢ to 18.04¢, which adds $60 a month. Homes now use 875 kWh a month against 958 kWh in 2010, which moves the bill by −$12. Dollars here are those of each year, not adjusted for inflation.

The table splits each state’s change the same way. The two parts add up exactly to the change in the bill.

From price = the change in price per kWh × the average use of the two periods; from use = the change in kWh × the average price of the two periods. The two add up exactly to the change in the bill. Dollars of each year, not adjusted for inflation.

Average bill at the biggest utilities

Within a state, bills differ by utility. These are the 25 utilities with the most homes on their own service, from EIA’s 2025 utility returns. Each state’s electricity rates page lists every utility with 10,000 homes or more.

EIA-861 for 2025: each utility’s revenue from homes on its own (bundled) service ÷ those homes ÷ 12. Homes that buy power from a supplier and pay the utility only for delivery are left out, so in states with choice the figure is for default-service homes. A utility serving two states appears once for each.

For one company over a longer run, see electricity rates at the 40 biggest US utilities: price, bill and outages, every month since 1990.

How these numbers are made and checked

The bill. Every utility reports to EIA each month what its homes paid and how many homes it served (form EIA-861M). The bill is the state’s revenue from homes divided by its residential customers. EIA counts this as gross revenue: energy and demand charges, customer charges, fuel adjustments, environmental surcharges, franchise fees and state and local taxes billed in the normal way, but not credits or adjustments carried from earlier periods. The latest months are EIA’s preliminary figures and can move a little when EIA revises them. A single home’s bill may also differ through sales tax, late fees or a utility’s own discounts.

Homes and end uses. EIA’s 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey followed 18,496 homes and split each one’s bill by end use. We take only ratios from it: how a group of homes compares with the average home in its census division, and what share of the bill goes to each use. Then we apply those to the current EIA-861M bill. We work out the error of every ratio from the survey’s 60 replicate weights. A group shows only if at least 30 such homes were surveyed and the error is no more than 30% of the figure. Between 15% and 30% it is marked less precise. EIA plans to publish its 2024 survey results in spring 2027, and the page will move to them then.

Check. The survey and the utility returns are separate counts of the same thing. For 2020 the survey’s average US bill was $115 a month and the utilities’ was $117, 2.1% apart. State by state they differ more, because the survey holds a few hundred homes per state. That is why the bill on this page always comes from the utilities.

Download and cite this data

• Every state, 12-month average bill, kWh, price, highest and lowest month (CSV)
• Typical bill by type and size of home, US and every state, with survey error (CSV)
• The survey ratios, end-use shares and checks this page uses (JSON)

@misc{say2026electricbill,
  author       = {Say, Jeremiah},
  title        = {Average Electric Bill by State, Home Type and End Use (US, monthly since 2010)},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {GreenCalculus},
  howpublished = {Data set},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.24067456},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24067456},
  note         = {EIA-861M to August 2026; RECS 2020. CC BY 4.0}
}

TY  - DATA
AU  - Say, Jeremiah
TI  - Average Electric Bill by State, Home Type and End Use (US, monthly since 2010)
PY  - 2026
PB  - GreenCalculus
DO  - 10.5281/zenodo.24067456
UR  - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24067456
N1  - EIA-861M to August 2026; RECS 2020. CC BY 4.0
ER  - 

Questions

Bring your bill down

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• Home energy costs, every guide in one place

Version history

• 1.1 (9 November 2026): the full dataset is archived with a DOI (Zenodo) and on GitHub under CC BY 4.0, with every month since 2010, end-use shares, the spread of bills in each state and the survey check; added how to cite it.
• 1.0 (November 2026): first published.